Although Shaun Rankin spent several decades living and working on the Channel Island of Jersey, he’s always carried his North Yorkshire roots with him. The English chef debuted his fine dining restaurant, Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall, in Ripon in 2019, and has since focused on showcasing the best of the region. Even his childhood memories from growing up in nearby Richmond have made their way onto the expressive, 11-course tasting menu.
The bread course, for instance, draws on a distinctly British tradition. “As a child in Yorkshire, you were brought up on bread,” Rankin recalls, sitting in the empty dining room before service on a windy January morning. Even though it’s barely 11 a.m., he’s already in his chef whites. “You always had Sunday lunch where your mom would cook a roast joint. She’d move it out of the way, and you’d get your bread, and you’d dip it into all the beef dripping bits.”
In true Proustian fashion, Rankin evokes that memory by presenting warm sourdough alongside silky whipped bone marrow and homemade salted butter. It’s served with a rich, aromatic beef tea, a nod towards Bovril, the British beef extract brand often served as a warm drink. “I used to get Bovril when I was a child,” he says. “So the whole thing really works together.”
Not only is Rankin interested in reimagining the dishes of North Yorkshire, but he’s also focused on the area’s seasonality. Many of the menu’s ingredients come directly from Grantley Hall’s kitchen garden, located behind the estate, which operates as a five-star hotel and spa. Every year, Rankin makes a 12-month plan for which produce will be grown there and during which season. And because Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall is tasting menu only, the restaurant doesn’t need a lot of everything. “It’s been really successful for us,” Rankin notes. “We only need 20 or 30 of each thing every night, and the gardeners help with that.”
This emerges in the menu’s standout course, a frozen Magnum ice cream bar that acts as a bridge between the savory dishes and the dessert. When I dined at Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall, the Magnum was crafted from Jerusalem artichokes from the kitchen garden. The week prior, the main ingredient was pumpkin, and soon, Rankin will transition to fennel, and later to hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. “It’s finding the savory items that work well with sweet notes, like chocolate or buttermilk,” he explains. “We like to move in season with the Magnums.”
Beyond the garden, the estate offers opportunities to forage wild ingredients, like meadowsweet, which currently augments the ice cream in an apple and caramel dessert. The chefs have discovered everything from wild garlic to birch sap to pineapple weed in the area. Rankin aims to source everything from within 30 miles of the restaurant, though there are some exceptions, including seafood like lobster, crab, scallops and turbot that come from nearby Scotland.
“Pretty much everything else is local to us,” the chef says. “Even the truffles are from England, farther south. We actually tested some soil samples from the estate last year, and it could work for truffles. So we have an idea to plant trees and farm our own truffles.”
Rankin recognizes that the emphasis on hyperlocal produce is a privilege afforded to him because of his restaurant’s location on a luxury estate, as well as in an area with lots of farms. He calls his menu “Taste of Home” because it spotlights exactly what can be achieved in North Yorkshire, more than 200 miles away from London’s culinary center. Instead of flying things in from around the world, Rankin looks to what’s around him, and takes his inspiration from the landscape.
“I think it’s important wherever you are to showcase what you have to offer,” Rankin says. “Whether you’re in the Pyrenees or Yorkshire or Devon. I spent 30 years on Jersey, and I used to really champion Jersey produce. Very rarely, I would buy outside of Jersey—only protein and cheese from France. Everything else was homegrown. So it’s about where you are. You find your supply chain, you find your growers, you find the superstars of the industry, and you work with them because you need them, and they need you to survive.”
Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall earned its first Michelin star in 2020, and the chef credits the success of his restaurant to his relationship with local providers. Spilmans, in Thirsk, provides asparagus, strawberries, and raspberries—ingredients Rankin anticipates all year. “You can get fabulous ingredients from Asia that are amazing, but they’re expensive, and they’re not sustainable,” he says. “They can’t be—the carbon footprint is huge. Buying local supports your supply network chain.”
For Rankin, it’s this emphasis on the regionality of the food that helps to define it, an important distinction when there’s an ongoing debate about what, exactly, comprises British cuisine. It’s not, Rankin points out, fish and chips, which actually come from Portugal. Instead, a regional cuisine is about mastering what is grown and produced there naturally.
“If you’re cooking in the north of France, you’re cooking with cream and butter, and if you’re cooking in the south of France, you’re cooking with olive oil and tomatoes and Provencal herbs,” Rankin says. “Like how in Italy, the different areas produce different dishes because they’ve always worked with what is there. The U.K. is only now growing so much of its own product, so it’s now getting a style of its own. That might be using methods from Nordic areas or fermentation processes from Asia, but with the ingredients that are natural to the U.K. That’s British cooking for me.”
At Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall, the chef has paired this seasonal, local approach with a refined sensibility that can be seen in everything from the décor to the button-up service. He wants to champion the art of luxury tableside dining, including a tableside trolley for the cheese course and a champagne trolley. He’s planning to add a martini trolley featuring his own Shaun Rankin Gin, a collaboration with the Spirit of Masham distillery.
“I love the art of formal service,” he explains. “I hope it’s on its way back. You can go into great restaurants, but it’s a stripped-back table and a bit of pottery, and everyone has a wooden spoon. For us, it’s about the champagne trolley. It’s about the luxurious surroundings. It’s about the tablecloth and the china and the glassware. That’s fine dining at its best, and that’s what we want to try to champion.”
Although Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall is certainly not the only fine dining outpost in North Yorkshire, the region has never quite achieved the recognition of London or even areas like the Lake District or the Cotswolds. But the vast area, which comprises both countryside and coastline, is slowly beginning to get its due. Rankin says it’s “coming onto the map,” but admits that there is a culinary “gap” once you get outside of London.
For those interested in exploring the area’s culinary offerings, he recommends North Yorkshire regional spots like The Angel at Hetton and The Black Swan at Oldstead, as well as Kenny Atkinson’s Newcastle spots House of Tides and Solstice, both of which have Michelin stars. In York, Andrew Pern helms The Star Inn, while near Nottingham, Restaurant Sat Bains has two Michelin stars and a green star. “They’re spread out, but there is great food here,” Rankin notes.
Before opening his restaurant in Grantley Hall, Rankin helmed the Michelin-starred Bohemia in St. Helier, Jersey, and saw considerable success. He published a cookbook, Shaun Rankin’s Seasoned Islands, in 2010, and in 2009, Rankin was named the winner of The Great British Menu cooking show, serving a treacle tart for the finale episode. He previously ran Ormer Jersey and London’s Ormer Mayfair for years before returning to North Yorkshire. These days, however, he rarely says yes to TV appearances, preferring to focus on what he’s doing in the restaurant.
“The accolades are great and they support everything we do, but they’re not the be-all and end-all,” he says of his success. “Your customer is. The clients are what keeps your restaurant running. So for me, it’s all about running a successful, well-run ship. At this level, I have been able to train the chefs who are coming through the ranks. It’s important to show them what we’re trying to achieve in this restaurant, so as they grow, they’ll do the same things as what we’re doing now. I want to pass on that sustainability approach.”
He considers and then acknowledges, “But what does success look like? It just means a great restaurant where the customers are happy and your staff is happy. That’s what matters.” As one of those customers, I can attest that Rankin’s approach does, in fact, leave you both happy and full—and ready to explore all that North Yorkshire has to offer.
