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Simon Gueller would prefer not to talk about the past, or at least not his own. He's much happier talking about the past of the restaurant where he has just started cooking, the Box Tree in Ilkley; the 'magical' place it once was and the magical place he intends to make it again.
His own history, though, is a trickier business and it will take us a while to get round to discussing it. For the moment he wants to talk about cooking. 'I'm very much a nostalgic where food is concerned,' he says when we meet, a few days before opening night, surrounded by packing cases in what will be the private dining room.
'This place practically writes the menu for you. In a time when every chef's looking to do something different it's great to have the food suggested to you like this.' At 40, he has no hunger, he says, to be on the cutting edge. He wants to feed people and, famously, that is what the Box Tree always did very well.
In its day, the Box Tree was a true gastronomic diamond in the rough. Opened in 1963 by two visionaries called Malcolm Reid and Colin Long, it became, under chefs Michael Lawson and his successor Michael Truelove, one of the first places in Britain to have two Michelin stars. It was a destination restaurant before anybody even knew what that meant, and tutored battalions of young British chefs, among them Marco Pierre White.
Its thing was the classical Escoffier repertoire done as well as it could be done, in a cosseting jewel box of a country cottage that looked, according...