We walked into Roots to Oasis at full volume. Do not look back in anger, Sally can wait. It sounded as if a live band had set up in the kitchen.
To be fair, they turned it down as the dining room filled, but it set a tone for the evening we did not expect from a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Perhaps Michelin wants to loosen its tie these days, less church, more like a regular Friday night restaurant. We get that. People should not need courage to book a table. But there is a difference between relaxed and loud, and for a while Roots was on the wrong side of it.
Aged Beef Toast – Oldstead Charcuterie
Tommy Banks’ York restaurant sits by the river in an old Arts and Crafts building, the younger sister to The Black Swan at Oldstead. Much of the produce comes from the family farm in the North York Moors. It sounded like a strong starting point for our trip. It should have been.
Our table was in the corner of one of the restaurant’s two dining rooms, beside the window. A wooden bench ran along the window side of the square tables, with chairs opposite. I had a chair, but my wife had the bench. No cushion, no padding, just wood. A church bench would have been more comfortable.
Then there was the service.
Not for lack of effort. The team was working hard, visibly so. But nobody appeared to be running the floor. Tables waited to be cleared, glasses sat empty and the whole room lacked direction.
At one point, we sat for around fifteen minutes with a finished plate in front of us and nothing to drink.
Hen of the Woods
A nearby table ordered champagne. By the time their first course arrived, the glasses were dry. They ordered three more glasses. The champagne was poured at the bar rather than brought to the table.
Wine by the glass being poured out of sight is something we keep seeing in England. We do not love it, because we always want to see the bottle, but fine, a glass is a glass. Champagne at a Michelin one-star restaurant is different. Bring the bottle to the table, show the label and give it a little flair. It is not a pint of beer.
Strawberry – Hay – Burnt Cream
The wine pairing we chose never really came together. Too often, the food changed the wines for the worse. The white Chateau Musar 2019 was a genuinely interesting bottle to try, credit for that.
The food was not strong enough to rescue the evening.
The Oldstead charcuterie and aged beef toast were good. The toast was rich, savoury and properly satisfying, while the charcuterie showed the quality of the produce behind the restaurant.
But good is not the same as one-star good.
The food at Roots deserved a better evening. A kitchen can only carry so much.
Strawberry – Sweet Cicely
The aged sirloin with béarnaise and garden salad left almost no impression at all. My wife remembered the salad more clearly than the beef, and not for the right reason. It was too sour and pulled the dish out of balance.
The hen of the woods was harder to forget. It is a mushroom packed with umami, and it needs a firm hand to keep it in balance. Here the mushroom was too large, too dominant and too intense. It seemed to grow in the mouth, which is not a quality we usually look for in a dish.
The desserts did not change the direction. Strawberry, hay and burnt cream arrived looking more like a puddle than a composed dessert, pleasant enough, but not much more.
The final sweet course, strawberry and sweet cicely, never settled. Nothing led, nothing supported, and the dish fell apart quietly on the plate.
Two supplements were offered that evening. The Root Vegetable French Toast was tempting at an extra 16 pounds. But we passed on both. In retrospect, that was one of the better decisions of the night.
After talking through the evening again, we both reached the same conclusion. Roots felt closer to a good Bib Gourmand restaurant than a Michelin one-star restaurant.
Unfortunately, the bill had received the star.
No
No
