At just 27 years old, Niall Keating is one of the UK’s most exciting young culinary prospects. In less than a year from taking the reins at Whatley Manor (one of the finest country house hotels in England) in late 2016, he had bagged a Michelin star for the hotel’s The Dining Room restaurant and was later named Michelin’s Young European Chef of the Year 2018. The Michelin guide has noted Keating’s ‘immense talent’ and said that his ‘modern cooking has a well-measured playfulness and brings together British, French and Asian flavours in an appealing multi-course set menu’. Despite his youth, Keating already has more than a decade of industry experience under his belt, beginning his career aged 15 as a kitchen porter at the Fitzherbert Arms in Stafford and going on to work at some of the best addresses in the UK and around the world including Restaurant Martin Wishart in Edinburgh, the Bath Priory (as part of Sam Moody’s brigade that regained a star for the hotel and working with general manager Sue Williams, now also at Whatley Manor) and Restaurant Sat Bains: “Seeing Sat in the kitchen every single day for two and half years was very inspiring for a young cook,” says Keating, and crucially, Benu in San Francisco. His signature ‘tortellini-black’ dish exemplifies Keating’s exciting innovative approach to country house cooking and draws on specific, formative experiences in the chef ’s career. Keating explains: “It’s just two dishes brought together. When I was at the Bath Priory, we used to make tortellini all the time, crab tortellini with lemongrass and ginger foam or grapefruit and ginger and I used to love making them, and at Benu, Corey Lee has his very famous xiao long bao (Chinese soup dumplings). The black tortellini are like a soup dumpling with a farce made from 50 per cent jellified pork jus and black garlic oil and 50 per cent pork mince and we match it all together with black garlic and squid ink pasta.” In addition to The Dining Room, Keating oversees Grey’s Brasserie at the hotel with a menu that includes crispy boqurenoes with Parma ham, Romain heart, yolk emulsion and red onion jam as well as steaks served on hot stones. In 2018, Keating raised over £8k for the charity Hospitality Action when he invited his former boss Sat Bains to cook with him at Whatley Manor where they served a joint menu of some of their most popular dishes.