The top-class dining destination
We have long recognised that the North York Moors area is one of the best food destinations in the UK. Three restaurants hold a Michelin star (Mýse, The Star Inn at Harome and The Black Swan at Oldstead) and countless others are operating at the top of their game. It was heartening therefore to learn that the Good Food Guide, the UK’s most comprehensive eating-out guide, has acknowledged this too, crowning the area the ‘Most Exciting Food Destination of 2024’.
Restaurant Mýse is one of those star-studded restaurants that opened in the summer of 2023 and was soon recognised by Michelin, who awarded them a star just nine months after opening.
The restaurant is the work of Josh and Victoria Overington, who had run their petit Le Cochon Aveugle in York for seven years before moving 17 miles north to handsome Hovingham, transforming the village pub into an elegant restaurant with rooms.
Victoria directed the refurbishment creating a calming interior in tones of cream and white, and incorporating natural materials like sheepskin throws, a sycamore bar and a log-burning stove.Victoria works as front of house and sommelier, overseeing the exceptional wine list while Josh runs the open kitchen creating an innovative menu of 14 small and inventive courses.
Dinner begins with snacks and moves through the oft-changing menu, which may include a dainty ‘charcoal pie’ made with charcoal from their own fire pit and filled with local venison tartare, fermented chilli and wild plum sauce then finished with Exmoor smoked caviar.
The Orkney scallop appears to be a stayer on the menu and the only dish to survive the move from York. It’s easy to see why. The shell comes to the table bound in string, which is cut to reveal a plump scallop bathed in a sauce of dried coral and sea urchin butter. Scallops don’t get better than this.
The theatre continues with a crown of duck paraded through the dining room before being served in a variety of ways: a duck and walnut broth, with beetroot and black walnut relish and a duck neck sausage.
Dessert is an extraordinary custard tart made with colostrum, the rich, concentrated first milk from cows after calving. The finale is another dessert served in a copper pan filled with a sticky cake of foraged medlars, doused in rum and then sent flaming to the table.
Courses are small, but they keep on coming. Cutlery is etched with the Mýse logo. Each hand-thrown plate is matched to its complementary dish. No detail is too small for the Mýse attention to detail.
At £145 (£115 at lunch), plus an additional cheese course for £17, a wine flight of £95 and 12.5% service charge, you may have to sell the children to eat here, but you will have an amazing food adventure.
Mýse (pr. Meese from the Anglo-Saxon meaning ‘eating at the table’) is the culmination of Victoria and Josh’s ambition to create their own distinctive restaurant. It is sometimes challenging, always surprising, but do go because it is very very good.