Food: Food writer and restaurateur James Ramsden chats about his roots in North Yorkshire

GROWING up on a North Yorkshire farm, James Ramsden loved his food and confesses that, as a youngster, he munched on everything from toadstools to strange berries and even raw cake mix. “I wasn’t fussy, I enjoyed eating anything that was going,” he laughs.

Little did his parents realise their son’s curiosity, voracious appetite and adventurous tastes would lead to a career as an acclaimed food writer and restaurateur who would go on to win a Michelin star just over a year after opening his first London restaurant, Pidgin, in 2015.

Some of the inventive dishes he has helped devise include an aubergine pudding and a chilli sorbet black bean mousse. And he and his team have also had fun with courses which are all black or contain obscure and exotic rhyming ingredients.

Now, having opened a second restaurant last summer - Magpie in London’s Mayfair - and on the point of opening a third, the 32-year-old father of two young children and author of four cookery books is cutting back on writing about food to concentrate on making it.

That’s if he gets time, because after making a rash promise to fans of his first restaurant, he’s hoping he’s not going to be too busy unloading dishwashers to do anything else. For when Observer Food Monthly magazine asked readers to vote for their restaurant of the year, James joked to his 17,000 followers on Twitter that if they voted for Pidgin he would ‘personally empty your dishwasher’.

The restaurant won by several thousand votes and the award, based on the public vote, meant even more to him than the Michelin star. “Winning that was a big excitement, it really felt like something to be proud of,” says James. “If anyone really does want me to empty their dishwasher, of course I will honour it,” he laughs, although most serious diners will appreciate his time is better spent as one of the driving forces behind his restaurant kitchens.

Although he still writes for Delicious magazine and produces a weekly podcast, The Kitchen is on Fire, with business partner Sam Herlihy, he has time for little else.

While his success might appear to have come quickly, this is something James has been working towards for some time. Raised on an arable and dairy farm, where he helped with harvest in the holidays, he was encouraged by his mother and father, both good cooks who grew their own vegetables and soft fruit and always ensured the family ate well.

“Around the age of 13, I started taking it more seriously,” he explains. Inspired by Jamie Oliver, who had just brought out his first Naked Chef cookbook, James was soon developing curry and pasta dishes and making his own fresh pesto.

He enjoyed food writer Nigel Slater’s work and articles by restaurant critic Giles Coren, and went on to write about food for the student newspaper at Bristol University, before taking a short cookery course at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland and deciding this was the path he wanted to follow.

After getting a job with Sainsbury’s Magazine, he started running The Secret Larder supper club from his London flat to supplement his income, roping in friend and fellow food blogger Sam to help. He and Sam, the former frontman with the mid-Noughties indie band Hope of the States, cooked for friends and strangers, progressing to serving in the evenings from a local coffee shop, from where they built up a small fan base.

James’s lightbulb moment came while watching restaurateur Russell Norman’s BBC TV programme Restaurant Man. “I remember thinking it would be fun to open a restaurant. I texted Sam that night and asked if he wanted to join me.”

The next few months passed in a blur: “It’s like what people say about childbirth, you block it out and can’t fully remember. I was so naïve, but if we’d stopped to think about what could go wrong, we’d never have done it.” They found a modest, 28-cover space in Hackney: “We got the keys on June 1 and opened on June 30, which is crazy, but didn’t seem so at the time.”

One of the things which makes Pidgin stand out is it creates a new set menu every week, so diners are sharing the same experience for one night only. In nearly three years, they have never repeated a dish and reviews have been effusive. “It does create pressure, but our chefs enjoy it,” says James. “It’s week 145 and we have created 600 different dishes,” he calculates. “It’s like opening a new restaurant each night.”

The 57-cover Magpie is similar to Pidgin but more laid-back, with a west Californian vibe. “It’s less fussy, with a monthly changing menu,” he says. The food, though, is every bit as creative and idiosyncratic. Launch dishes included mackerel crudo with blueberry kosho and fennel pollen and James is currently enthusing over a beef tartar with truffle crisps and taleggio cheese, using coal oil, flavoured on white hot barbecue coals to create a carbon-y, smoky flavour. “It tastes like a Big Mac, in the best possible way,” he says.

While he enjoys cooking and has occasionally helped out in the kitchen at Pidgin, James, whose wife Rosie is also a food writer, doesn’t describe himself as a chef.

