Mr. Banks, at 24 you became the youngest Michelin-starred chef in the UK. Did that come with a lot of pressure to prove yourself?
Oh, definitely. In 2013 when I won the Michelin star for my restaurant The Black Swan, that came with a bit of media attention because I was so young. As a result I really had this sense of imposter syndrome because although I was working really hard and making nice food, I certainly didn’t feel like I was some sort of genius or anything — which is what people were heralding me as. I just craved more identity. Heston Blumenthal was an amazing example of that. It’s totally mad what he’s doing, the creativity is off the charts. Watching him, I remember thinking, “Where does this creativity even come from?” And for me, I’d not travelled anywhere, I’d not really done anything, I didn’t have any formal training, the only thing I really knew was farming and the area of Yorkshire where I’m from. I ended up doing a deep dive into that, cooking based on and around this place, and once we put in that restriction, that was a big catalyst for creativity for me.
It’s a quite bold move to go back to basics when you already had a Michelin star.
Sure, but I think being particularly young and having no one above me to tell me if what I’m doing was right or wrong… That was the best thing for me back then. I had an idea and we just did it, and I think you have that sort of fearlessness when you’re young. You hear it all the time in other fields, musicians and filmmakers and artists say: strip it right back. And that’s really what I did. We updated our land to accommodate gardening and farming, we stopped using ingredients that we can’t get in Yorkshire — we have no fish on the menu for example, no vanilla, no produce that we can’t grow ourselves. We’re almost completely self-sufficient, even in winter we’re planning ahead by fermenting and preserving our produce. You get amazing levels of creativity when you restrict yourself.
“I’m so intensely passionate about the area I’m from, I’m so happy to be really deep diving into what it means to be from there, what my identity is. It’s like our version of terroir.”
Were you worried about taking a luxury staple like seafood off your menu?
Yes, I mean, it is absolutely delicious and in the UK, we have some of the best seafood in the world. We were serving hand-dived scallops from the top of Scotland, which are like the sweetest, most beautiful scallops you can imagine. We had line-caught turbot from Cornwall. Unbelievable ingredients, but we felt we had all of this ethos and this story and what we’re trying to achieve… Just to then shoehorn in some luxury ingredients because we were worried about what guests would want. We plucked up the courage and said, we’re going to get rid of fish altogether because we don’t have it here in Yorkshire. And it turned out okay to take that risk; some people are pleasantly surprised, some people just don’t notice. But we’re trying to make use of what we do have, taking simple ingredients like lion’s mane mushroom and making it delicious, making it a star.
It almost shows more skill to treat an everyday ingredient like mushroom and turn it into something extraordinary.
The thing is with cooking fish, the more simple you do it, the better. A really nice roasted piece of fish with a very well-made sauce is basically all you need. But you’re right that you have to do a lot more with a lion’s mane mushroom, it gets marinated, then it gets cooked in pork fat overnight, and then it gets barbecued, then brushed in another glaze and barbecued again. We need to do a lot to build the levels and the layers of flavor.
There must be a lot of challenges inherent to self-sufficiency. The menu is not only changing seasonally, but weekly depending on what produce is available, what’s ripe right now, what is flourishing, what makes sense with the rest of the menu…
There’s two fronts to this. One is being reactive to the weather, the season, everything you mentioned to have totally fresh produce. But we’re also thinking about how we can use those tomatoes in January to March when we have nothing at all. So it’s about proactively preserving those in some way, with an eye to six months down the line. It’s taken us a very long time to perfect this process, and we’ve made countless mistakes in the early years with this kind of planning.
It used to be that exotic ingredients and imported luxury items were a selling point in fine-dining, but now the tide has shifted towards seasonality and locality. What do you think brought on that transition?
One of the reasons, I think, is novelty. For example, Yorkshire rhubarb is an amazing thing. It’s available January through to March, and it’s always been grown in this one area of Yorkshire, even going back to before the Second World War. You can go to the supermarket and get a pineapple or a banana, an avocado or vanilla from Madagascar… That’s all delicious, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t go out and buy Yorkshire rhubarb, or sweet woodruff, or Alexander seeds, because those things are local to the United Kingdom. And I think it’s become a really interesting thing, trying to protect our culture and our history and our heritage through food. It’s almost like the local ingredients are more of a novelty than the exotic ones now.
There’s definitely a very special sense of pride in northern England and Yorkshire especially that I haven’t experienced anywhere else.
There’s a huge amount of regional pride around northern England. I obviously grew up on a farm where it’s hardwired into you from a child that your importance in the world isn’t that big because you’re just a custodian of a farm. The most important thing you do is you look after the land, you look after your animals. It’s a very egoless lifestyle. We’re taught from a young age the importance of the area that we’re from and the importance of protecting that. You get taught the history of this land, all these stories, and then you pass it on to the next generation. I’m so intensely passionate about farming and food and the area I’m from, that I’m so happy to be really deep diving into what it means to be from there, what my identity is. It’s like our version of terroir, the flavor of an exact geographic location and how that effects things… It’s a beautiful thing.
And that pride is reflected back to you. Everyone I met in the north of England knew of you and The Black Swan.
We’re the biggest employer for miles and miles around because there aren’t really loads of jobs here, especially for young people. So people do know who we are, and I think generally, they are very supportive. That’s been part of our mission as well, to invest in the community. I’m fiercely proud of this little tiny place that I’m from, I love it here.
You seem to have a really natural instinct for bringing all these elements together and presenting it in a way that makes sense.
Storytelling is so important to what we do. I think also on an emotional level, it means a lot to me and so I can feel it — and if I don’t feel it, then I’m not really interested. If it’s cool and I like it and it’s telling the story I want to tell, and it’s hitting all the right notes in terms of flavor, then let’s just do it! Let’s try it. What’s the worst that’s going to happen?
Is it easier to take those creative leaps now because you have the experience to back it up?
You definitely feel a lot more comfortable in your own skin. There’s certainly still hard and bad times but I think one of the things I’ve really learned is you actually just have to enjoy the process of doing it because if you can do that, then everything becomes easier. You enjoy your colleagues because they’re wonderful people. You enjoy the guests that come through the door because they’re giving their time to us. You walk out into the garden, onto the farm, and spend some time with some cows, how can you not enjoy that? I’m really privileged because I get to do this thing that I’m so passionate about. There isn’t anything more worthwhile than building things together with the people you care about.