Uncharted territory: James and Maria Close on Atlas

And just like that, James and Maria Close are back. Having wowed at the two Michelin-starred Raby Hunt, the pair have taken charge of the entire food and beverage operation at Rockliffe, a five-star resort just south of Darlington best known for its golf course, spa and being home to Middlesbrough Football Club’s training ground.

Their brief is to add ‘world-renowned gastronomic destination’ to that list – no small undertaking in a part of the UK that, for most at least, is more associated with heavy industry and Greggs than top-flight restaurants.

On first inspection at least, the whole enterprise seems fanciful. Why would gastrotourists choose the southern fringes of County Durham over, say, the Lake District to the west, with its spectacular scenery and wealth of Michelin-starred restaurants, or Edinburgh to the north, with its tourist attractions and thriving, varied food scene.

The Closes and Rockliffe owner Steve Gibson have a one-word answer to that question: Atlas. Adjacent to the main building overlooking the golf course, the 584sq m, 36-cover stone-clad pavilion is a purpose-built temple to fine dining with a vast open kitchen arranged around three bespoke Molteni cooking suites.

No figures have been disclosed but given the from-scratch build and the lavishness of the fit-out, Atlas looks to be among the most expensive fine-dining restaurant projects ever undertaken in the UK.

“We obviously worked with an architect and an interior designer, but fundamentally the restaurant was designed by me and Maria based on going to the very best restaurants in the world,” James says, giving some indication of the scale of their ambitions.

A Close call

The Closes officially joined Rockliffe in 2024. They hadn’t been planning to leave The Raby Hunt but had become increasingly frustrated with the limitations of running one of the UK’s best restaurants in a small pub with creaking infrastructure. James recalls the building flooding several times a year. On one occasion, a Michelin inspector dined oblivious to the fact that the cellar was under several feet of water.

“I used to say that place existed against all odds,” Maria explains. “We got to the stage where we couldn’t expand any more. We were at the maximum number of rooms and couldn’t elevate the guest experience. Attracting a team was really hard, too. We couldn’t provide accommodation, and with the way the industry was going, people were worried about job security.”

“We got two stars out of a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, which was an amazing achievement,” interjects James. “But it was getting a little bit mundane. When we travelled to great restaurants around the world, we always came back feeling a bit disappointed with what we had. It wasn’t experiential enough.”

Moving on from The Raby Hunt

Despite their frustrations at The Raby Hunt, the Closes were far from convinced that Rockliffe was the answer. Just 20 minutes down the road, they were familiar with the hotel and aware that it had never quite managed to get its food and beverage offer right.

“I wasn’t interested at first,” James recalls. “I knew the hotel and its weaknesses. I didn’t think there would be enough investment to turn it around.”

But meeting Gibson changed their minds. The prospect of significant investment was clearly a factor, but just as important was the rapport James established with Rockcliffe’s owner.

“He’s from the North East and I’m from the North East, and it was: ‘Let’s try to do something great.’ He’d always had ambition but maybe hadn’t quite found the right people to turn it into something visible. After a couple of meetings, I started to think: ‘This could be really exciting.’”

James’s employment arrangement at Rockliffe has more in common with that of a professional footballer than a typical hotel chef. Gibson, who also chairs Middlesbrough Football Club, has signed Close on a fixed-term contract, giving both chef and owner some assurance that the other will stay the course.

“I was never going to give up my restaurant and come into an environment where they could get rid of me after a week or two,” he says. “For their side, it’s perfect too, because they wouldn’t want me coming in and then walking off.”

Charting a new course

The Closes have created a total of six concepts for Rockliffe. As well as Atlas, there’s low-lit Japanese-inspired cocktail bar Ro, Italian-American restaurant Rialto, elevated sports bar and restaurant The Clubhouse, afternoon tea experience The Morning Room, and Café Terra.

Surprisingly, a standalone, purpose-built fine-dining restaurant wasn’t part of Gibson’s original vision for Rockliffe. The resort’s flagship restaurant was originally intended to occupy The Orangery, a high-ceilinged, glass-roofed space at the heart of the hotel. But James was adamant that it was not suitable for fine dining. With the restaurant only open Wednesday to Saturday, guests arriving on other days would find one of the hotel’s principal spaces empty and lifeless.

“I made it clear that I would never cook there. It needed to be somewhere people could wander in and out of throughout the day, the social hub of the hotel. That’s why Rialto is there now.”

The handsome if a little operationally awkward room also had a chequered history as a fine-dining destination. Gibson recruited Kenny Atkinson to launch a restaurant there in 2009, but the Michelin success the chef had enjoyed elsewhere eluded him at Rockliffe. He left in 2013 and now runs two Michelin-starred restaurants in Newcastle.

Soon after joining Rockliffe, the Closes launched a series of pop-ups in Café Terra, allowing them to test different food and beverage concepts.

“We tried a French bistro, Italian restaurant, a burger and champagne bar, an American concept, and a Latin-American concept called El Camino,” James says.

