Chef-patron Josh Overington is creating dishes "rooted in time and place" in Yorkshire
Having made waves with his York-based tasting menu-only restaurant Le Cochon Aveugle, Josh and wife Victoria Overington have run for the hills. The Howardian Hills, to be precise – the rolling, bucolic strip of uplands above York that plays home to the likes of the Black Swan at Oldstead and the Star Inn at Harome – an area fast becoming Yorkshire's foodie mecca.
After closing Le Cochon last year, the aim was to find a site with rooms, and the couple settled on a former pub in the chocolate-box village of Hovingham. They have created Mýse, a light, cosy and relaxed 22-cover space complete with a beautiful live-edge sycamore bar. It's an ideal setting for a £125 tasting menu (£95 at lunch) that sees chef Josh at the absolute top of his game – drawing inspiration from the Yorkshire larder and foraged foods to cook an utterly distinctive menu.
"I want people to eat these dishes and feel like I can only eat it at Mýse," says Josh. "It is so important to me that the identity of this is like nowhere else in the UK."
And he's right. What other fine-diner would serve walnut wine, medlar cake or – most unique of all – a colostrum tart? More on those later.
The tasting menu is broken up into five snacks and starters, six mains and four desserts, and Josh and his three-strong brigade set out their stall early with a bijou roe deer and caviar tartlet. A mini tart casing made using charcoal from their fire pit is filled with venison tartare mixed with a fermented chilli and wild plum sauce and a juniper vinegar, then topped with Cornish smoked caviar. But it is also what it stands for that Josh is proud of.
"Everything in that tart is made in England. You've got wild venison and plums, chillies grown in York, caviar from Cornwall. It's rooted in a time and place. And then you open it up you get that little bit of ‘wow'."
Next, there's a show-stopping, artery-clogging bread course served with chicken dripping, where whole chickens are roasted, the drippings reduced down, mixed with chicken fat and finished with herbs and a dash of vinegar, alongside Ampersand butter ("the best butter in England"). As a dish, it encapsulates how Josh wants Mýse to be perceived: "I've been calling it refined grandma cooking. It is smart food but I want the relaxed feeling that you've been invited into someone's home for Sunday lunch and you've dipped your bread in the roast chicken tray."
The only dish to follow Josh from Le Cochon is his scallop dish, where the scallop is baked in the shell with sea urchin roe and Jersey cream butter, topped with dehydrated scallop roe, a dashi made from the scallop roe, and a grating of Amalfi lemon. "It's a perfect dish because there are very few things happening. It all comes down to buying the very best ingredients," he says. "It doesn't work if you buy crap butter or crap scallops, because it's so simple."
A trio of duck dishes are the centrepiece of the mains. Sourced from nearby Pollards of Thirkley, first up is a small course of duck liver and cured duck on crumpet alongside a mug of duck broth mixed with the spiced smack of homemade walnut wine, created by Josh from foraged walnuts. This is followed by breast of duck dressed in walnut wine and served alongside chewy beetroot, and then a homemade duck offal sausage. "We use every part of the duck. I'm particularly proud of the breast dish and the way it looks and it feels. It's just duck, walnut and beetroot. It's really hard to make something special with just three ingredients."
For dessert, more of Mýse's individuality, a custard tart made with colostrum, the sweet, creamy first milk that cows produce, excesses of which are usually discarded by dairies.
"I wanted to make like the best custard tart you could taste, baked to order. It's difficult because colostrum has such high fat content. So there's no egg, then there's nothing else setting it apart from what's in the colostrum."
To finish, a cake made with foraged medlars, which the kitchen bletts (allows to rot slightly). The result is a sticky, toffee flavour, the cake soaked in Yorkshire rum and set alight at the table. As an ending, it's as provocative as the venison starter; a dish made with foraged produce and Yorkshire ingredients, and one oozing character, class and – like the rest of Mýse – utter individuality.
From the menu
Summer field biscuit with salted bramble
Pickled cacklebean quails egg with hay and wild mushroom
Braised ox cheek in Yorkshire pudding batter with fermented cucumber
Broad bean porridge with confit ceps, fresh cheese and whey
Wild halibut, poached Lindisfarne oyster, leeks with an English sparkling wine sauce
Duck and walnut wine broth with liver crumpet
Roasted Thirkleby duck with chewy beetroot and black walnut
Duck neck sausage
Citrus marigold ice-cream with plum kernel oil and candied oak church raspberries
Linseed caramel
Colostrum custard tart
Flambéed medlar cake with malted ice-cream
Main Street, Hovingham, York YO62 4LF www.restaurantmyse.co.uk
