Refined tastes
Jill Turton visits Hansom in Bedale where an award-winning and experienced young chef is serving up offering a seven-course tasting menu that supplies imagination and good value.
IN 2021 Karl and Cathy Mason, the couple behind Mason’s Yorkshire Gin, bought the former verger’s cottage in Bedale and converted the 400-year-old building into a charming neighbourhood bistro. They called it Tom and Nellies after Cathy’s grandparents who once lived in the cottage. But two years of staff shortages led them to put Tom and Nellies on the market. Fortunately, an ambitious young chef was waiting in the wings.
Ruth Hansom has packed a lot into her 28 years. Brought up in Darlington, she was just a teenager when she won Future Chef of the Year, a competition for aspiring chefs under
16. In 2017 while an apprentice at the Ritz, she won Young National Chef of the Year and went on to work in a variety of kitchens: a stage (an unpaid internship) at the prestigious Core by Clare Smyth, gastropubs in Notting Hill and Shoreditch and a six month ‘residency’ at the swanky Swinton Park Hotel in Masham.
In February this year, Ruth opened Hansom, in the former Tom and Nellies, offering a seven-course tasting menu at £75, a small plate menu and on Sundays, a traditional roast dinner.
The interior will look familiar to anyone who ate there under the Mason’s ownership. Low ceilings, old beams, an inglenook fireplace, banquettes, bold coloured upholstered chairs.
The Tasting Menu kicks off with two great little snacks; a ‘cigar’ of crisp pastry, rolled and filled with chicken liver parfait at one end and cherry preserve at the other, a clever match of sweet and savoury. Another mini pastry case has been filled with seaweed, horseradish and a crunch of kohlrabi.
Then a tray of bread: rapeseed focaccia, a dark Black Sheep beer bread, and my favourite, a seeded cracker to slather on the whipped Marmite butter.
Expect to see asparagus on every menu from now on. Chefs love it not only because it tastes delicious, but because it’s seasonal. It’s finished by mid-June when farmers stop harvesting to let the spears regenerate for the following year. The date to remember depends on your lifestyle, it’s either the summer solstice or Royal Ascot, either way, think June 20.
This asparagus is supplied by Spilman’s near Thirsk, one of the biggest growers in the region. Hansom has wrapped her spears in sheets of nori seaweed then piped beads of smoked Cheddar custard, added a truffle emulsion, roast hazelnuts and a tiny, pickled mushroom. There are flowers and nasturtium leaves in there too. Don’t think ‘Yorkshire portions’ think precision and skill which is the Hansom hallmark.
Similarly, the fish course brings us a piece of pure white cod, poached in butter, and unanimously voted the best dish. It’s served on what is billed as a warm tartar sauce. Forget any ideas of those plastic sachets of gunky stuff that come with your fish supper, this is a rich creamy emulsion studded with cornichons, capers and tasty little brown shrimps. It’s dainty and delicate and all four of us agreed we could have eaten the dish twice over.
There is a theory behind tasting menus that says it creates less waste, reduces labour costs and ensures a guaranteed spend. In return, the customer gets a succession of small intensely flavoured dishes that showcase the chef’s creativity with tastes and textures that in a fullblown dish might be too much.
Our chicken dish was one such concentrated dish. With her funky, undercut hairdo our funky head waitress Amy McBrearty, explains what’s on the plate: the chicken breast has been stuffed with morels, tarragon and wild garlic. A confit chicken thigh has been wrapped in leek and celeriac, there are dots of black garlic ketchup over which she pours a Madeira sauce to finish the dish. It’s the kind of manicured dish you see on TV’s Great British Menu. Wait, wasn’t Ruth Hansom a finalist in 2020?
Two desserts and we are close to the finish line. Poached rhubarb and fennel panna cotta are hidden beneath shards of sweet, pinkspeckled meringue. The one contrasting with
the other. The super sweet meringue, married to the sharp acidic rhubarb.
And finally, a chocolate ganache, with poached pears and a Jerusalem artichoke ice cream. Yes, that mucky old, knobbly root vegetable has been converted into a sweet, nutty earthy ice cream and it’s real a winner.
All this comes at a price: eight courses are £75, with wine pairing a further £55, though wines by the bottle begin at a very reasonable £28. An additional cheese course is £14. By any standard, that adds up to a lot of dosh for your dinner. But trust me £75 is the lower end of the Tasting Menu market. All the other Yorkshire restaurants I know of, working at this level, come in at well over £100. Michael O’ Hare’s former Man Behind the Curtain, now re-invented as Psycho Sandbar in Leeds, is serving an ‘accessible’ ten courses at an eye-watering. £165. By these standards, this one has been judiciously priced.
Hansom’s has been an interesting adventure with one grumble. We had such long gaps between courses it began to feel less like a meal and more like a series of snacks.
When dishes are small, they need to follow in reasonable succession and after three hours, even I was getting bored talking to my family. I’m assuming these are teething troubles because Ruth Hansom is an experienced chef, putting refined and imaginative food on the plate, though I still have arguments over the pleasures of a tasting menu for the customer.
Next time I visit it will be for her Sunday roast with all the trimmings and sticky toffee pudding to follow, because I know Ruth Hansom is a skilled, accomplished and perfectionist chef.
Hansom 7-9 North End, Bedale, DL8 1AF www. hansomrestaurant.co.uk