Long read
Mýse en place: Joshua and Vicky Overington are all set to dazzle at their new restaurant
Joshua Overington used to enjoy provoking his guests at his previous restaurant, Le Cochon Aveugle. “Cochon was aggressive and bolshy and urban,” he admits. “We told people what they were eating, we didn’t really do dietaries and the music was a bit too loud.”
Launched by the chef and his wife and sommelier counterpart Vicky in 2014, the York restaurant closed towards the end of last year with the pair saying at the time that they wanted to ‘start a new adventure’.
That new adventure is Mýse (pronounced like mise en place), a more spacious, ambitious and grown-up restaurant on the site of a former pub in Hovingham, a desirable village about a 25 minutes’ drive north of York. Launched last month, it has been conceived as a softer-edged, more experiential counterpoint to the 20-odd cover restaurant with which the pair made their name.
“Mýse is more feminine. It’s more relaxed. Things move slower and we hold the customer’s hand a bit more. We do dietaries. We even offer a vegetarian menu,” says Joshua in a manner that suggests he can’t quite believe how accommodating his new restaurant is.
As its name suggested - Le Cochon Aveugle means the blind pig - the Overington’s former restaurant offered a ‘blind’ menu, with guests only finding out what they were eating as it was served to them. This at times controversial policy has now been ditched, with Mýse putting its tasting menus on the table as the meal commences. “A lot of our diners are former Cochon guests, so we’re finding that a high proportion don’t look at it,” Vicky says.
Bidding adieu to the macaron
Despite this more customer-centric attitude, Joshua is adamant that his most famous and therefore most requested creation - a jet-black macaron filled with boudin noir - will never hit the table at Mýse. “People ask for it every day but it’s gone. Finito. Dead. I’m not doing it again. I don’t care how much you pay me.”
Isn’t that a bit like Elton John refusing to play Rocket Man? “It was important to me to not have that dish on the menu here. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a good dish, it just doesn’t make sense in this environment.”
“We’re focused on British produce here. That’s not to say that I won’t use lemons and stuff like that, because I will, but the main ingredients on the plate are from the British Isles”
What he means by this is that the pig-blood-sausage-filled canapé was emblematic of Le Cochon Aveugle’s approach in so much as it was a creative take on modern European cuisine with strong leanings towards France.
At Mýse, the culinary inspiration and to some extent the ingredients come from closer to home. This is partly due to its rural location and also because the pair are now looking to create a narrative-driven restaurant experience.
“We’re focused on British produce here. That’s not to say that I won’t use lemons and stuff like that, because I will, but the main ingredients on the plate are from the British Isles.”
That means no squab pigeon, no foie gras and - yes - none of that delicious boudin noir, either.
French fancies
Joshua grew up just down the road from his new digs in Pocklington, a market town to the east of York. At 19, he arrived at Bray’s The Waterside Inn with minimal experience and soon released he wasn’t quite as good as he thought he was.
He recalls Alain Roux taking him to one side and advising him that he needed some proper training if he was to work in three-Michelin-starred kitchens. At the time, he was fixated on France so headed to Paris to train at Le Cordon Bleu.
“I wanted an adventure and the idea of cooking in Paris was very romantic,” he recalls. “To this day it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. When you work somewhere like that you don’t stop learning. You’re friends with other chefs and you go to restaurants on your day off. It also gave me connections and taught me about the culture of working hard.”
After completing the course, Joshua felt he had unfinished business with Gallic three-stars so took a job working under Yannick Alléno at his Pavillon Ledoyen flagship in Paris. After a couple of years of “getting beasted”, he left to work as a private chef in the Alps where he met his future wife.
Vicky is from the opposite end of England having grown up in the Dorset village of Bridport. She had dabbled in restaurants in her youth and came from a food loving family but ended up becoming a nurse, her profession eventually taking her to France.
The pair’s ‘how we got together story’ is an excellent one. Joshua managed to break his leg while on a date with someone else and – in a bid to save some cash on medical bills – sought out Vicky, then merely an acquaintance, for some advice. She frogmarched him to hospital, and the rest is history.
Swine dining
The couple returned to the UK with hopes to launch their own place but underestimated how much capital would be required. They ended up working for other people, Vicky for Tommy and James Banks at The Black Swan at Oldstead (which is only about 10 minutes’ drive from Mýse) and Joshua for Michael O’Hare at his York restaurant that had recently changed its name from The Blind Swine to Le Cochon Aveugle.
At the time, the restaurant was run along the lines of a French bistro serving dishes such as steak and chips and snails with garlic butter. It wasn’t going so well, prompting O'Hare to head to Leeds to launch the very successful Man Behind The Curtain.
The landlord ended up offering the restaurant to Joshua – then O’Hare’s number two in the kitchen - in 2014. “It all happened fast and we literally only had £800 in the bank so we could not afford to change the name,” Vicky says. “We had fairly humble ambitions when we relaunched it as our own, it was basically just a neighbourhood bistro.”
Blind ambition
The pair pushed the tiny space to its limits, creating one of the UK’s most ambitious restaurants (in its latter years Le Cochon Aveugle featured on Restaurant’s list of the top 100 places to eat in the UK).
"It was a restaurant that never should have worked, but through our hard work and stubbornness it did”
“It happened organically, but when you start on that path you can't really go back,” says Joshua. “Cochon was our learning restaurant – we were only 26 when we started. We made a lot of mistakes, but we had a lot of successes too. It was next to a Chinese takeaway in a student area on the outskirts of the city centre. It was a restaurant that never should have worked, but through our hard work and stubbornness it did.”
