Pubs are in Kirsty Cheetham’s blood. Her grandparents ran one, her dad was a brewer and, at 15, she was pot-washing in her local. Now 42, she has spent her life in professional kitchens, cooking for nine years at Queen o’ t’ owd Thatch.
“I love pubs. I love country pubs. I love community pubs. Good British food is exciting,” says Cheetham. That enthusiasm helps explain why the Queen – an attractive dining pub in the commuter village of South Milford, between Leeds and York – has enjoyed such extraordinary success in the OFM Awards. “When we opened,” remembers Cheetham’s partner and pub manager, Annie French, 51, “Kirsty said: ‘We’re going to perfect our roast and build on that. We want to win the Observer Food Monthly Best Sunday Lunch.’” They first did so in 2018. This is their second victory. The Queen has otherwise been a regional runner-up every year since it opened. You have to “mobilise the troops” to vote, says French, but people only make the effort, “if it’s a really good roast”.
During the week, Cheetham satisfies her creative curiosity. She makes labneh and an incredible black pudding threaded with ham hock and apple. She serves tempura guindilla peppers, Whitby crab samosas and heritage tomatoes with lovage, chilli emulsion and black olive crumb. The Queen’s small kitchen garden might, in jerusalem artichokes or, this year, the first fruit from a self-explanatory tree nicknamed Quincy Jones, inspire specials. “On Saturday, I’ll have a fancy duck dish on,” suggests Cheetham. “Starters are the pretty Insta ones.”
But on Sundays, Cheetham relishes the steady repetition of producing a roast dinner. You will hear no complaint that it stifles her self-expression. “She doesn’t have an ego like that,” says French. “I think Kirsty is creative. She says she employs skills and knowledge, and she is a tradesperson.”
The prep starts four days before by creating homemade beef, lamb, pork and poultry bone stocks to be flavoured with herbs, wines, cider or vermouth, to create gravies for the Queen’s 40-day-aged beef, lamb shoulder, pork loin and turkey, all sourced from the respected Yorkshire catering butcher Sykes House Farm. Turkey cooks overnight: “Slow, slow, slow at 100C with a bit of steam. I brown it in the morning. Almost cooking it backwards to how you normally would, to keep it super-moist.”
Cooking in the fats from those roasted bones is fundamental to the flavour of Cheetham’s roast potatoes and yorkshire puddings: “I love to see the potatoes coming out all crispy and delicious or people ordering two yorkies” – huge things you could wear as a hat – “and going, ‘they’re never going to eat them, they’ve no idea what they’re getting’.”
Cheetham will do more than 100 covers on Sunday afternoon – her roasts striking the perfect balance between homely generosity and cheffy rigour – then sit down to a roast beef dinner: “Always.”
“We don’t fill the place then have staff frantically running around or people waiting 45 minutes for starters,” says French, another reason why, in a county that considers the roast dinner its own (“If they want yorkshire pudding as a starter, they get it,” says Cheetham), the Queen’s reputation is gilt-edged.
“Oh God, no,” says Cheetham, genuinely shocked at the mischievous suggestion Sunday lunch is a dying meal, only eaten by ageing diners. “That’s not what we see,” says French. “We’ve plenty of regulars in their 20s, 30s, and parents who come in with younger children.”
And the future, what now for Cheetham? “The treble would be nice,” she decides. Do not bet against it.
Queen o’ t’ owd Thatch, 101 High Street, South Milford, LS25 5AQ; theqott.com
