The Times
Giles Coren knew his ten-hour round trip to deepest North Yorkshire was going to be worth it from his first taste of chef Ruth Hansom’s bread-and-butter pudding appetizer; it was “gorgeous and new, sensual, full of love and truth”.
“Sheer beauty came next. Beauty and genius” in the form of pickled mushroom soup topped with a tuile wreath that was “a masterpiece of delicate pastry-making”. And the soup was properly hot, said Giles, whereas “fancy food is so often the temperature of spit” because it has been passed from flunky to flunky on its way to the pass. Not here, because there are no flunkies.
Hansom – the Darlington-born, Ritz-trained, first female winner of the Young National Chef of the Year, formerly of the Princess of Shoreditch – is another chef fulfilling her fantasy of running her own small place in the country, where she cooks without any back-up staff in the kitchen. Her husband Mark (who has a job of his own) helps out by picking up and dropping home customers within a 12-mile radius in his electric Lotus, free of charge. “Would you do that for your wife, to make her dreams come true?” asked Giles. He certainly would. “In this game, Ruth can have anything she wants,” he said. “She’s incredible.”
Giles Coren - 2025-02-23
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