What got you into cooking, was it always something you wanted to pursue?
I’m a farmer's son, I was born in Whitby, on the coast. Unfortunately, my mum got multiple sclerosis when I was nine years old, so I stayed in the kitchen helping her cook, and that's how it all started. We were surrounded by brilliant produce with the farmland and the local game, my dad even had a rough shoot on the farm. My grandfather would fish on the River Esk, so he'd always have wild salmon in the freezer. Without knowing it, I was surrounded by some brilliant ingredients that were literally on our doorstep. I started cooking random things like woodcock terrines and pheasant fricassees when I was 10 or 11 years old.
When I was at school, I tended to play rugby all the time, not really learning very much, I wanted to get into the army but to become an officer, you had to get better exam results. The careers lady said, ‘why don't you go to Scarborough TEC and get BTEC equivalents of A-levels?’, and then suddenly, I was top of the class rather than bottom because I could cook.
The rest is history. I loved it, I went off to France five times in the second year, the college and the lecturers there were brilliant. James Martin was in the year below me. It was a good college, a lot of good kids came out of it.
Why did you choose the gastropub route?
The British know the rules for the pub and it’s our equivalent of the French ‘auberge’. I trained in classic French cookery as a chef, so I wanted to put that into a pub environment.
The French have their cuisine – terroir– where they fly the flag for the food of their region, and nobody was really doing that for Yorkshire. It’s the biggest county in the country and there's such a varied list of ingredients that can be taken from the Dales, the farmland, the North Sea, down the coast, the Moors with the game, the biggest estates for soft fruits. I mean we're the envy of the country and it made sense for me to let the seasons write our menus.
I remember, Michelin said to me just before we got a star in 2002, ‘are you a pub or a restaurant?’ and I said, ‘we're both’. You can come and have a 10-course tasting menu, a Ploughman’s lunch, a game of dominoes, 10 pints of Estrella or a wine pairing with your meal. There is literally something for everybody here within The Star environment. I just replicated what I would really want in a pub, and I put it into practice here and I've done that for 29 years.
What do you enjoy most about your industry?
I don't really count it as work, I count it as a hobby. I enjoy being able to cook, to eat, meet different people and do different things. The hospitality industry can take you anywhere in the world. I've cooked in the Caribbean, in Europe, I've cooked in the Indian Ocean and the Maldives, and I've cooked in the middle of the Moors up here on a winter's day. That's the beauty of it, it's so varied.
If you're interested in the trade then there's a lot to take from it, from choosing the different beers for the bar, or choosing the wine list or sorting out the next menu and specials, or working within the local community, they're friends and neighbours within the village. I wouldn't choose anywhere else in the world to be.
What does being a Top 50 Gastropub mean to you?
It's brilliant, we've been involved in this since it was started and, up until recently, when we had the fire, we've never been out the top five. It's all about consistency and working with different people from all the different places that we like going to. Yorkshire is a big county and there's so many great places up here but when you go further afield, down into London to the Harwood Arms or to the Hand & Flowers, there's always different things that you can pick up. They've all got the similar characteristics of a pub where it's not stiff and stuck up, you can go in with your rugby shorts and your flip flops on. It’s a good place to release, if you've got great food to go along with the ambience, it's a winner.
How does it feel re-entering the top 10 on the list after bouncing back from the fire?
Brilliant, absolutely amazing. It’s quite emotional really, it was quite a roller-coaster of a time with two years of Covid where we’d lost several members of staff. Having to rebuild the team after the pandemic and then, nine weeks later, having the whole place burn down and see it all unfold in front of me.
The pub held so many memories for a lot of people that have got engaged here, got married here, had christenings here, had family occasions, had birthdays, anniversaries, wakes, I mean, it's something to everybody and until that point, we didn't really realise. We had letters from all over the world, letters of support, we were on news channels in New Zealand, Australia, America, it was crazy for a little pub in the middle of nowhere.
To get back into the top 10 straight away is a massive thank you to the industry really. Every day you want to get better and better, and we always beat ourselves up about how ‘this wasn't right and that wasn't right’, it’s a constant work in progress so, hopefully, we’ll be back up there again for next year's awards.
Has your offering changed since reopening?
A lot of people said to me ‘what are you going to change?’, I said ‘well, the first 26 years were fine, so there's no point in changing anything’. We took the opportunity to refurbish and add a bit of a modern slant to it. We used some of the same local craftsmen companies that did work in the 1930s but these were from four generations later. The building itself is better equipped, the plumbing, electricity, it's not as draughty, especially now we've got a new roof.
It was business as usual. We opened a year to the day of the fire and we gave the people in the village a big party because they'd built up a bit of a thirst over the past year. We gave them a free bar and they had a good time.
Where’s your favourite place to enjoy an Estrella Damm?
The Star, I love it. The ambience and the low beams and the open fires and the wonky walls and your friends all drinking Estrella Damm, we've even got Free Damm (0.0%) on draught as well. Estrella Damm is a go-to drink, it's our best-selling beer, which is credit to itself really. As soon as we put it in, it flew. It’s my go-to beer if I go elsewhere in the country, The Pipe & Glass in South Dalton, James Mckenzie's got it on there, Tom Kerridge has it, all these different places, it’s nice to have something that you recognise and can enjoy to its full capacity.
What’s so special about dining at The Star?
I think it's a building itself and the food. It's an element of surprise when people come into a 14th century thatched pub, they don't expect the level of food and service that we offer in such a relaxed environment.
We are unique within our offering, if the kids want to come and kick a football around the outside, they can do so in the beer garden while mum and dad can have foie gras, turbot and caviar if they want, and granny can have a ploughman’s lunch while grandad's playing dominoes in the corner.
Who’s your biggest influence?
Michel Roux Senior
The Roux brothers, they were my heroes. As is Marco Pierre White – he's a Yorkshireman as well. The Roux brothers’ books were like bibles when I was at catering college. They were the books we always looked at and wished we could make. Legends of the industry like Pierre Kaufmann and Gary Rhodes, who did very British food, which was what I liked to try to replicate. If you look back at it now, it was quite simple, but it was actually him who started modernising the old classics of British cuisine and looking at that regional territory food. All those sorts of people, who later on in life became a friend, which is crazy given that they were the people who inspired me.
None of us take ourselves too seriously. Within the pub environment, you've got to have a relaxed nature.
What does being an Estrella Damm ambassador mean to you?
It's a great privilege. I love doing the different dinners and matching the different beers with the food, we even use it in the food sometimes. The Belgians used beer quite a lot in their cookery so there's no reason why we can't as well.
The Estrella Damm dinners around the country are fantastic. Meeting other chefs and working together especially coming up to 10th anniversary of Estrella Damm’s headline sponsorship of the Top 50 Gastropubs. It’s a massive privilege to be asked to fly the flag for Yorkshire down in in London at the event with other great chefs. My executive head chef Steve Smith, who has been with me for 17 years, will be joining me and we’re really looking forward to it.
What advice would you give to an aspiring chef?
Roll your sleeves up, get on with it, take every day as it comes and say yes to everything – and think about it afterwards. That's always been our policy and the foundations, the first two and a half years, we worked 18-hour days with no days off and we won three Catey awards in the first three years and a Bib Gourmand within months of opening.
Be proud of what you do, be proud of your area and ingredients. Use local, if it's good, but don't use local for local’s sake, don't dilute your standards. Be prepared to listen. If you are in charge, bring on people around you and involve them within the menu process, listen to them, work with them and encourage them.
Even if you're cooking for a few people or one person, make sure it's the best you can always do, don't let yourself down.
