'I put a chef's jacket on when I was 10 and I love it to this day': James Martin opens up on Yorkshire upbringing as he makes new return

When asked about the twin milestones, Martin says he was “ready to seek pastures new” from the BBC after enjoying 20 years of working with the corporation but is keen to put the decision and subsequent move to ITV into perspective.

"You work as a chef, my main job is I work in restaurants. I was working in a restaurant until 1.30am this morning – that is my job, that’s what I do. Television is a part of it but it is not 'the’ part of it. The restaurants will always come first.”

Martin is clearly practicing what he preaches; he is speaking to The Yorkshire Post the night after working in his Manchester restaurant having been at his Lygon Arms site in the Cotswolds the day before and Chewton Glen in Hampshire prior to that.

His busy schedule is soon going to include a trip back to where it all began for Martin in his native North Yorkshire. He will be the star attraction at the new Flavours of Yorkshire festival next weekend, hosting three live cookery demonstrations on July 4 at an event being held at Galtres Park, formerly the Pickering Showground.

The festival is just a few miles up the road from where he grew up on the Castle Howard estate and Martin says he is looking forward to his latest return to his old stomping ground.

"It is just around the corner from home and it is nice to do something that is right on your doorstep,” he says. "It is coming home. I went to school in Malton, and then a little bit of college in Scarborough, so I know the area really well. The chefs and guys I was in college with have gone on to do amazing things. Yorkshire is really a gastronomic hotspot now, so it's good to come back and support it.”

Martin was famously brought up on the Castle Howard estate where his father worked as a catering manager and was also a pig farmer.

He agrees it proved to be a fantastic grounding for his future career. "None of my family were chefs, but I was just certainly surrounded by food, working on the farm. My grandparents were brilliant cooks, they had their own allotment so I certainly learnt the value of hard work and graft, and the appreciation for food, and the appreciation for people who produce it. That still holds dear to me to this day.

"When my dad was working as catering manager at Castle Howard, you got a property on the estate. My dad, being a typical Yorkshireman, didn’t want the land to sit there empty. We started off with six pigs and ended up with about 1,000. Me, my mum and sister looked after the pigs while he went off and did the catering side of things.”

Martin says he was always determined to be a chef from starting off washing pots in kitchens. "From about the age of 10 years old, when I was working in kitchens, I knew I wanted to be a chef. I loved food, I loved everything around it, so any opportunity to be able to do stuff I took.”

While none of his current restaurants are based in Yorkshire, in the early 2010s his work at The Talbot in Malton saw it secure a place in the Michelin Guide. He says a recent walk with his fiance Kim Johnson was a reminder of how formative North Yorkshire has been for him.

"Kim and I went walking around the Hole of Horcum and through Whitby and Kirkbymoorside. You go back to all the places that you remember as a kid, and obviously I spent a lot of time in Malton when I was part of The Talbot. Getting them in the Michelin Guide was a great thing for us.”

His continuing passion for the restaurant world is more than matched by his concerns about the current state of the hospitality industry. UKHospitality warned at the start of the year that around 1,000 restaurants faced closure during 2026 due to rising business rates on top of other financial challenges.

Martin says the industry has been facing a “perfect storm” on several fronts.

"Brexit was a complete and utter disaster for hospitality because it stopped the movement of Europeans and Eastern Europeans travelling, and vice versa. I used to go work in France and you can't do that anymore. They used to come over here and work. We lost so much opportunity and so many great talented people. That was that was the start of it.

"Then, obviously, Covid hit and hospitality got absolutely mullered. Off the back of that, you look at energy, you look at National Insurance, the minimum wage, everything has just skyrocketed.

"People say inflation has gone up four or five per cent; food has gone up 300 per cent. You’ve got the squeeze on people’s wallets so people are eating out less.

"Energy costs have gone through the roof, we are the highest-rated VAT in Europe in terms of hospitality. Nobody's listening, all these hospitality businesses are going bust and you’ve got one million youngsters unemployed.

"The key to employment from 16 up to 18 or 19 used to be working in hospitality to earn money. That’s gone. There’s no one answer to it, there’s no one fix. Yes a cut to VAT would help but that’s not going to help the cost of seabass and energy and everything else.”

But he says despite the challenges for hospitality owners, there are still “great opportunities” for anyone determined enough to start a career in the industry due to the increased quality of the nation’s restaurants.

"The UK is an amazing place to work in terms of hospitality. When I was training in London, when I got on the train as a young 16 year old going down to London, there was probably four or five restaurants that were the crème de la crème in the UK.

"Now you can pick and choose wherever you want. I mean, what an amazing place the UK is now to work. It's very difficult to run a restaurant but running somewhere is very different to working in somewhere.”

He says the economic challenges facing restaurants have made those working in them more connected. "I’ve worked in every one of my sites over the last four days. We were lucky, we were full, we did 170 covers last night. Without that team, you can’t do it. It’s made you much more close knit as a team. We were always close anyway, but it's made you a lot closer knit.

"Where you might have two or three businesses, each one of those businesses and the teams in them are actually talking a lot more and realising we can do it all together and pull through this.

"It is an amazing job, I love this job, I put a chef’s jacket on when I was 10 years old, and I still love it to this day.

"Hospitality is an amazing thing. There's so many facets to it. It's not just restaurants, it is cafes, it is bars and it's the wider thing you're supporting like farmers. I just enjoy the whole thing of it as much as I ever done, and you're learning more every day, and you never stop learning. That's the key to that's what drives you. You never stop learning, and you get to work with amazing people."

Tickets to watch James Martin’s displays on July 4 at Flavours of Yorkshire are now on sale. Visit www.rhp-events.co.uk.