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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast.

I'm Olivia Potts.

And I'm Laura Prendergast.

And today we are delighted to be joined by Tommy Banks. Tommy is the head

chef and owner of the Michelin-starred Black Swan Pub in Oldstead and the restaurant Roots in York,

along with his brother James, who's recently launched Banks Brothers, a range of canned wine. Tommy,

welcome to table talk. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Tommy, as listeners know, we always start with the same question, which is, what are your earliest memories of food?

Quite humble ones. I grew up on a farm, so we were sort of a farm and family, really small farm.

And I guess my food memories would be quite different to a lot of people.

We had like our own hens.

We'd always go out collecting eggs every day.

That was a children's job or we'd milk a cow on the morning.

So I definitely have a memory of drinking sort of warm milk straight from the cow,

which is quite sort of sweet and things like that.

But I think that overwhelming memory,

my grandparents live next door on the farm,

and they would cook Sunday dinner. So it would be like a slow-cooked lamb, and then we'd have a vegetable plot. So they would grow little maris barred potatoes, and they had an apple mint plant,

and they always used to, it was back, it was obviously 90s, so it was when everyone cooked everything in a pressure cooker. So the potatoes are going in the pressure cooker with all the mint.

And I just remember potatoes, mint and lamb being like this Sunday staple, which I, to

honest, I still cook a lot of dishes, which are potato and mint and lamb, because it's a great

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