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About The Team

It all started with the idea to live a better life… 'the good life’. Born in a time of frugality, when we decided to start trying for a family.

We began in the kitchen, baking cakes and kneading bread on rainy days. We then started to use the amazing local markets to buy fresh local produce and prepare all of our meals from scratch. Our passion for all things foodie grew and so did our knowledge and skills.

We started to grow our own produce on the allotment and keep a couple of chickens for eggs. We flirted with bits of butchery and each carved out our role to play.

This way of living quickly started to take over our life and our work in London was becoming a sideline. Our first daughter arrived, a welcoming set of extra hands getting dirty at 18 months planting the spuds on the plot. Family fun days were foraging on the beach and baking more cakes on yet more rainy days.

Our transition was complete... We decide to give up the city and shining lights for the rolling hills and smoke smoke-filled valleys.  

We opened the door to The White Swan a week before the arrival of our second daughter. Our vision was to blend the modern with the traditional and stick stringently to the values that we had developed.  

As the journey has progressed, so has our menu and style. We don't want to be defined in any particular way, but if we have to describe ourselves we’d say "we are a traditional North Yorkshire country pub, with a modern twist. We specialise in North Yorkshire Beef & Butchery…Steaks, Seafood & The Burger".

Things have changed quite a bit since those early days of growing our own potatoes by hand… but we still do chop all of our own chips and do as much as we can from scratch…. We now have an onsite butchery where we make our own burgers, black pudding and sometimes bacon, as well as crafting all the steaks to perfection!

The girls overseeing the cattle herd, looking down over the foot hills of Brimham Rocks.

A little extract from our Burger Recipe

We have just entered a competition for Britons Best Beef Burger - Fingers Crossed.

We start with grass fed beef, slow grown on grass and sourced locally from an old school farmer called Seedy in Brimham Rocks. In house we then butcher and hang the chuck for a minimum of 28 days, once we’ve removed our Flat Iron steaks of course. We rough cut 100% chuck steak and mix it with our house seasonings to make the burgers. One ingredient in our house seasoning we don’t mind telling you about is the mustard seeds, these add a great deep flavour to the beef and lovely popping texture. We then cook over fire to flame lick the burgers to a perfect medium rare. We add some home cured back bacon and some locally sourced Swaledale Smoked cheese, made by Sam, our local cheese maker. We serve in a freshly baked brioche bun which is topped with black onion seeds. These add a lovely aroma and subtle onion flavour, without the harsh bite. Throw in some mixed herb leafs and a generous slither of beef tomato. Top with our house chunky ketchup. A tomatoey piccalilli that adds some great acidity and extra texture. Our Ultimate Burger is then topped with a giant gherkin (removable of course). This is the flagship burger on the menu of seven. Our customers love it and on a Wednesday Burger Night it comes with a free pint of locally brewed ale!