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Telegraph
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
William Sitwell reviews Roots, York: ‘So heavenly it could calm the wildest loon'
Tommy Banks's empire includes a Michelin-starred restaurant-with-rooms on the North York Moors, an old inn by Byland Abbey, a food delivery service, a posh spot in York called Roots (also starred), a recently launched pub group, and a canned wine business. The tinnies are on the wine list at Roots, naturally, but the staff (or indeed anyone in the world, as far as I know) are yet to figure out a way to open them with flair. Sommeliers can yank out corks with majestic creativity and attempt theatrics with screw caps (turning the bottle with a flourish, rather than the cap), but when they bring you a can of wine there is no such drama. Our server settled, understandably, on bringing the tins for show then returning them empty with a filled decanter. I enjoyed the novelty of a fine-dining establishment offering canned wine. And I enjoyed the wine, too. The Banks Brothers gamay/pinot noir blend is fabulous, all the more so if, like me, you've a train south to catch and can grab some more tins for the journey. It was one of the things that tempered my dread of the compulsory tasting menu at this converted old inn by the River Ouse. It's a bright room – lots of pale wood, beige walls, panelling. What you might call civic-chic. In fact, the whole place feels like a modern-courthouse-cum-registry-office. With Banks's entrepreneurial mind I'm surprised he doesn't rent the space out in the morning for sentencing and marriages before turning out his food and wine in the afternoon. Seven courses came our way (you can also opt for a pricier nine-course menu), but were far less painful than feared. First up, salami and hams – meltingly tender, salty palate galvanisers (especially for a wonderful South African wine, The Foundry Roussanne, in glass this time) – followed by bread, a whole, decent loaf of sourdough. Then the main thematic thrust of the menu: fluffy, creamy froths framing the cured, the pickled and the fermented. A rustic bowl of cloud-like yellowy froth (what they call a 'soup' of Jerusalem artichoke with aged Killeen goat's milk cheese) is a dish that draws folk to Roots from far and wide, a siren call you can succumb to without repercussion, bar obesity. Underneath the froth are mushrooms and fermented grains. It was a complex and delectable dish. The next frothy offering was bitter, topped by a scallop, caramelised and sliced like a fat hasselback potato. The over-sugary scallop couldn't quite match up to the harsh-tasting foam, though; I'd have preferred the simplicity of a naked scallop. Then in washed another spumy yellowy sauce, with hints of leek and herbs. This time the bubbles bobbed with pink fir apple potatoes – a lovely celebration of these wonderful tatties, but a dish that left me craving a change of scene. It came, finally, with the main course dish of venison. This was a plate, all dry dabs of protein, fermented cherry and beetroot, that cried out to be drenched with sauce. Thankfully a spoonful of jus dispatched at the table went some way to avert the sparse look. More thrilling, though, was the accompanying little pastry, delivering croissant flakiness with warm, oozing venison within. So good, so soporific, so rich and heavenly, it could calm the wildest loon. Hand them round to the world's troublemakers and they'd be suing for peace before midnight. Down went the deer, then a pud of pears with hazelnuts (I searched in vain for the advertised chocolate), and I took myself and my tinnies merrily south.
BBC News
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Hotbed of rave culture' - East Anglia in the '90s
If glow sticks and "techno, techno, techno" mean anything to you, perhaps you lived the '90s rave culture - and if you did, an author is hoping to document your journalist Matt Anniss says Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk were a "hotbed" of the rave scene back in the is planning to put together a "people's history" of the genre from the late 1980s and '90s - and can be controversial, with unlicensed and illegal events causing disruption to residents and landowners, but he is keen to hear stories about the "countercultural playground for ravers". "A few years ago I wrote a book called Join the Future... which looked at what we call the hidden history [of the rave scene and British bass music]," Mr Anniss says."I started looking at things that happened in different parts of the country and what was missing from the archive."One of the biggest things that's missing in terms of British dance music is what happened in predominantly rural regions like East Anglia."Obviously there was a dance music scene with clubs and record shops, but what drew people from the region together were the raves and free parties." Anniss, 46, from Bristol, has strong family ties to eastern England, particularly Norfolk, and is researching the region's rave history for a PhD at Southampton Solent work will cover a 30-year period "to see how things changed and whether rave culture has become embedded in counties like Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk"."The earliest raves or free parties in Cambridgeshire actually took place before rave, from an outfit called the Tonka Sound System, who used to break into abandoned buildings in Cambridge and put on parties from 1985 onwards," he says. "Then there were other warehouse parties run by the Banks Brothers who also ran a rave at the Cambridge Corn Exchange called Eclipse."He says at one point there was so much going on that Cambridgeshire Police even had its own "rave-busting party unit" - although the force was unable to comment on that. Meanwhile, in Norfolk, "there was dance music culture in most of the larger towns - Great Yarmouth, Norwich, King's Lynn - but also smaller club nights in places like Cromer and Sheringham", he says."But later, what became bigger were things like illegal raves and especially in places such as Thetford Forest."Because of legislation, that activity largely died off in other parts of the UK, he says, but not so in East Anglia."I think there are several things in play here. One, there's something in the character of the people in East Anglia - a long history of non-conformity - and there's a lot of space and not a lot of nightclubs." Nick Slater, 57, is still part of Shades of Rhythm - a DJ outfit that regularly played on the rave scene in the Peterborough area in the '90s."Things were really local back then, so each town would have a couple of people who were in the loop and in most towns you'd have a bar or some place where everybody could meet," he recalls. "[Rave] was a new genre, it wasn't like anybody had done this before."It was derived probably from funk and soul and disco and then obviously rap music, electro disco, break dance, and it led us to a clashing technology where 'sample' all of a sudden came out, and we could start to sample drumbeats from rap records and we'd have to speed them up."We were using technology to the full advantage, which almost led to things speeding up and becoming dance music - rave music as we know it." Asked about his happiest memories of the time, he says: "It's just the people you met - everybody was like-minded - it felt like something big was about to happen and you felt part of it. "It was just brand new." Chris "Charlie" Brown also used to DJ at raves in the Cambridge area. Now 62, he still plays events and says the scene remains strong, "although now legally"."I remember we did a gig in the Beechwoods [nature reserve] just outside Cherry Hinton and we had someone at [another venue] on one of those big Nokia mobile phones - like a brick - then we made the phone call asking them to announce where the gig was." He says: "About 10 minutes later we saw hundreds of headlights coming up the Gogs [Gog Magog Hills]."Although the police arrived it was very good natured, he says, and the party was wound up in the early hours. About 350 people attended and when it finished, many went around collecting rubbish."When we left the site it was like nothing had ever happened." While Anniss accepts raves can cause disruption, he says his PhD research will not actively focus on landowners or police involvement as "disruption is quite well covered within the archives by newspapers"."What interests me is obviously the events that happened - how and why they happened - why there were more raves in Cambridgeshire and the rest of East Anglia than in some other parts of the country," he says."And not every rave was illegal. Sometimes farm or landowners were paid by rave promoters."What you tend to find when you try to document history like this through people is that some have great memories - really vividly - and others don't. "Obviously the elephant in the room is the associated drug culture. That is part of it. I'm not interested in asking people 'did they take drugs'... that's not why I'm doing it."His anonymous online survey, which will form the basis of the "people's history", asks about "Your East Anglian Rave Journey" and most memorable events. 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