MasterChef's Liz Cottam: 'I've turned dairy farm buildings at Bolton Abbey into my next restaurant'

This is the view across the road from Byre – Liz Cottam’s latest restaurant venture – on a hillside above Bolton Abbey in glorious Wharfedale. Byre occupies three converted former dairy farm buildings on the Devonshire Estate which the former MasterChef semi-finalist opened in June.

Byre means ‘cattle shed’ in old English and the word ‘restaurant’ almost feels too grand for this cosy, atmospheric space, which Cottam has sympathetically and cleverly transformed into a humble dining room and kitchen that befits its rustic charm.

“When I came here and started thinking about the possibility of doing something, I had to listen to what the building wanted. You can’t impose fancy commercial kitchens on a place like this. It wouldn’t feel right,” she says.

If the setting is far removed from her previous restaurant, Emba, a plush, open plan space in Leeds city centre, then so too is its size. There’s no brigade of chefs here, it’s just Cottam and another chef with two people front of house – all of whom she’s worked with before.

Cottam’s restaurants have all been about fine dining and in this sense Byre is little different, except here there’s no fixed number of courses and while guests know the style of food when they book, they might not know what every dish will be.

There’s an open kitchen, adding to the feeling that you’re in a farmhouse. “You sit down and see and smell the fire and the food that you're about to eat,” Cottam explains. “There’s no formality about it. The food comes as and when it’s ready.”

She first visited the site four years ago at which point she had Cora, a bakehouse and wine bar in Boston Spa, The Owl, in Leeds city centre, run by head chef Mark Owens, and Home, her flagship Leeds restaurant. She was drawn to the picturesque space but parked the idea until earlier this year, having just closed her restaurant Emba, when she put the wheels in motion for what is now Byre.

It’s 10 years since Cottam appeared on MasterChef, having ditched her corporate sector career, leaving behind the comfort of a six-figure salary in search of something more fulfilling. She didn’t enjoy the process of doing the TV cookery show saying she put “too much pressure on myself”. However, the experience of working in a professional kitchen fired her desire to be a chef.

Just a year later she opened Home, a fine dining restaurant overlooking Kirkgate Market in Leeds. For a local girl like Cottam, it felt a perfect fit. “My mum and dad were publicans and we used to get our produce from the market. Everything happened there and it was a really thriving, vibrant place.”

Home quickly flourished, earning rave reviews. “We were a successful business with waiting lists on most days. We were doing brilliantly.” So much so that two years later, in 2019, she opened The Owl, which also won plaudits from punters and critics alike.

And then came Covid, which hit the hospitality sector particularly hard. This was followed by the war in Ukraine causing huge spikes in energy bills and higher food inflation, which along with the cost-of-living crisis and declining consumer spending, created what she calls a “perfect storm”.

Her restaurant, Home, saw bills spiral. “We had an electricity bill of £1,800 a month that went up to £12,000,” she says. The cost of ingredients soared, too. “A really nice big scallop would have been maybe £1 back in the day. Now they’re between £4.50 and £5.50 each. Butter went up more than 100 per cent. Even things like linen would go up 16 per cent.”

It meant the businesses she had worked so hard to build up were becoming unsustainable and in July 2023 Cora closed, followed by Home just over a year later.

But rather than admit defeat, Cottam crowdfunded Emba – a city centre restaurant overlooking Leeds & Liverpool canal – in May last year. “I used to tell people I was the self-appointed ‘queen of Leeds’ because I'm so patriotic about Yorkshire and about my city. I wanted to contribute to helping put Leeds on the map and making it great.”

However, the challenges hadn’t gone away. The situation was compounded by increased National Insurance contributions and minimum wage hikes, all of which combined to slash profit margins. “I was working 100 hours a week at Emba to fill in the gaps that some of these economic pressures created, and it did nearly break me,” admits Cottam.

In March this year she reluctantly closed Emba. “We had a fantastic team. We had amazing guests, a fantastic reputation, and we, on paper, were very successful. But the economic pressures and changes just didn't allow for our style of business to survive. So I never felt like I failed.”

It did, though, lead to some soul-searching. “How do you do the thing that you love, if it doesn't work in the way that you've been doing it? For me, it had to be about something that was small, something that took me away from some of the problems I knew about.”

She knows that Byre may well present a different set of problems but feels prepared for them. It is smaller in scale, initially opening three days a week. “Rather than needing to have 200 or 300 people in Leeds city centre coming in to make the business work, I'm looking at 30 people a week.”

Her plan is to start small and grow organically – she’s looking at doing some more cookery classes once the dust has settled.

She has put together a carefully-curated wine list and aims to make the most of local produce where possible. “We get all of our dairy delivered on the doorstep and we’ve got a gamekeeper who brings us rabbits. So if there’s something that we really want to cook with we’ll use it. But I'm not going to constantly do it just because it's in vogue.”

Guests at Byre can choose between the ‘Signature’ menu or a seafood-led alternative. At £125 per person, it isn’t cheap, but Cottam believes there is an appetite for this style of cooking. “I think people are spending less on high end food, but they're still out there. They haven't disappeared and the things that they love haven't.”

She points to the fact that she’s already taking bookings from people across Yorkshire and as far away as London, and even Norway. “We're really close to Ilkley and we’re not far from Harrogate and Skipton. I think there's a lot of food travel around here,” she says.

The past few years have been a chastening experience for Cottam but having moved to the Dales she views Byre as an exciting new chapter. “One of the reasons I’m a chef is I love starting from scratch. It's a bit like an artist and having a blank canvas, rather than doing the same thing over and over again.

“I am also a realist. I've been through three restaurant closures. I know it's probably not the time to open a restaurant right now, but I had to keep on cooking because I'm a chef,” she says.

“I started out cooking for friends at home and now I've got all of these experiences and skills and this beautiful environment. Without being too cliched about it, I feel as if this is where I'm supposed to be and without all of the things pushing me in this direction, I wouldn't be here.”

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