Tommy Banks is one of the youngest British chefs ever to win a Michelin star. He was just 24 when The Black Swan at Oldstead retained the accolade under his culinary direction in 2013, not bad for an aspiring professional cricketer with no formal culinary training. He is one of the most prominent and authentic ‘field to table’ chefs in the country, with produce for the restored county inn’s 12-course tasting menu coming from the Banks family’s neighbouring farm and the inn’s own two-and-half-acre kitchen garden. The Black Swan, set within picture-perfect Yorkshire countryside on the edge of the North York Moors National Park, is truly a family affair with Tommy’s brother James running front of house and parents Tom and Anne running the business. The ancient stone-built inn retains lots of original features like flagstone floors and window seats in the ground floor bar contrasting with locally made oak and leather artisan chairs in the cream-walled upstairs dining room that overlooks the kitchen garden. Banks’s food incorporates foraged ingredients such as wild garlic, sorrel and woodruff and techniques such as preserving and smoking. One item that’s never off the menu and that demonstrates Banks’s style, as well as the local produce he so loves, is Crapaudine Beetroot, a crop grown on the family farm. Banks elevates this humble ingredient to gastronomic heights by very slowly cooking thick wedges of the vegetable in beef fat, oak smoking them and topping them with carefully arranged dots of goat’s curd and horseradish cream, smoked cod’s roe emulsion, discs of golden and red beetroot and shards of homemade linseed crackers so that the finished dish resembles a piece of fine French patisserie. The Independent has called his food, ‘Practically perfect in every way’, the Telegraph rated it 10/10 and said Banks’s ‘gift for invention, flavour and presentation is staggering’, attributes apparent in his most famous creation, Turbot with Strawberries and Cream that he prepared during his appearance on the 2017 series of Great British Menu and which he served at the final banquet at Wimbledon. In 2016, Banks became the only chef in Yorkshire and the North East to hold both 4 AA rosettes and Michelin Star. He has appeared on Saturday Kitchen and his debut cookbook Roots will be published in May.