Roots York

The Oldstead hand on Marygate

Fermentation, pickling and smoke do much of the quiet work before the first plate reaches the pass. Tommy Banks, Co-Proprietor of Roots York in York, carries that method from his family’s Oldstead ground into a converted pub on Marygate. His role here is not the daily fiction of one chef at every stove; it is the setting of a house language, built around the farm, the garden, the forager’s basket and the restraint to stop before the ingredient disappears.

Banks comes from a North Yorkshire farming family with five generations behind it. At The Black Swan at Oldstead, his parents’ pub became the place where that inheritance turned into a kitchen discipline, and Roots York opened in 2018 as the city expression of the same conviction. The restaurant took shape inside the former Bay Horse, a Grade II-listed 1894 pub, with the timber and bar still giving the room a memory of its previous trade. The Michelin star belongs to Roots York itself, first awarded in 2021 and retained into the current guide.

Preservation at the centre of the menu

The bench here starts with supply rather than garnish. Produce comes from the Banks family’s 20-acre farm and three-acre kitchen garden at Oldstead, with local suppliers and foraging extending the season rather than replacing it. The tasting menu changes with availability, so preservation is not a decorative technique; it is the method that lets one part of the year speak into another.

That shows in the kind of cooking associated with the house: fermented turnip wrapped into bao with lamb, whey-creamed leeks with cod and smoked mussel, kale with yoghurt, pickled walnut and cured egg yolk. Bread and crackers arrive with things that read plainly and work harder than they sound, among them Lincolnshire Poacher custard or Crown Prince squash butter. The Sunday feast follows the same hand in a broader register, with duck-fat potatoes, spruce-tarragon carrots, charred hispi cabbage crumb and an ox cheek Yorkshire pudding. The point is not nostalgia. It is control of acidity, fat, smoke and storage.

A pub room holding a tasting-menu rhythm

The room keeps some of the old pub’s scale, which matters when a tasting menu begins to set its own tempo. There is a bar, timber, fireplaces, and the softer friction of a city table rather than a rural dining room. Service carries the wine program beside the food, with by-the-glass choices and pairings shaped for dishes that often lean on brassicas, preserved dairy, smoked shellfish and the deeper sweetness of roots.

At the pass, the place has to hold two pressures at once: the polish expected of a Michelin-starred York restaurant and the looser warmth of a converted local building. When it works, Marygate gives the cooking a useful frame. The old Bay Horse bones keep the room from floating away from the farm.