The Felin Fach Griffin, Brecon

The Felin Fach Griffin is a gastropub of serious pedigree. Their sister restaurant is the Gurnard's Head in Zennor, Cornwall, long one of the most well-regarded and popular spots in the West Country, and where we enjoyed a fantastic meal back in between lockdowns in 2020. Given that this particular trip to Brecon and Camarthenshire wasn't as overtly foodie as the Cornwall holiday I thought just one dinner from a team who clearly knew what they were doing would be a nice highlight of the trip, a bankable win even if the rest of the meals would be more along the lines of a National Trust egg and cress sandwich.

And so it turned out, which of course is great news for all concerned, but even I, expecting good things, was blindsided by the quality of the experience. There's a serious maturity on display at the Griffin, real technical skill when it comes to getting things like perfectly cooked, meaty cod fillet or a deliriously attractive crisp brown skin on a piece of chicken, but something else on top of that, a grasp of flavour and texture that only the very best kitchens can produce. There are lots of good gastropubs, but not many at this level, and certainly not many making the very best of local asparagus and garden herbs for £38 for 3 courses.

But let's start at the beginning. House bread was a) great and b) free, both of which as it should be. If you scan down a menu and see a variety of exciting sauces and jus on offer, then you're also going to want a decent bread to soak into them, and it's always a nice bonus if you don't have to worry about extra cost.

Value is a theme that runs through everything the Griffin do. There are cheaper restaurants, of course there always will be, but you really do seem to get a lot for your money here, whether it's the clear amount of cheffy effort that's gone into this fluffy white onion soup (with accompanying disc of Welsh rarebit) that would not look out of place anywhere with a Michelin star.

Or this beetroot tart with goats cheese and walnut pesto, yes not an entirely original combination of flavours but incredibly well executed with its delicate pastry base and interesting selection of herby dressings.

Best of the starters though was this neat little fillet of poached salmon, with a lovely smooth "horseradish buttermilk" sauce and chunks of fresh sweet pickled cucumber. The salmon had a nice firm texture, it was all seasoned well, and a couple of sprigs of dill from the garden (at least I assumed it was from the garden, as I saw some growing there) finished it all off.

Just look at that bit of cod. Examine it; breathe it in, glory in it. It was every bit as good as it looked, and alongside some choice bits of braised celeriac, fennel and the like it stood out as the kind of serious fish dish you would happily travel halfway across the country (as indeed we had, although it was only 5 minutes drive from our wonderful AirBnB in Talybont) to eat. Pescatarians need not apply, as that deliciously silky sauce underneath is actually "chicken juices" but you know what, cod and chicken *always* works.

Chicken was also worth the journey on its own. See how crisp and golden brown the skin looks? See how clear and silky the jus, see how perfectly charred the miniature garden vegetables. This came with a bowl of "crisp potatoes" (sort of like very crunchy patatas brava) but I couldn't resist trying a portion of their triple-cooked chips too so yes we may have slightly overdone it on the potatoes. Both were wonderful though, so it's hard to have any serious regrets.

Maple & hazelnut-glazed celeriac with "sweet & sour" shallots and charred asparagus was a veg-led dish that would make any vegetarian happy, and although I didn't get to try it (I was pretty full by this point thanks to two portion of potatoes) I'm reliably informed it was very good. Looks good anyway, doesn't it?

Desserts were each ordered thanks not to the main event but the accompaniment. I am far less interested in "Chocolate delice" than "Guiness ice cream" and although the chocolate was more than decent the ice cream was thick and malty and superb. Likewise, Artic roll was very nice but even better was the rhubarb sorbet parked on top, which was packed full of summery flavours.

