Jamie Keeble takes over Swinton Estate's Chef's Table

Jamie Keeble takes over as head chef of the Chef's Table at Swinton Estate this month, ahead of the restaurant's twelve-seat relaunch on 1 October.

Keeble arrives from Myse, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Hovingham he has run as head chef since it opened in 2023 alongside owners Joshua and Victoria Overington.

Jamie Keeble's move to Yorkshire

A twelve-seat kitchen built around one walled garden is a very Yorkshire kind of ambition.

At Swinton, he inherits a tasting-menu format built around the estate's own walled garden, tenant farms and Yorkshire suppliers, inside the Coach House on the estate's 20,000-acre grounds near Masham.

Keeble was named a Rising Star at the 2026 National Restaurant Awards and reached the final of BBC series Great British Menu, representing the North East and Yorkshire. His earlier kitchens include the Michelin-starred pub The Wild Rabbit in the Cotswolds and Gareth Ward's Ynyshir in Wales, after a first professional job at Sheffield Wednesday Football Club.

“The connection between the estate, the walled garden and the kitchen provides an outstanding platform to create a dining experience that is personal, memorable and rooted in the seasons,” Keeble said of the move.

A walled garden runs the menu

He will report to executive head chef Steve Darou, who joined Swinton in June after twelve years with the St John restaurants in London and has already reset the estate's wider food operation. “Jamie is one of the most talented young chefs working in Britain today,” Darou said.

The walled garden supplies much of the produce for the Chef's Table, an approach that has become common among British country-house kitchens looking to shorten their supply chains and put a named grower behind each dish — though as what a tasting menu actually costs to put on a table shows, that kind of sourcing rarely comes cheap.

Swinton is not the only Yorkshire kitchen making news this year: Michael Wignall has just published a cookbook drawn from seventy dishes served at his own restaurant, The Angel at Hetton, a sign of how much weight the county's tasting-menu scene now carries nationally.

The twelve-seat format keeps the Chef's Table among the smallest tasting-menu rooms in the county, a scale that lets Keeble change dishes through the seasons without overhauling a large brigade, and one that will be watched closely once the doors reopen.