The Top 56 Places to Eat Near Durham Ox
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Rank 1. Durham Ox
British
A fire-roaring, eclectically decorated Yorkshire pub that's been around forever in a genuinely sleepy hamlet outside Crayke. The menu runs long and leans British, with hearty, unfussy cooking that changes with the seasons. In summer the courtyard earns its keep; in winter the bar stools near the hearth go fast. Cosy rooms upstairs mean you can order another round without doing the maths on the drive home.
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Rank 2. The Abbey Inn
British
Flagstone floors, colourful throws, and a blazing fire in winter frame the view across to the Gothic ruins of Byland Abbey from this classic North Yorkshire gastropub with rooms. The kitchen runs on produce from the owners' own farm, and the menu moves with the seasons while keeping a few crowd-pleasers nailed down permanently. Come summer, the garden terrace is a perfectly reasonable excuse for a pint in the afternoon.
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Rank 3. Black Swan
Creative British
Exposed beams, flagged floors, and an open fire announce that this was a pub once, though the tasting menu format means you won't be propping up the bar. The kitchen at this Michelin-starred country restaurant runs on produce from its own farm and two acres of growing beds, supplementing with pickling and preservation when the fields go quiet. The village of Oldstead is genuinely in the middle of nowhere, so arriving here is a decision, not an accident.
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Rank 4. mýse
New American
A former pub in a quiet North Yorkshire village, mýse holds a Michelin star and sits at number 26 on the National Restaurant Awards list. The chef calls it "elevated grandma cooking," which sounds like a joke until the tasting menu arrives, built on local produce and the kind of hearty inspiration that doesn't usually come with this level of technique. Flagstone floors, whitewashed beams, a 300-bin wine list strong on eastern France. Dress like you mean it.
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Rank 5. Star Inn at Harome
Modern British Pub
A thatched fourteenth-century pub in a tiny North Yorkshire village, the Star Inn holds a Michelin star and sits at number five on the Top 50 Gastropubs list, which tells you this is not your average moorland local. Fish comes from Whitby, game from the moors, and vegetables from the kitchen garden, all finding their way into cooking that is classical underneath and quietly inventive on top. The charred beams from a 2021 fire were left exactly where they fell.
- Michelin Guide 1 Star
- Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #5 · Top 50 Gastropubs
- National Restaurant Awards 2026 · #78 · The National Restaurant Awards
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Rank 6. Chartwell
Modern New American
One of the bookshelves swings open to reveal a hidden bar, which tells you something about how seriously Aldwark Manor takes dinner. This country-house restaurant runs modern tasting menus with enough attention to detail that even the mirrors are rigged with camera feeds into the kitchen. Bold fabrics, sweeping lawn views, and a room that rewards looking closely make it worth arriving before dark.
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Rank 7. The General Tarleton
Modern British Pub
A glass-roofed courtyard and a big terrace where walk-ins are always welcome set the tone at this gastropub near Knaresborough, part of Tommy Banks' growing Yorkshire operation. The kitchen runs on local produce and day-boat fish, mixing pub classics with the odd more ambitious move, all with a seasonal logic baked in from the start. The service team have the warmth the setting asks for, which, in a coaching inn this old, is quite a lot.
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An Arts and Crafts building on a quiet Marygate street, this Michelin-starred tasting menu restaurant is the York sibling of Tommy Banks' Black Swan in Oldstead. The same farm-to-table ethos runs through it: kitchen garden, small regional suppliers, and Banks family farm produce shape the menu season by season. Dishes read as simple and arrive looking it, then turn out to be quietly complex in a way that makes you stop mid-conversation.
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Rank 9. Blind Jack
Beer Bar
A 400-year-old timber-framed building on Knaresborough's market square, Blind Jack's is a proper beer pub with five cask and ten craft lines pouring from a tiny bar that has no business handling that much traffic. Draught Bass sits alongside Black Sheep, but the rotating pumps wander toward American brown ales and porters. The 2025 Great British Pub Awards named it Best Beer Pub. You walk in feeling like a regular before you've ordered.
