The Black Swan at Oldstead

Wow, just wow! Food fabulous, service spectacular, surroundings wonderful. Nothing more to say.

The Best Food in the North of England 

An amazing culinary experience. Course after course of fascinating and delicious flavour pairings. Worth every penny.

We were really looking forward to the Black Swan with all the favourable press, chef’s appearances on national television and in the press, and the inevitable popularity which has followed, meaning that booking is needed three months before your preferred date and then the only way to be guaranteed a table is to book a room and meal package and pay in advance, so there was a lot to live up to. We were shown upstairs to our table in the smaller dining room to one side of the main one and almost before we had sat down the first starter was in front of us, a Jerusalem artichoke crisp with pickled onion and Tunworth cheese filling, which we found very enjoyable and got the taste buds working nicely. Crab and asparagus is a bit old hat, but in this case the brown crab hollandaise on an asparagus purée with small disks of white crab with lovage and horseradish combined in a very good blend of tastes. The next dish was also shellfish, this time langoustine cooked on a Japanese indoor BBQ and then disappointingly somewhat overwhelmed by the whey caramelised with palm sugar. We were not sure whether the sourdough bread, with its strange texture, and the sour butter, which was precisely that, was meant to be a course or not as no information was forthcoming. The following course seemed to be something of a contest between the ferment of chilli from the garden and local raw deer, the main contestants being backed by wild sorrel leaves, onion rings and a rye cracker, and the deer not that tender although with a good taste. Next came lovely Skye scallops with a tastily creamy sauce made with smoked butter and white onion, some rhubarb, again from the garden, and, again, a purée, this time the inevitable Jerusalem artichoke version. All this worked well enough, but we could not but draw comparison with better scallop dishes we have enjoyed elsewhere. The ferment theme continued with the excellent monkfish, roasted in butter for a luxurious finish, but not in harmony with the fermented celeriac which was rather sharp and out of kilter with the caramelised butter for the mushrooms and asparagus. The best dish for us was the crapaudine  beetroot cooked in beef fat for five hours, deliciously meaty on the palate and craftily balanced with a sesame seed crisp and horseradish cream (again?). Aged sirloin on the menu but far more  beef on the plate with a slow-cooked rib in a (too thick) suet bun, onion and lovage (again) and sirloin which, for me, suffered from being below the ideal temperature and had to be reheated, which made us wonder whether we were eating too slowly for the kitchen, and would this have happened if Tommy Banks had been present? On we went to the desserts - a brown sugar meringue on top of a rhubarb ice cream sandwich, sweet Cicely and a crispy buckwheat wafer; freeze-dried granita-like apple, hay-infused cream and meringue (again); one of the better courses in the form of sweet and savoury crunchy chicory root biscuit and potato custard; and finally, apricot schnapps toast with sour cream and soft, sweet and satisfying candied vegetables. We were surprised that in a restaurant with the Black Swan’s reputation there was no sommelier, no bottles presented, the staff lacked polish and the dishes were removed almost too swiftly (again us eating too slowly for the kitchen?), there were no petits fours, too many occurrences of similar ingredients and, generally, perhaps too much striving for effect. As far as we were concerned it does not live up to the hype. Tip: if you do decide to go to the Black Swan get a taxi from Helmsley unless you are used to country roads.