Menuwatch: Where There's Smoke, Masham

The result is Where There's Smoke (WTS), a tiny 14-cover restaurant (plus a 10-cover private dining room), with a six-course tasting menu priced at £60, much of it cooked on Atashroo's bespoke charcoal grill. After opening in May 2022, the site picked up a Michelin listing in January this year. And despite being an hour from York and 40 minutes from Harrogate, its reputation has grown by word of mouth.

What makes WTS work, despite its rural location and lack of choice, is Atashroo's accessible yet refined cooking. With five years as head chef at Tate Modern's fine dining restaurant under his belt, plus junior positions at the likes of Arbutus, La Trompette and Hibiscus (all London), his food is deeply seasonal, with ingredients masterfully handled on the charcoal grill and dishes well-portioned for the Yorkshire appetite. "I can do tweezer food, but I don't like eating it. We wanted to open somewhere where I'd like to eat."

A typical six-course menu will start with snacks such as a delicate crab tart topped with julienned cucumber and radish, followed by a deeply flavoured hunk of homemade treacle and poppyseed sourdough with whipped buttermilk butter.

Every six weeks, Atashroo buys in a whole carcass from a local rarebreed saddleback pig farmer and construct main courses around it. For example: loin of pork cooked on charcoal with new season carrots. "We did a pickled carrot purée – pickling them in a bit of vinegar, some sugar and lots of Sauvignon Blanc – then roasted some down with Sauvignon Blanc, thyme and bay. Then we served it with broad beans and morels. It was just another-level dish, and you get the smokiness of the coals coming into the pork fat to top it all off."

Then there's the likes of crispy pig's head – seared and gently smoked over coals – with grilled and smoked pork belly, grilled fennel salad, foraged Jack-by-the-hedge, rhubarb, miso mustard dressing and pork jus. Every bit of the carcass (bar the shoulder) is used, including for making salamis or lardo, slivers of which accompany a dish of grilled Spillman's asparagus with truffled egg and black garlic mayonnaise.

While the no-choice tasting menu allows him to bring waste down to an absolute minimum, the low-price point of £60 can limit the inclusion of luxury items. But now WTS has a strong core of regulars, Atashroo has started offering supplementary courses. "You build trust. People know they're having a good meal. They think: the extra course or the more expensive bottle of wine? This is the place where it's worth spending that money."

Recently, he pounced on a lower market price of scallops, through Hodgson's Fish, to offer a supplementary dish of charcoal grilled scallop with fennel and wild garlic purée in a sherry shellfish broth, finished with a smoked scallop roe Togarashi, priced at a supplementary £12. "It just sells. Of the 15 people we offered the dish to, I think 13 people went for it."

Another supplementary dish is Atashroo's take on a cheese course – an ewe's blue cheese mousse with grape (£6), a light, whipped hit of piquant blue cheese cut through with a sugary-sweet hit of grape molasses and a blue cheese and walnut crumble.

If Atashroo has a signature dish, it is his banana tart with sour cream and macadamia, he says – a show-stopping finish that was inspired by an underwhelming pudding he had at a Michelin high-flier. "I liked the idea of the dessert but they used unripe bananas and it was horrible. But it got me thinking and I ended up mixing overripe bananas with a custard base and a particular spice mix. Macadamias got thrown in because the flavours worked, and then it needed acidity from the sour cream." The end product is WTS in a nutshell – comforting yet grown-up, with enough character to stand out from the pack.

Following the recruitment of restaurant manager John Goodyear last year, Atashroo says WTS really kicked on, but it is a small-scale operation: "The fact that we are booked for six weeks ahead is nuts. It's a nice problem to have."

From the menu

• Treacle and poppyseed sourdough, buttermilk butter
• Broccoli soup, yogurt, walnut
• Kebabbed monkfish cheeks, turnip, broad bean, oyster dressing
• Masham saddleback pork, carrot, blood orange
• Rice pudding, rhubarb, ginger sorbet
• Peanut chocolate and coffee

Tasting menu £60

7 Silver Street, Masham, North Yorkshire HG4 4DXwww.wts.restaurant