Inevitably the pair outgrew the space. “It wasn’t losing money but it wasn’t making much either,” he continues. “Economically and creatively it just wasn’t working for us. There is only so much you can do in a tiny little kitchen. It got boring. It started to feel like work.”
The Overingtons sold on the leases for Le Cochon Aveugle and their nearby wine and pizza place Cave du Cochon, with both sites closing towards the end of 2022. The cash from the two sales combined with savings and a hefty business mortgage allowed the pair to buy the site that now houses Mýse outright.
A pub no more
The site that Mýse occupies was already well-known for its food having been overhauled and relaunched by Richard and Lindsey Johns as The Hovingham Inn in 2019 (it made the Top 50 Gastropubs list in early 2022). But while it may have only been open a couple of years it still took a lot of work to make the switch from pub to restaurant.
“It was important to us that we were seen as a fine dining destination rather than a pub,” says Joshua.
As well as a cosmetic transformation that has seen the interior brightened and comprehensively decluttered, the rear of the site has been remodelled to create an open kitchen. Partly funded by an unnamed outside investor who now has a small stake in the business, the site’s three letting bedrooms have also required a lot of work.
The investment has paid off. While Mýse might retain some pub trappings - including a bar with a few handpulls and a cosy snug - it’s unlikely to be mistaken for a village boozer with its whitewashed walls, minimalist feel and Noma-esque dining chairs.
‘Elevated grandma cooking’
Mýse‘s £110 10-course tasting menu (a shorter version is available at lunch for £85) is partly inspired by Joshua’s grandma, a formidable cook, by all accounts. “This restaurant is a representation of the food I ate growing up. It’s elevated grandma cooking. That keeps the things grounded and also makes it playful,” he says.
The food is high-end and creative, then, but is largely inspired by hearty dishes. There is a take on Yorkshire pudding and gravy in doughnut form; a cod dish inspired by fish and chips with the fish cooked in beef dripping; and a clever black pudding dish that sees the ingredient used to construct a taco-like-object that’s used as a vessel for a grilled langoustine and a pickled rose petal.
The macaron may have been 86’d, but a handful of dishes and culinary ideas have survived the journey to the Yorkshire countryside. First among these is a scallop steamed in its shell with sea urchin butter that’s opened at the table, which Joshua describes as ‘a near-perfect dish’.
In general, traditional cooking techniques take preference over more contemporary ones, but the kitchen does make use of a few gadgets, not least an Anti Griddle - a grill that freezes rather than cooks - which is currently being used to set jam around whole strawberries without changing the texture of the fruit itself.
The chef is much more interested in talking about his ingredients than his techniques, however, with Mýse going to greater lengths than most with its sourcing. “I’m confident that we have the best. We are a 22-cover restaurant that is open for six services a week so that is achievable,” says Joshua, who has a longstanding relationship with local grower Rocket & Russet.
“I tell him what I want and he grows it. But I have to pick it myself. I go every week with our two-year-old daughter. It’s actually really nice and solves a big problem - great vegetables are not easy to find around here.
Seafood also requires a lot of effort, with the kitchen having to alternate between lots of different suppliers including a contact in Cornwall that sources straight from the boats, a shellfish guy in Scotland and a few local suppliers that are sometimes able to secure good stuff from the east coast.
Working with Noble Rot
Mýse might be shopping around for its fish, but it’s using just one supplier for its wine. Though Vicky is more than capable of assembling a killer list, she has opted to work with Keeling Andrew & Co – run by the team behind London’s Noble Rot – because she is unable to fully manage the wine programme due to childcare commitments (Vicky typically doesn’t do evening service).
“It also gives us access to wines that would otherwise be hard to come by,” she says. “It’s amazing to see all these wines that we previously didn’t have any chance of getting hold of now on the list.”
Created in partnership with Keeling Andrew & Co, the 300-bin list is big on classic wine regions with a focus on producers from Eastern France. “Having lived in the Alps we’re big fans of regions like Jura and Savoie, in particular. They are precisely-made underrated wines and can often offer great value,” Vicky continues. “And they tend to be made by small producers using low-intervention techniques. That’s certainly our style but not the very funky end; we like our wines to be clean and have a sense of place.”
With only small allocations available, the wine pairing (£85 at dinner and £65 at lunch) changes regularly and contains some serious wines including Bodegas Lopez de Heredia’s Viña Gravonia and a Saint Aubin 1er cru. An even more premium option is set to be introduced soon.
Weathering the storm
Mýse is hardly cheap but it’s priced competitively when compared to other top-end restaurants in the area. “There’s no getting away from the fact that we are a special occasion place,” Joshua says. “Sometimes you have to be a bit pig-headed about it. We are confident it’s worth the money.”
That said, the pair are well aware of how difficult the fine dining market is at the moment in terms of both demand and profitability and have cut their cloth accordingly. "There's no denying that it is going to be a tough couple of years. This is probably one of the worst times ever to open a restaurant,” says Joshua.
“Sometimes you have to be a bit pig-headed about it. We are confident it’s worth the money”
Yet there are plenty of reasons for positivity. The pair have spent the past eight years making a tricky site work and now have a space with better facilities in a more favourable location. And in contrast to most other startup fine dining businesses, they aren’t starting from scratch when it comes to customer data.
Most importantly, the former Le Cochon Aveugle pair are walking in with open eyes. “We have designed the business with the additional challenges restaurants are facing in mind,” Vicky says. “Mýse is as streamlined as it can possibly be. We aren’t alone in doing it but we operate a four-day week, which is good for the staff and also good for the business because we are condensing our bookings.”
“We feel positive, we’re getting busier and busier each week.”