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A mushroom, coffee, and caramel dessert tells you a lot about a kitchen. This creative tasting menu restaurant occupies a long-standing Yorkshire pub, smartly refurbished with a Nordic lean while keeping its rough-hewn bones. The cooking is hyper-local and technique-forward, opening with a broth made from vegetable scraps and building from there. Rooms are available if the narrow lanes home feel like an unreasonable ask after all that.
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The open kitchen faces every table at this Michelin-starred creative tasting menu restaurant on the Rudding Park estate, so you're watching the chefs the whole time, which sounds like pressure but somehow isn't. Ingredients come from 52 raised beds on site, with preserves lining the shelves behind the pass. At dessert, guests pick a track to play while puddings arrive, which is either charming or deeply chaotic depending on who's at your table.
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Rank 12. Shaun Rankin at Grantley Hall
Modern British
Drinks and snacks in the drawing room first, then through to the old music room for dinner: that's how a Michelin-starred evening at this grand 17th-century house tends to unfold. The cooking is Modern British, formal in setting but rooted in the chef's childhood and the estate around it. The wine pairings are notably inventive, and the service has the warmth that stops formal from tipping into stiff.
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Rank 13. Alice Hawthorn Inn
British
A dining pub on a village green that happens to share its postcode with the country's tallest maypole and a duck pond, which tells you something about the pace of life here. The rooms are full of beams and exposed brick, as required by pub law, but the kitchen ranges freely: dynamite shrimp and ceviche sit alongside fish and chips without anyone apologizing. Bedrooms lean pleasantly Scandinavian. Welcoming from the start.
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Rank 14. The Pheasant
Modern British
A terrace overlooking the village duck pond sets the tone for this country house hotel restaurant in the North Yorkshire village of Harome. The dining room leans formal, the conservatory a little less so, and the menu runs from breakfast through afternoon tea to Sunday roasts, all built around seasonal Modern British cooking with classical roots. The kind of place where strong sourcing does the quiet convincing.
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Rank 15. Skosh
Modern British New American
The name comes from a Japanese word for "small amount," which doubles as a menu philosophy: sharing plates, six or seven between two, built around bold flavors that roam freely from South Asia to the Middle East and beyond. It's a lively, informal spot on Micklegate with a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the kind of room where the food makes conversation stop mid-sentence. Book ahead; York has noticed.
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Beamed ceilings, a roaring fire in winter, a beer garden in summer, and a pork chop cooked with the kind of confidence that makes you order dessert without looking at the price. This is a proper North Yorkshire pub-restaurant, tucked between the Howardian Hills and the North York Moors, where the cooking is hearty and classical and the front-of-house warmth feels personal rather than performed. The kind of village inn that reminds you why village inns exist.
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Rank 17. The Bow Room at Grays Court
Modern British
The big bow window gives the room its name and most of its light, framing a walled garden that also supplies the kitchen. This is a Modern British restaurant tucked inside a Jacobean house beside York Minster, the kind of setting where a pre-dinner drink in the wood-panelled gallery feels entirely necessary. The menu follows the seasons closely, and the service has the easy warmth of people who seem to like their jobs.
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Rank 18. The Star Inn The City
Modern British
A Victorian brick engine house beside Museum Gardens, with big windows and a terrace over the river, is where this all-day brasserie sets up shop. It's the city sibling of The Star Inn at Harome, and the menu leans into hearty Modern British cooking rooted in Yorkshire produce, with enough polish to remind you this isn't a pub, even if the spirit of one is somewhere in the room.
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Rank 19. Fish & Forest
Modern British
A self-taught chef runs this snug Modern British restaurant tucked down a cobbled lane near the Shambles, where the blackboard menu shifts constantly and almost nothing goes to waste. The name maps the sourcing: fish from small boats, game from local shoots, and meat raised with some attention to how the animal actually lived. It's the kind of cooking that sounds earnest on paper but tastes like someone means it.
