Group Editor Andrew Palmer talks to the Michelin-starred chef ahead of his live show in York.

There is a particular kind of restlessness that overtakes a chef when the kitchen is no longer enough — when the story of how the food got onto the plate begins to feel as urgent as the food itself. Tommy Banks has reached that point. Spinning Plates Live, which arrives in York for one night only, weaves together three intersecting timelines: the twenty-five years since his parents bought The Black Swan at Oldstead, the defining twelve months that have brought him to this moment, and the single opening night of his latest pub. Across all three, he insists, the knife edge is real.

"There's certainly nothing I've left out because it feels too raw," he says when I ask which of those timelines proved hardest to put on a stage honestly. "This is a very honest, accurate and vulnerable depiction of what's happened over the last twenty-five years. "If anything, it's more of a shame that I've had to leave things out that were really interesting, funny, or amazing— simply because so much has happened over that time, and it's impossible to fit it all in."

That candour is characteristic. Banks is not a chef who deals in mystique, which is partly why the wider conversation about the state of British hospitality has fallen to him as much as to anyone of his generation. Three pubs are closing every week under the combined weight of business rates and VAT; the high streets are visibly thinning. Spinning Plates Live, he concedes, is both a love letter and a warning.

"Hospitality is on a knife edge. It's something I talk about a lot, and I think it's my responsibility to do so. More than anything, though, on an emotional level, I just think it's very sad that so many businesses are closing and the effect that has on our high streets and on people's ability to go out and enjoy themselves."

What does he want people to do as they leave the theatre? "The amazing thing about hospitality is that you get to celebrate people's special occasions with them. And I really want Spinning Plates Live to feel like a beautiful occasion in itself — a live event that brings people together. I hope people leave enthused by what they've seen, emboldened by the message behind it, and hopefully go straight out afterwards to support local restaurants and cafés."

A village that nobody had heard of

Oldstead was sleepy to the point of invisibility before The Black Swan put it on the map. "Growing up, nobody had heard of Oldstead. When I said where I was from, people didn't know it. So I'm very, very proud of what we've built there." He is also, refreshingly, sceptical of the idea that any of it could be lifted and reproduced elsewhere.

"Nothing we do at The Black Swan is really replicable anywhere else, and I think the key thing is that we were there to begin with. We had a farm, we had a community, and we built on top of that. Almost every other restaurant or hospitality business starts with a concept and then tries to fit that concept into a location. Ours has been a natural evolution of family life, farming and community."

It is an unfashionable thing to say in an industry that increasingly trades on scalability. Banks arrived in the kitchen at seventeen with no formal training — a few unpaid stages, including a week at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, and a willingness to learn on the job. Whether that absence of classical training was a handicap or a making is a question he has clearly turned over many times.

"I don't think my lack of formal training was a handicap, because I wasn't bound by the constraints of being trained in a classical way. I hugely admire chefs who have classical training, and there are chefs who are far more technically experienced, skilled and gifted than I am. But I think my route into cooking has led me to create some of the most interesting food."

The Black Swan, Oldstead Photo: Andrew Hayes-Watkins

Roots, York Photo: Andrew Hayes-Watkins

The Abbey Inn, Byland

The camera and the kitchen

Gordon Ramsay has lately declared himself a fan of influencers, a position that has drawn a certain amount of weary scepticism from the older guard of restaurant criticism. I put it to Banks directly: does an Instagram photograph and a ninety-second reel actually add anything to the culture of eating out, or does it flatten what restaurants do?

His answer is more generous than I had expected. "Yeah, I think I am a fan of influencers. We have to realise how fortunate we are as chefs — we've always existed within the media in some form, and I think we're very lucky in that respect. Influencers are just another form of media and another way of storytelling. My core mission is to spread our message as far and wide as possible, and I think all forms of media are important for that."

The harder question — the one chefs habitually deflect on the first attempt — is whether the kitchen quietly raises its game when an influencer or critic walks through the door. Banks, to his credit, does not deflect.

"No. I genuinely think that at the highest level of restaurants, every guest is treated the same — and that's not a cliché. We go to every possible length to mitigate anything that could go wrong, so every guest is effectively a VIP. There are no levers I could pull and nothing I could suddenly do differently to impress an influencer or critic more than we would for any normal guest."

Yorkshire hospitality and the trouble with scripts

If there is a particular pleasure in talking to Banks, it lies in his refusal to dress up the obvious. Over-rehearsed waiter monologues, the constant checking-in, the choreographed reveal — at what point does service stop serving the diner and start serving the restaurant's own mythology?

"Service is obviously incredibly important, but I think it's important that people share their own personality. I struggle when I feel like a waiter is reading from a script."

I have eaten at both The Black Swan and Roots, and can attest to the quality of the ingredients and the seriousness with which they are treated — but I confess to a degree of sympathy with his point about scripts from the diner's side of the table. There is a particular art to knowing when not to approach, and on my own visits the waiter's patter occasionally arrived mid-conversation; when one is interrupted, the thought is lost, and the carefully rehearsed description rather washes over you unheard. I noticed the same tension reviewing the Michelin-starred Etz in Nuremberg, where the front-of-house performance felt more insistent than the food required, and found myself contrasting it with the quieter, more confident restraint of Jøwåy in the same city, where the room trusts the cooking to speak for itself.

At his own restaurants, he says, the touchstone is something he calls Yorkshire hospitality. "It's about warmth. It's about not taking yourself too seriously while taking the subject matter very seriously. That balance is really important. You want people to feel kindness, humility and openness, but at the same time you have to be deeply serious and protective about what you're delivering."

It is a useful corrective to the current vogue for theatrical plating and elaborate front-of-house performance. Banks is famously rooted in what grows around Oldstead, but he resists the suggestion that "rootedness" has hardened into a brand or that he is consciously positioning himself against the theatrical excesses of the fine-dining circuit.

"I don't really see anything as an arms race, to be honest. But I do think the fact that we are possibly the ultimate farm-to-table restaurant is one of the reasons people come to visit us. There's more depth to our experience because of our location, because of who we are, and because of the journey we've been on to get to this point."

Here he offers what may be the most telling sentence of the conversation. "I've never really thought much about what other people are doing. I don't give competitors a second thought, really. We stay focused on ourselves, and I think that's the best way to be."

Rural pressure, city pressure

It is tempting, after twenty-five years in a village that the rest of the country has only lately discovered, to ask whether there is something about Yorkshire that London chefs genuinely fail to understand. Banks is too even-handed to take the bait.

"Running a restaurant in a rural place like Oldstead is very, very different from running one in a city centre. But equally, there are huge challenges involved in running a restaurant in somewhere like London. The challenges are just different. In London, for example, there's an enormous number of potential customers, but there's also a huge amount of competition. I imagine the same applies when it comes to recruitment and staffing. You can either be one of a small handful of the best restaurants in a county or one of many great restaurants in a huge city. It probably balances out in the end."

It is a characteristically grounded answer from a chef who has spent his career resisting the temptation to mythologise either his postcode or his trade. Spinning Plates Live arrives in York with its three timelines and its single, unfashionable conviction intact: that hospitality is worth fighting for and that the fight begins by telling the truth about it.



TOMMY BANKS SPINNING PLATES: LIVE!
York Theatre Royal, Main House
Fri 17 Jul, 7.30pm
Age guidance: 12+ Book tickets here

For more details on Tommy Banks restaurants click the following links:
The Black Swan, Oldstead
Roots, York
The Abbey Inn, Byland