“We thought the French bistro would be the one for the former The Orangery space,” Maria adds. “The food was amazing, but it didn’t quite work. French food was having a resurgence in London, but the North East isn’t London. It wasn’t right for here. The Italian concept was far and away the most popular, so we went down the Italian-American route.”

Midweek trade at Rialto – which is the hotel’s main casual restaurant - remains relatively quiet, but weekends are busy, with the restaurant doing up to 90 covers a day. The offer is stripped back at lunchtime, with a more comprehensive menu served in the evening offering dishes including tuna crudo with gordal olives and stracciatella; chicken parmigiana with vodka sauce; and lobster diavolo pata for two to share.

“We’re not quite there with Rialto,” says James with characteristic honesty. “Getting the right staff has not been easy. But give us six months we’ll be doing Martinis tableside.”

“It has to evolve gradually,” Maria adds. “As we get the staff settled with the covers they’re doing at the moment, we can keep adding things.”

Trying to relax

James has also had to adjust to the realities of running restaurants within a large hotel. Reading between the lines, he initially went into Rockliffe like the proverbial bull in a china shop but has since learned to be more collegiate and understanding of those without a fine-dining background.

“I’m uncompromising on standards, but I have to accept that not everyone is used to working at a high level. In a hotel, you’re exposed to different mindsets, which is fine, but I struggled to understand how people couldn’t see certain issues at first. I’ve become more relaxed about it as time has gone on.”

With Atlas now up and running, the couple’s attention has inevitably shifted to their flagship restaurant – they now won’t cook anywhere else, and James will be present for every service.

The restaurant is still finding its audience, however, and James is conscious that it will take time to establish itself.

“We’ve been open for less than a month. Nobody really knows about us, the only people we’ve had in really are our former guests at The Raby Hunt. Atlas is not on the map yet. Luckily, we have someone behind us that is patient and understands what we are trying to do.”

Close to the edge

Showing me around the restaurant, James’s anxiety is palpable. Standing in his enormous kitchen with his team setting up around him, he seems almost overwhelmed by the audacity of the project, its sheer scale and the extraordinary sums of money involved. Creating a restaurant from scratch might sound like a dream come true, but the process clearly had its moments.

“It started as a rectangular box out in the garden. Early on in the process, we realised it wasn’t nearly big enough for what we wanted to do so pushed to make it a lot bigger. A month before we opened, I remember walking through and thinking: ‘James, have you fucked this up?’ There was so much money going into it, and I was thinking it was all on us because we’d pointed them towards doing this.”

It has been an emotional journey for the couple, who recall breaking down in tears when they travelled to Molteni’s factory in Lyon to see their jet black and bronze bespoke stove for the first time.

“It was absolutely perfect,” James says, still visibly moved by the memory.

“As we saw it come to life, we grew in confidence. But until you do the first service, you don’t know what the acoustics or atmosphere are like, whether the spacing between the cooking suites is right, or what it’s going to be like on a quiet night.”

But what a restaurant it is. Passing through its heavy, stone-clad entrance door, you could be arriving at a multi-Michelin-star restaurant in France or northern Spain rather than the North East of England.

Guests first enter a champagne bar that offers only a glimpse of what lies beyond. The dining room itself is a study in understated luxury, with a muted palette of creams, taupes and warm wood, textured finishes and elegant contemporary lighting.

Floor-to-ceiling windows run along both sides, overlooking the golf course in one direction and a Japanese-inspired garden in the other. The generously proportioned tables are spaced unusually far apart but not to the point the space looks sparse.

Dominating the centre of the room is an enormous waiter’s station, its polished surface lined with an impressive collection of wine decanters. The overall effect is luxurious but restrained – the Closes want the food to do most of the talking here.

The kitchen is simply stunning, a space that any three-star chef would be more than proud to call their own. The kitchen is completely open to the dining room, with no dividing counter or conventional pass, its three cooking suites arranged perpendicular to the dining area and spaced almost extravagantly far apart, mirroring the generosity of space afforded to diners. Viewed from the restaurant, the kitchen runs from the hot section on the left through cold preparation to Maria’s pastry section on the right, with ageing fridges lining the rear.

Out of sight at the rear is a separate kitchen used for pot wash, goods receiving vacuum packing, bulk preparation and other less glamorous tasks. But in their pursuit of perfection, the Closes also use it to cook anything deemed too messy for the open kitchen, including tempura – a decision that has necessitated the installation of a full ventilation and extraction system.

There are a few nods to the Closes’ former restaurant – including the rather unsettling skull portrait of James in the kitchen and, hidden within the Atlas menu as an Easter egg, a tiny reproduction of the hot-air balloon motif that was etched into the glass panels in The Raby Hunt’s dining room – but Atlas is a world away from The Raby Hunt.

Familiar culinary territory

The menu structure and culinary direction, however, are similar. As the name of the restaurant hints, James and Maria are once again playing the role of culinary Phileas Foggs by offering a creative take on dishes from around the world, the majority of which are inspired by their travels.

As before, a meal starts with a selection of eight high-impact dishes. These were previously single bites, but most have evolved into larger, more complex creations that make full use of the better equipment and larger team. Some even require cutlery to eat.