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Rank 20. Arras
Mediterranean
A converted coaching house on the edge of the old city, Arras is a modern dining restaurant where the bread alone, baked at their sister bakery Little Arras, sets a promising tone for what follows. The cooking moves with the seasons and leans into inventive combinations, while the British cheese selection arrives on a handmade oak trolley, which is the kind of detail that makes cheese people visibly emotional. The wine list gives English bottles a fair showing.
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Rank 21. Legacy
Modern British
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Rank 22. INOS
Greek
A casual Greek bistro in the heart of York, where the menu runs through pita and dips, meatballs, and moussaka before landing on a Cretan orange cake that earns its place at the end of a meal. The room is cheerful and unfussy, the service warm, and the Greek wines and spirits give the whole thing a coherent logic. Good value at lunch, when the city's historic centre hums outside.
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Rank 23. The Owl
Contemporary British
A former drover's inn perched above a valley in the North York Moors, The Owl is a rural pub that leans into its setting without making a fuss about it. The kitchen runs on unfussy British comfort, the kind where devilled kidneys and toad in the hole appear without irony and disappear quickly. Rooms are available if the moors convince you to stay longer, which they tend to do.
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Rank 24. Melton's
Modern British
Murals of ingredients and happy diners cover the walls at this cosy neighbourhood restaurant, which feels like a self-portrait the place has earned. A short walk from York's centre, it runs on local produce and long-serving staff who know the room. The cooking is classically grounded but quietly ambitious, and if a soufflé appears on the dessert menu, it would be rude not to order it.
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Neapolitan-style pizza in the middle of York, where the dough is the whole argument, light and properly developed in a way that makes toppings feel like they were always meant to be there. Cresci is a casual pizza restaurant that shifts between classics and more contemporary combinations without losing its footing. The room is informal but not accidental, comfortable for a quick slice or a slower dinner.
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Six tables, four counter seats, and Michael O'Hare doing whatever he wants, which turns out to be a constantly shifting parade of small, technically intricate courses in a quietly modern room in a smart Yorkshire village. The chef's cult following will recognize the restless creativity and the occasional Asian detour, like Peking-style duck appearing somewhere unexpected. A wine flight is the move.
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Rank 28. Fletchers
Modern British
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Rank 29. Grantley Arms
Traditional British
A flagstone-floored country pub with a roaring fire in winter and a terrace when the sun shows up, run by the team behind nearby Grantley Hall. The menu is a study in British comfort, braised beef and ale pie, sticky toffee pudding, trifle, all the classics done with care. Old trinkets line the walls, the room feels genuinely lived-in, and the cooking asks for nothing more than your full attention.
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A 16th-century stone house in the market town of Bedale, where drinks begin on the cobbled street out front before you move into a dining room that pairs old beams and a fireplace with clean modern lines. Chef Ruth Hansom is a local, and her tasting menu leans into that, pulling from the surrounding area with a focus that feels less like a concept and more like someone who actually knows her suppliers by name.
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Rank 31. Where there's Smoke
Modern British
The smoke hits you before you've even sat down, which is either a promise or a warning depending on your feelings about coal-fired cooking. This modern British restaurant in a pretty North Yorkshire market town runs a seasonal set menu built around whatever prime produce suits the embers that week. The chef also happens to be a potter, so the cheerful room comes lined with his own ceramics, and yes, he made the tabletops too.
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Rank 32. Homestead Kitchen
Contemporary British
A stone farmhouse on the North York Moors that the team has turned into a small, unpretentious restaurant where the menu reads like a map of the surrounding landscape. Moorland roe deer, Whitby crab, and whatever the kitchen garden is offering all find their way onto plates that lean hearty rather than fussy. The sauces in particular do a lot of quiet, convincing work.
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Rank 33. Pinnacle Sports & Games
Beer Bar
Seventeen screens, three Sky boxes, and sound zones that let different matches play in their own corners of the room: Pinnacle takes the sports pub formula pretty seriously. Pool, darts, and electronic basketball keep things moving between kickoffs, and the family-friendly hours mean it's not purely a fortress of lager and shouting. The 2025 Great British Pub Award for Best Pub to Watch Sport suggests the rebrand landed.
