One day, we will be able to talk about restaurants without referring to the upheaval of 2020, but not yet. Roots in York, the OFM readers’ Best Restaurant for 2022, has flourished post-pandemic but it’s a very different restaurant to the one that opened in 2018. That, says its creator, Tommy Banks, was all down to Covid.
This city spin-off from the Black Swan, Banks’s Michelin-starred destination in remote North Yorkshire, was opened as its casual sister venue. Housed in a former pub by the river Ouse, Roots was designed to utilise the Black Swan’s accumulated knowledge and produce from the Banks family farm in Oldstead, including its uglier vegetables, charging £50 a head and turning tables regularly. It was, says Banks, “sharing plates, high volume, very busy”.
Banks loved the variety of cooking at the intimate Black Swan one night and the intensity of managing 100 covers at Roots the next. It made business sense, too: “We’re always looking for new ways to expand. You can’t run a farm and supply a 30-odd cover restaurant. You have all these things you can’t utilise.”
Then the pandemic hit. Banks and his co-directors in this family business – his parents, his brother James and their friend, Matt Lockwood – reinvented themselves as a finish-at-home meal delivery company. Within months, the newly created Made In Oldstead (MIO), was dispatching meal boxes nationally from a production facility in Ripon that required 40 staff. MIO is still selling around 1,000 meals for two every month and continues to expand a mail-order range that runs from bottled cocktails to charcuterie produced on the Banks farm from its growing herd of rare breed pigs.
MIO “solved all our problems” says Banks but, by June 2020, it was adding to the quandary of how to reopen Roots. Social distancing (fewer tables, one-way systems) and public apprehension (were sharing plates risky?) meant the old version of the restaurant wouldn’t work, practically or financially. Banks was also juggling the demands of his new retail business and the reluctance of some staff, now working day-shifts at MIO, to resume restaurant hours. “A lot of people who have families weren’t going to want to work Saturday night,” he says. “A few didn’t come back at all.”
At Roots, that catalysed wholesale change. The restaurant reopened four days a week not six, serving tasting menus only (dinner, £135 to £160), numbers capped at 46. Banks’s kitchen teams already worked four-day weeks, but where previously Roots required 18 chefs, it now has a regular team of 12.
The restaurant’s modus operandi is using exceptional seasonal produce from the Banks’s 167-acre farm, doing magical things with unpromising ingredients (aerated potato custard, anyone?). This might be familiar from the Black Swan where Roots’s head chef, Will Lockwood, spent six years, but in no way lessens its impact. Roots won a Michelin star in January 2021, and the detail in its dishes is exquisite. A brioche, toasted in clarified butter and topped with fresh crab, is a luxurious crowdpleaser, and the pickled parsley shoots that punctuate an accompanying crab custard are one of many inspired curveballs.
That parsley is one of several fermented and pickled ingredients made on the Banks farm by a specialist team. Instead of lemons, Lockwood loves to use the bright acidity of their flavoured vinegars to “lift” dishes. These items, says Banks, are the “DNA of the food we do … 20% of the creative process”.
Roots can appear austere on arrival. The almost monastic rooms of this Grade II-listed building are minimally dressed with rugs, tapestries and ingredients in jars. But buoyed by its relaxed, friendly staff, an eclectic playlist (from Stone Roses to Hall & Oates), and a thrum of excited chatter from neighbouring tables, Roots is looser and louder, and attracts bigger groups than the Black Swan. Lockwood, 29, head chef since last autumn, leads Roots creatively, as Callum Leslie does the Black Swan. “I’m happy to say it’s more the head chefs than me,” says Banks. He laid down a blueprint for the novel treatment of often obscure northern European ingredients, but now mentors the duo – Lockwood is influenced by modern Scandinavian cuisine; Leslie loves the traditional techniques and precise styling he learned in high-end Michelin kitchens – to run with that: “Within reason, I encourage them to do what they want because that creates two totally different restaurants.”
“Tommy tastes everything, gives input and, if he’s got ideas, I put them into practice,” explains Lockwood. For example, Roots’s lamb neck cruffin, a cross between a croissant and a muffin, was a Banks brainwave that Lockwood executed. “That dynamic’s been going for a while,” says Lockwood. “Tommy’s style was born as I rose through the ranks. Essentially, we have the same style.”
Sat at an alcove table as Roots gears up for Friday lunch, Banks rejects assumptions that the shift upmarket was purely motivated by profit. Serving 250 guests each week is easier (700 a week is “carnage”), but he says the bottom line is “probably identical”.
“Generally, it’s wrong to think that expensive restaurants are really profitable, because obviously they’ve got lots of costs, or that high-volume restaurants are really profitable because margins might be less.” Banks adds, drily: “If there’s one thing I know, it’s restaurants aren’t very profitable whatever route you go.”
The pandemic left him feeling “vulnerable” as a restaurateur and his current focus is “building resilience”, hence diversifying into canned wine, under the Banks Brothers brand, event catering at Twickenham and the Edrich restaurant at Lord’s cricket ground. As his employees grow older, have children or need a different work-life balance, Banks, now 33 and a parent himself, wants to provide careers for them outside restaurants. To do that, he says, “we have to generate a bigger business”.
He is anticipating criticism: “‘He should be on the stove all the time, he’s going to let standards slip.’ That’s the classic.” But Banks, who cooks at Roots and the Black Swan at least once a week, trusts his teams. “For years, it was all about the named chef. Reality is, I am one of 110 people in this business. If you don’t have senior people taking responsibility, the same way you are, you’re never going to achieve anything.”
Roots, 68 Marygate, York YO30 7BH; rootsyork.com