The last meal he made for family and friends involved cooking a turbot slowly over a gentle barbecue fire, and served with a bisque sauce, which he made from leftover prawn shells. “I’d never tried this dish before and it was mildly terrifying as it’s an expensive fish to waste if it goes wrong. Fortunately, it was very good,” he says.

Sometimes, if he’s feeling lazy, he cooks pasta or noodles and is not above dishing up fish fingers with baked beans occasionally for his children, three-year-old Thom and eight-month-old Nora.

The family lives in Hackney: “Right on the train rails,” he says, as a freight train chunters past in the background. He likes the fact he can be in town in 20 minutes, but he also misses the beautiful countryside of his home county.

He returns to North Yorkshire - where his earliest food memories involve enjoying pizza in Ripon’s Valentino’s restaurant and eating fish and chips out of proper newspaper from Drakes fish and chip shop - as much as he can.

James is looking forward to introducing his young children to these Yorkshire favourites. “I want them to enjoy pizza and fish and chips, just like I did," he says.

James’s top tip for home cooks

‘Trust your instincts and don’t worry too much. Most ingredients and recipes are more forgiving than a lot of people would have you believe, there’s always a margin for error.’

ROAST STUFFED MACKEREL WITH LENTILS AND BACON

This method requires either a certain level of deftness with a sharp knife or a friendly relationship with a fishmonger. Boning and stuffing the fish is something to get out of the way long before your guests appear; it’s fiddly but not too challenging.

You can if you wish just stuff the cavity of the cleaned but unboned fish, though that means when it comes to eating you have to work your way around the bones as opposed to hacking straight through a cross section of meat and stuffing. Otherwise, you can take two mackerel fillets and put the stuffing in between before wrapping in bacon or prosciutto.

Serves 6

olive oil

50g/1¾oz/½ cup dried breadcrumbs

2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed to a paste

1 red chilli, deseeded and finely chopped

10 anchovy fillets, chopped

a big bunch of parsley, finely chopped

1 tsp finely chopped rosemary

zest of 1 lemon

salt and pepper

6 spankingly fresh mackerel, about 300g/10½oz each, whole and not cleaned

For the lentils

1 onion, peeled and finely chopped

1 stick of celery, finely chopped

100g/3½oz smoked streaky bacon, finely chopped

300g/10½oz/1½ cups green or Puy lentils, rinsed

600ml/20fl oz/2½ cups chicken or vegetable stock

To serve

salsa verde

Up to 2 days ahead:

Heat a little oil in a frying pan and add the breadcrumbs. Cook, stirring occasionally, until golden, then remove and set aside.

Add a splash more oil and gently cook the shallots until softened – about 10 minutes – then throw in the garlic, chilli, anchovies, parsley, rosemary and lemon zest. Season with a good pinch of salt and plenty of pepper, and cook for a further minute or so, then mix with the breadcrumbs. Cover and chill.

Up to 6 hours ahead:

Using a sharp knife, chop off the heads of your fish. Now, instead of cutting along the belly as you normally would to gut a fish, carefully cut down either side of the spine to separate the flesh and the bone – make sure you don’t cut through the belly. Pull out the bones and guts and clean the fish, checking for and tweezing out any stray bones. You now have a boned and butterflied mackerel. (If you don’t feel up to this process, I’m sure a fishmonger would be happy to do it for you, but it is remarkably straightforward and surprisingly fun.)

Pat the fish dry and fill each cavity with the cold stuffing, then roll each fish tightly in clingfilm and chill.

1 hour ahead:

Remove the fish from the fridge. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/ Gas mark 6.

For the lentils, heat a little olive oil in a large-ish saucepan and gently cook the onion and celery until softened. Add the bacon and fry for a couple of minutes, stirring regularly, then add the lentils and stock. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes, then take off the heat.

20 minutes ahead:

Unwrap the mackerel and put them in a roasting pan. Rub with a little oil and a good pinch of salt and roast for 15 minutes.

Dinnertime:

Serve the mackerel with the lentils and salsa verde.

Tart: Wrap the mackerel in prosciutto and fry for a couple of minutes to crisp up before roasting for 10 minutes.

Tweak: Aside from the tweaks mentioned in the intro, you could omit the lentils in favour of something lighter – say, couscous in the summertime – or try a different stuffing, such as one with pine nuts, raisins and cooked spinach.

Tomorrow: Leftover lentils are lovely tossed through a salad.