These include a mini version of Maria’s rightly famous croissant that used to grace The Raby Hunt’s breakfast table, here stuffed with a generous amount of Spanish ham and anchovies; a take on lomo a lo pobre (poor man’s steak) that inevitably uses wagyu; and a more delicate version of The Raby Hunt’s visually striking take on ceviche, served in half a hollowed-out lime and topped with coconut foam.

Perhaps most impressive is a complete reimagining of puttanesca: an oily pool of finely chopped tomatoes, olives, capers and anchovies, in which sits a mound of burrata cream draped with two slices of otoro and topped with caviar.

The larger dishes that follow are more of a departure from what was served at The Raby Hunt, with the Closes taking the journey theme a step further. After the last miniature course is cleared, an envelope containing five black-and-white postcards is placed on the table. The only clues to what lies ahead are an image and a place name on each card.

These include La Rochelle: an oyster suspended in a rich potato espuma topped with caviar; Marseille: a haute take on a fisherman’s stew, with lobster, brill and aioli in a bisque sauce; and Miyazaki Highlands: A5 wagyu with a single piece of pepper draped over it and a perfectly executed beef sauce.

For now, this part of the meal focuses largely on France – understandably so, given that it’s where James and Maria most love to eat – but the itinerary will eventually expand to take in more countries.

“As we grow as a team, we will take the concept to a different level. We’ve started with the places we know the best just to get us going,” James says.

The three-hour-plus meal ends with the chocolate cart – constructed to resemble a slice of the multilayered cake Miss Trunchbull forced Bruce Bogtrotter to eat in Matilda – laden with a dozen or so of Maria’s creations, including red chocolate lips filled with a boozy, viscous liquid inspired by the Cosmopolitan cocktail; miniature Paris-Brests; and The Raby Hunt’s signature edible paint-flecked chocolate skulls.

James says that completely reinventing the menu was never an option, not least because of the loyalty he feels towards former Raby Hunt regulars who have followed him to Atlas.

The Closes’ globetrotting approach can, of course, be traced to their love of travelling to eat, but James says it also reflects the North East’s lack of a clearly defined culinary identity and the limitations of the local produce available to him.

Digging for victory

But moving to Rockliffe has opened up an important new route to the exceptional produce needed for what will hopefully soon be a world-class restaurant. James has persuaded his longstanding fresh produce supplier Ken Holland to become the resort’s head grower. It’s something of a coup for the resort: the 62-year-old is a living legend in UK farm-to-table cuisine, having spent the past two decades or so supplying specialist produce to and advising some of the country’s leading chefs, including Simon Rogan, Tommy Banks and Sat Bains.

Holland has hit the ground running, overhauling the walled garden and making full use of the existing greenhouses to grow all manner of produce, including ingredients that most would assume are impossible to cultivate in the North East, such as yuzu and shiso. There is one guiding principle underpinning the entire operation: if Holland can’t grow something better than Close can source elsewhere in the world, there’s little point in growing it at all.

It’s an arrangement that says much about Close. He is uncompromising, but also remarkably adept at persuading those around him to buy into his vision. It’s arguably this ability to get everyone pulling in the same direction that separates a two-star restaurant from one capable of reaching the very pinnacle of fine dining.

With the added job security and accommodation options that a large hotel affords, the Closes have found it far easier to attract high-calibre staff to their flagship. Nearly everyone has a Michelin-starred background, with some joining from leading restaurants in the North, including Lake District three-star L’Enclume.

“Front of house is the key. That’s where it’s really gone to a different level. You’ve got three proper sommeliers and a proper service team,” James says.

While there are plenty of new faces – the kitchen team is twice the size it was at The Raby Hunt, and the front-of-house team is roughly three times bigger – there is also continuity. Executive chef Adam Molloy spent seven and a half years at The Raby Hunt, rising through the ranks to become its head chef, while restaurant director Jack Adams is another longstanding member of the old team.

Key new recruits include head of wine Manuel Ghezzi (see boxout, below), formerly head sommelier at The Connaught, and head chef Shaun Hurrell, the former chef-owner of Durham Mexican restaurant Barrio Comida. A longstanding associate of James, Hurrell’s CV also includes Marcus at The Berkeley and Kitchen Table.

Celestial navigation

When I last interviewed Close in 2022, he admitted that his pursuit of a third Michelin star had at one point become an unhealthy obsession. Four years on, and with a much grander and more sophisticated restaurant at his disposal, has his attitude towards the little red book’s ultimate accolade changed?

“I don’t aim for one, two or three stars. I aim to create a great restaurant, an amazing menu, amazing ingredients and staff, and enjoy it. As we evolve, everything normally takes care of itself.”

But the reality is that Michelin recognition will surely be crucial to the project’s success and must therefore be part of the business plan, especially given the eye-watering investment made by Gibson.

Without one star – ideally two – its reach may struggle to extend far beyond former Raby Hunt regulars and the local market. And for all Close’s protestations, it’s hard to look at a restaurant built on this scale and not see a renewed push for three stars, whether or not he chooses to frame it that way.