A profile of David Nowell, head chef of REYTA-winning Tickton Grange.
‘Frank brought these sea bass and crab in from Skipsea this morning but we won’t have any smoked trout until Justin arrives this afternoon.’
This is David Nowell, food and beverage executive at Tickton Grange, showing me around his larder.
‘That’s pork from Anna Longthorp out at Howden and Tom dropped off goats cheese yesterday,’ he happily explains as I point at different ingredients, trying to find one that doesn’t come from East Yorkshire. I struggle. The duck is from Leven, the lobster from Brid, even the rape seed oil (David refuses to use olive oil) comes from Paul and Anna Jackson’s farm in Carnaby. ‘Why use olive oil from Italy,’ he argues ‘when we produce rapeseed oil in this county that is more versatile, better for you and comes from crops grown a few miles up the road?’
It’s this passion for local food that has recently seen David asked to take on the role of chairman of the East Riding Local Food Network, a body created to promote exactly the sort of produce that he has made a cornerstone of his dishes for over two decades now.
David has been head chef at Tickton Grange – a handsome Georgian country house hotel just outside of Beverley – since 1991, and in that time he’s taken the experience he picked up from kitchens all over the world and turned it to creating truly extraordinary dishes designed around food sourced almost exclusively from within East Yorkshire. ‘Cuisine in the Riding was, unfortunately, in the doldrums for a long time,’ he explains ‘but now it’s as good as anywhere else in the country, and the local produce we have in the riding is one of the reasons. The local producers now want to provide to local businesses, the local food network helps support this and these days there are more places than ever utilising the wonderful produce we have in the region.’
It’s also fair to say that David’s dedication to local producers has also had a direct and significant effect on the Riding’s nascent culinary reputation. Many of the local producers who are now supplying the best restaurants and gastropubs in Yorkshire and beyond got their first break when he discovered them and put their produce on his menu at Tickton. He explains his working rationale: ‘For me, the really enjoyable part of being a chef is creativity; taking 2 or 3 great local ingredients and making them work together, to compliment each other and to look and taste great on the plate. I try to do that every time I design a new menu and I encourage all of my team to come up with new ideas all the time. I liaise with the local producers and then bring their products into the kitchen for the team here to come up with something.’
It’s an approach that has brought him many admirers amongst his peers in the restaurant trade. Talking to chefs around East Yorkshire, it’s clear that they hold David in very high regard and recognise how important his enthusiasm has been in bringing the region up to spec, gastronomically. But while all decent chefs use local ingredients these days there are very few that use them with such flair and sense of theatre. The dishes at Tickton Grange are exquisitely designed and built to draw gasps as they enter the restaurant.
It’s a style of cooking that David says he learnt during his time working under culinary legend Anton Mosimann when he ruled London at the Dorchester during the 1980’s. ‘The Terrace at the Dorchester had two Michelin stars and was real cutting edge cuisine. I managed to work my way up to the terrace – where the most adventurous cooking happened – and there I was, 24 years old, learning directly from the best in the world.’
His attempts to break into catering, though, started at a much younger age, as a teenager at school. ‘I used to make fudge and sell it to my classmates. I would buy the ingredients from my mum, make the fudge and then go and sell it in class. I made 100% profit, so by the end of the first year I’d saved over £100 and bought myself a bike.’
Spurred on, he decided to go to college to study catering, something which initially disappointed his parents. ‘Mum and dad were intellectuals who worked at Hull University. Mum was Philip Larkin’s secretary and dad was a reader in Psychoneuroendocrinology – a very clever man. They expected me to do something equally cerebral.’
David, however, was heavily influenced by his mother’s cooking skills and these convinced him to try his hand at being a chef. She used to buy fresh ingredients every day from the shops in their home village of Cottingham and turn them into simple but delicious meals for the family. If you take this upbringing, add a tough boot camp experience cooking at Turnberry in Scotland and a fine dining education from Mosimann you end up with the fundaments of David’s culinary ethos – local ingredients, hard work and flair. When his parents saw what their son had achieved, they became very proud.
David returned to East Yorkshire in the mid 80’s to help his mum nurse his dad, who was dying from cancer, fully intending to continue with his life in London at some point. ‘The plan was to have one last Christmas at home with dad and then head back to the Dorchester,’ he explains ‘but fortunately he rallied and, while he sadly passed some months later, I decided to stick around to help out and ended up taking some local chef work, which finally lead me to the head chef job here at Tickton in 1991.’ Marriage and kids (he has 4 sons, all in their twenties) ultimately determined that he stay in the riding and he’s now been at the Grange for 22 years. His reputation means that the local suppliers and producers usually seek David out because they know that they will get a sympathetic hearing and, more often than not, the Grange becomes their first restaurant client.
There are some amazing characters making great produce in the East Riding and David is justly proud of the relationships and friendships he has forged with them. Frank Powell is a great example, he is one of only three people granted a license to fish off the Yorkshire coast using hand nets. This means that he lays nets from the beach at Skipsea, extending into the North Sea, and then marches out to sea twice a day to see what he’s caught. He does all of this by hand, without boats or rods, and then sells what he catches to local restaurants. As an operation, it’s almost prehistoric in it’s simplicity.
‘Frank came knocking on the kitchen door telling me that he pulls fish out of the sea with his bare hands,’ explains David with a chuckle ‘I had to go see him do it before I could honestly believe him. I love Frank, he’s a genuine person, he’s a hard grafter, he’s out in that sea in all weathers at anytime of the day or night and he knows fish. He rings me from the sea, actually stood in the sea, with the waves breaking over his oilskins and tells me what he’s finding in his nets so I can start thinking of recipes.’
David has similar tales to tell of most of his suppliers; how he discovered Tom and Tricia Wallis and their Lowna Dairy goats cheese at Driffield farmer’s market 15 years ago and became the first chef to put their wares on the menu. They now sell nationally to some of the best restaurants in the UK. His latest discovery is Justin Staal of Staal’s Smokehouse, who has only been operating for just over a year but has been supplying smoked fish and duck to Tickton virtually from day one.
Many chefs would closely guard a supplier they have discovered and help nurture and, indeed, some would even drop a producer if they became too ubiquitous. Not so with David: ‘I believe that if the local food producers prosper, the whole industry in this region prospers, too. You want to find people who are equally passionate about what they do as we are. You get an instinct very quickly about whether someone is genuine or not, whether they are doing it for love or money.’
Oddly, David’s work seems seem to fly under the radar of most people. The Grange has a reputation as a ‘best kept secret’ despite producing some of the most adventurous cooking in the whole county. David is clear on the reason why: ‘We’ve relied entirely on word of mouth and that has always served us very well. With the increase in competition, though, and the recession, it has got harder to fill the restaurant every night but we won’t compromise on quality and I won’t compromise when it comes to using local produce. It’s central to this restaurant and central to my instincts as a chef.’
If, ultimately, the success of a restaurant and its chef is determined by the quality of the food on the plate then the names of David Nowell and Tickton Grange should be shouted from the rooftops. The only place you seem to see any reaction, though, is on the faces of the diners savvy enough to eat and Tickton as their next course lands in front of them. And that reaction is absolute joy.
Click here to find Tickton Grange on a map.
Click here to find accommodation near Beverley.
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