Josh Overington

Career Chef-owner at Mýse in Hovingham, North Yorkshire, England, Josh Overington works in a role that is direct on paper and exacting in practice. The title points to ownership; the work points to control of detail, locality, and pace. At Mýse, the kitchen is shaped by classical discipline and by the practical demands of building a restaurant in the North under his own name. Le Cordon Bleu sits in that background as formal training, but the stronger thread is how that training is carried into a room with a defined place and a defined point of view. What marks Overington’s approach is the meeting point between structure and instinct. The line he gives about opening at 26—"We opened it when we were 26, so everything was done quite naively."—reads as plain acknowledgement of how restaurant knowledge is made: through service, repetition, and the pressure of making decisions in real time. That kind of early naivety is not unusual in the trade; what matters is how quickly it gets replaced by judgment.

The Essentials - Current role: Chef-owner at Mýse. - Location: Hovingham, North Yorkshire, England. - Training: Le Cordon Bleu. - In his own words: "We opened it when we were 26, so everything was done quite naively."

Signature

Black pudding macarons are the clearest shorthand for Josh Overington’s cooking at Mýse. The dish works because it puts a familiar ingredient into an unexpected format without losing the point of either. That kind of move tells you something useful about the kitchen behind it: the food is built on contrast, but the contrast is controlled. Familiarity is present, but it is being handled with enough precision to make the result read as deliberate rather than gimmicky. In that sense, the dish fits the restaurant’s wider identity and the way Overington shapes it.

In Their Words “We opened it when we were 26, so everything was done quite naively.”