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The wine list includes bottles from a Loire Valley vineyard that one of the co-owners grew up on, which tells you something about how seriously this French bistro takes the whole project. Spindle-back chairs, gilt mirrors, green walls, a long banquette: the room looks the part too. Horsforth is an unlikely postcode for a Michelin Bib Gourmand, but the Gallic classics coming out of the kitchen make the suburb feel briefly like the 6th arrondissement.
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Rank 35. Pipe and Glass
British Pub
A Michelin-starred gastropub hidden down the country lanes of East Yorkshire, where Barnsley chops and locally shot game arrive in portions that mean business. The kitchen refines pub classics without making them feel precious, and the wine list runs deep enough to keep you at the table longer than planned. Smart rooms converted from old lambing buildings make spending the night a reasonable excuse.
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Rank 36. The Highland Laddie
British Pub
Sausage rolls baked to order, ham carved from the joint and finished on the open fireplace, a dedicated mustard menu: the Highland Laddie is a pub that takes the pub seriously. It landed on the Top 50 Gastropubs list, and Jimi Famurewa called it out in The Observer as a northern boozer of unexpected finesse. Come for a pint and leave having somehow eaten rather a lot.
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Rank 38. Ox Club
Wood-fired Barbecue
A wood-fired restaurant inside a converted Leeds mill, sharing the building with a beer hall and cocktail bar, which means the room is loud and no one is pretending otherwise. The kitchen runs everything through smoke and flame, with a US-imported grill doing the heavy lifting and bold flavors layered on top, nduja with oysters, gochujang on crispy pig tails. Vegetarians get a serious run too. The côte de boeuf is there if the mood takes you.
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A pub in a Leeds conservation area that won the Great British Pub Awards' Best Pub Garden two years running, and once you see the place, that tracks. What was a car park and field is now a two-tiered outdoor space with a terrace bar, wooden huts, and views over a cricket pitch. The planting is genuinely cared for, pollinator-friendly and all. A solid neighborhood pub where the garden is the whole point.
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Rank 40. Forde
Mediterranean
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The old estate forge has been doing something more interesting than horseshoes for a while now. This is a tasting menu restaurant, vegetarian and vegan versions included, drawing heavily from the grounds around it: honey and birch sap harvested on site, produce grown nearby. It holds a Michelin star. The cooking stays grounded in season and place rather than spectacle, which out here in the North Yorkshire countryside feels like the obvious move.
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A 15th-century coaching inn on the village green, with a garden and terrace that carry their weight in summer and a crackling fire that earns its keep in winter. The cooking is modern and seriously assembled, classical technique doing the quiet work underneath. The room is smart without being stiff, and the staff seem to actually enjoy being there. A cottage next door handles overnight stays.
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Rank 43. Sandpiper Inn
British
A stone pub in a pretty market town where three low-ceilinged dining rooms go by "snugs," which turns out to be exactly right. The menu leans into the Dales, with lamb and other local ingredients shifting by season, and the kitchen's approach is confident and unfussy rather than showy. Two country-chic bedrooms upstairs mean you can commit to a second round without worrying about the drive home.
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Rank 44. Box Tree
Modern British
Two sandstone cottages on a Yorkshire high street that have been feeding people since before most of their diners were born. Box Tree is a formal tasting-menu restaurant where the chef grew up between Western Australia and Britain, and the menu quietly shows it, with Jarrah honey and Paddle Pop ice cream appearing alongside the kind of cooking you'd expect from a room this serious. The team pulls off warmth without dropping the white-tablecloth register.
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Rank 45. The Brasserie at Saltmoore
Modern British
Green walls, seersucker upholstery, and marble café tables set the tone in this brasserie inside Saltmoore's hotel and wellness resort on the North Yorkshire coast. The menu has a classic British backbone built around prime meats from the grill, with local touches that earn their place, Whitby crab in a clean, unfussy tartlet, heather honey from the North York Moors folded into the crème brûlée. The staff will happily talk you through it all.
