OFM Awards 2022: Best Restaurant – Roots, York

One ​​day, we will be able to talk about restaurants without mentioning the upheaval of 2020, but not yet. Roots in York, the OFM readers' top restaurant for 2022, has thrived after the pandemic, but it's a very different restaurant to the one that opened in 2018. According to its creator, Tommy Banks , that was it until Covid.

This spin-off town of the Black Swan, Banks' Michelin star destination in isolated North Yorkshire, has opened as a venue laid back twin. Housed in a former pub by the River Ouse, Roots was set up to use the Black Swan's accumulated knowledge and produce from the Banks family farm in Oldstead, including its ugliest vegetables, charging £50 a head and turning the tables regularly. It was, Banks says, "sharing plates, high volume, very busy".

Banks loved the variety of cuisine at the intimate Black Swan one evening and the intensity of managing 100 covers at Roots the next. It also made business sense: “We're always looking for new ways to grow. You can't run a farm and supply a restaurant with thirty seats. You have all these things that you cannot use. »

Then the pandemic hit. Banks and his co-directors of this family business - his parents, his brother James and their friend Matt Lockwood - have reinvented themselves as a door-to-door meal delivery business. Within months, the new company Made In Oldstead (MIO) was shipping lunch boxes nationwide from a production facility in Ripon that required 40 employees. MIO still sells around 1,000 Meals for Two per month and continues to expand a mail-order lineup that ranges from bottled cocktails to deli meats produced at Banks Farm from its growing herd of rare breed swine. p>

MIO "solved all our problems" Banks says but, in June 2020, it added to the dilemma of how to reopen Roots. Social distancing (fewer tables, one-way systems) and public apprehension (was sharing plates risky?) meant that the old version of the restaurant would not work, practically or financially. Banks was also juggling the demands of his new retail business and the reluctance of some employees, who now work day shifts at MIO, to resume restaurant hours. "A lot of people who have families weren't going to want to work Saturday nights," he says. “A few didn't come back at all.

At Roots, this has catalyzed a sea change. The restaurant has reopened four days a week, not six, serving only tasting menus (dinner, £135-£160), number capped at 46. Banks' kitchen teams were already working four days a week, but where previously Roots used to have 18 chefs, it now has a regular team of 12.

The restaurant's modus operandi uses exceptional seasonal produce from the Banks' 167-acre farm, making magic things with unpromising ingredients (aerated cream of potatoes, anyone?). It might be familiar from the Black Swan where Roots head chef Will Lockwood spent six years, but that doesn't diminish its impact. Roots won a Michelin star in January 2021 and the detail in their dishes is exquisite. A brioche, toasted in clarified butter and topped with fresh crab, is a luxurious crowd pleaser, and the pickled parsley sprouts that punctuate an accompanying cream of crab are one of many inspired curveballs. p>