TOM JACKSON68 The Times Magazine
to the upper echelons of the food trade, which
shares Barker Business Park on the outskirts of
Ripon with such other stalwarts of the sector
as Masham Sausages, Spa Vending and Dalton
Engineering (Poultry Know-how), among
whose corrugated steel units I might easily
have got lost as I drove to dinner, were I not so
used to eating on northern industrial estates.
On a brief pre-dinner tour of the factory
(which made me feel a bit like the local
MP), owner Mitch Mitchell showed me vast,
simmering sarcophagi of bones, boiling to
fulfil orders marked up on whiteboards from
Fortnum & Mason, the Northcote, Sat Bains,
Brasserie Zédel, the Ned, the Ginger Pig,
Marcus Wareing, Core, Hide...
And then he brought me through into
the small, steely cosiness of his kitchen, with
seating for ten in normal times, eight with
social distancing in place: a four by the
window and two twos at either end of a long
prep table, facing the rotisserie, grill and pass.
It is open only on Fridays and Saturdays, for
dinner, one sitting only. So 20 covers a week.
You can wait a year for a space.
Mitch opened the ChefsTable three years
ago to give his cooks and food developers, who
are invisibly responsible for so many of the
flavours you and I eat in restaurants (or when
consuming Heston Blumenthal’s range at
Waitrose, for example), an opportunity to cook
for people they could see. A bit of fun. And
it is so good, so popular (despite being wholly
unknown to critics south of Leeds and the
muppets at Michelin) that, unlike most small,
top-end restaurants, it makes money. Most of
which is ploughed back into some of the most
fantastic, futuristic cooking kit you will see.Eating out Giles Coren
few months ago, some bright spark
decided to start dropping this column
online on Wednesday evenings at
5pm instead of simultaneously with
its paper publication in The Times
Magazine on Saturdays. The result
has been a tenfold spike in the
number of comments posted below
the line, which I take as an indication that page
visits have increased as planned and also that
the new weekday readers are more engaged
than their sleepy weekend counterparts. Even
if 90 per cent of them are only asking, “Why is
this review being published on a Wednesday?”
Another indication that new readers are
coming aboard is the number of commenters
suddenly wanting to know, “Why is there so
little about the actual food?” and, “Why does
he never go to the north of England?” Clearly,
they have not been reading these past 20 years,
which regulars will know I have spent mostly
in the towns and cities of the industrial north,
celebrating the food scene there in forensic
detail and grimly recording every mouthful,
molecule by molecule.
And this week I am at it again, reporting
from an industrial estate in North Yorkshire,
where I have lately eaten a deliriously brilliant
multicourse dinner that deserves to be recorded
with all my habitual nerdish specificity.
I’m talking about ChefsTable, a show
kitchen attached to the factory of Truefoods,
purveyor of high-quality stocks and saucesA
‘It’s reminiscent of Noma
or El Bulli. Apart from the
fact that I’m on an industrial
estate in Yorkshire – with
food I’d rather eat’
ChefsTable at Truefoods