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Rank 46. Prashad
Vegetarian Indian
A family-run vegetarian Indian restaurant in a former pub outside Bradford, earning a Michelin Bib Gourmand for cooking rooted in Gujarati tradition. The bread alone, naan and rotli made with real care, would justify the drive. You can go à la carte, share a set menu, or commit to a full tasting, which for a place this warm and unfussy feels like exactly the right way to spend an evening.
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Rank 47. The Angel
Modern New American Pub
A 15th-century pub on a quiet lane in the Yorkshire Dales that now holds a Michelin star, which tells you something about what Michael Wignall has been up to since taking over. It remains a proper pub in spirit, but the kitchen runs tasting menus alongside à la carte, and the plating is a long way from anything on a chalkboard. Nine bedrooms upstairs mean you don't have to rush back over the moors afterward.
- Michelin Guide 1 Star
- Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #6 · Top 50 Gastropubs
- National Restaurant Awards 2026 · #47 · The National Restaurant Awards
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Rank 48. Westwood
Modern British
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A one-Michelin-star tasting menu restaurant in a 16th-century farmhouse so deep in North Lincolnshire that the owners run their own smallholding to stock the kitchen. The surprise menu reads like a personal diary, Yorkshire nods sitting beside refined chicken tacos and lamb kebab, which sounds like a strange dinner party but somehow makes the chef's cooking feel more considered, not less. Sumptuous rooms upstairs if the drive back feels unkind.
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Rank 50. Shibden Mill Inn
Contemporary British Pub
Tucked into a mill fold on the edge of the Shibden Estate, this gastropub has eleven rooms if the drive home feels ambitious. The kitchen runs proper à la carte and tasting menus alongside Sunday lunch, with cooking that leans into Yorkshire produce without making a big speech about it. Gentle Brontë country walks are right outside, and the Anne Lister connection means someone at the bar is always mid-rewatch of Gentleman Jack.
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Rank 51. Hope & Anchor
British
A glass-fronted dry-aging cabinet sits behind the bar of this nautically themed pub on the Humber estuary, which tells you roughly what kind of night you're in for. The kitchen leans into proper British cooking, with produce from their own smallholding and meats finished in a Josper oven. The cement works next door is not glamorous, but the estuary views go some way toward balancing the ledger.
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Rank 52. Norman's Neighbourhood Kitchen
Mediterranean
Norman is a dog and a grandfather, not the chef, which sets the tone for this relaxed neighbourhood bistro in Kirkburton. Rustic décor, a warm service team, and sharing plates that lean Mediterranean with a local wink, including pig's cheek glazed in Henderson's Relish, Sheffield's cult condiment. The entire wine list comes by the glass, and the local ales move fast. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.
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A wood-burning oven anchors the open kitchen of this modern sharing-plates restaurant inside a traditional Yorkshire stone building. The menu has a Spanish spine, croquetas and boquerones and the like, but roams freely from Mexican tacos to Vietnamese prawn toast before landing back home for sticky toffee pudding. It earns a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the closely-set dark wood tables tend to fill early with locals who have clearly done this before.
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Rank 54. Yorebridge House
Modern British
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Rank 55. Restaurant DOM
Polish Eastern European
Shelves of house-made jams, pickles, and preserves line the wood-clad interior, and in winter some of them find their way onto the plate. Restaurant DOM is a smart modern dining room in central Scunthorpe where the chef's Polish heritage shapes the menu in ways that feel personal rather than performative, grandmother's sauerkraut recipe included. Bedrooms are coming, but the kitchen is already the reason to make the trip.
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Rank 56. Hearth
Modern British
A wood-fired hearth anchors the open kitchen at this Modern British restaurant, tucked into the old part of Hull among some handsome Georgian streets. The ground floor doubles as a bar and bakery; head upstairs for the rustic two-room dining room, where small plates and grilled larger dishes share the menu. Check the boards for seasonal specials, and start with the sourdough before anything else.