Having a short stroll around the extensive kitchen gardens after dinner, in the late summer sun (we were very lucky with the weather in Brecon, or maybe it's always like that who knows) it occurred to me that when an operation really puts the effort in, it often creates a virtuous circle of increasingly impressive returns. Start up a kitchen garden and yes you may not save any money versus buying your veg wholesale but the changing seasons force a creative kitchen in new and unexpected directions - all of which improves the restaurant experience. And the better you get at the gardening, the better your menu gets, and so on. The Felin Fach Griffin have created their own ecosystem of seasonal flavours, and know exactly how to make the most of them.

Because yes, a kitchen garden is one thing, but the Griffin are able to work in excellent local producers (including a particularly good fishmonger by the looks of things) and end up with a menu of charm and variety, and serve the whole lot (with a couple of glasses of wine) for a very reasonable £42.50pp. And this is where the real skill lies, in sending customers away with a spring in their step and the knowledge they'd quite happily go back and do it all over again as soon as is at all possible. That requires not just a great kitchen but a charming front of house and a lovely low-beamed building in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. God, it's good to be eating out again, isn't it?

9/10

Llys Meddyg, Newport, Pembrokeshire

Although, in the end, our meal at Llys Meddyg turned out to be (spoiler alert) really quite good, it did not get off to the best of starts. It's not that the welcome at their basement bar wasn't warm, or that there was anything to complain about in terms of the comfort of the seating or the volume of the sound system, but when my request for a selection of their advertised 'foraged cocktails' was met with a gasp of "oh God, I'll have to look up the recipes", it seemed to suggest that perhaps bar work wasn't this particular member of staff's strongest skill. I watched with increasing horror as huge copa glasses were filled with vodka, gin and who knows what else (or maybe I just don't want to know), two ice cubes per glass to ensure the temperature of the final mixture was only just under room temperature, and finally a thin scattering of random herbs, lending the unfortunate things the look of something a toddler may proudly present as "tea" after an afternoon playing in the garden. So far, so bad.

But once settled upstairs under the twinkling fairy lights of their tastefully rustic dining room, things started to go a lot better. The menu seemed to involve a great many of my favourite things (crab, pigeon, cockles) and made a point of featuring ingredients smoked in their own back garden smokehouse, which tends to suggest an operation with a certain amount of ambition. House bread was soft and crunchy in all the right places, and (gordal?) olives plump and full of salty flavour.

My own starter of pigeon would have been perfect - literally perfect - if it had just been seasoned a bit - well, a lot - more. Carefully butchered and beautifully timed to pink inside, a bolder hand with the salt would have made the most of its lovely gamey flavour. That said, the parsnip mash was silky smooth, and poached blackberries (presumably from the garden) were another tasteful, and colourful, accompaniment.

The aforementioned house-smoked salmon fortunately did not suffer from lack of seasoning, and came artfully folded around radish, beetroot and toasted hazelnuts. I realise it look a bit anaemic above - this was not the case on the night, it was just very dark in there and my pics have needed a bit of Photoshopping to make them even vaguely usable.

Last of the starters was Solva (a very pretty little fishing village further west towards St Davids) crab, huge mounds of it, fluffy and fresh, studded with pickled kohlrabi and cherry tomatoes. But the highlight of this dish wasn't the crab - lovely though it was - but a little jug of what they called "tomato water", a clear but powerfully flavoured liquid that tasted of summer itself. A truly wonderful thing.

I had my eye on a main of cod and crayfish tails, and seeing that a few bits and pieces on the menu were foraged or home-grown, asked our waitress if the crustacea had been netted locally. She darted off to the kitchen to ask, and came back with the answer that they were from "the North Atlantic". After it was pointed out that crayfish are a freshwater species and if they'd been fished out of the North Atlantic they'd have been very lost indeed, not to mention rather ill, she disappeared again, only to return with the same answer - North Atlantic, specifically "Subarea VI". I half thought about ordering it just to see what on earth would turn up, but in the end my desire for a nice dinner overcame my curiosity and I ended up with the lamb. Much like the pigeon, this otherwise carefully cooked shoulder of lamb would have been faultless if seasoned a bit more boldly. A shame, but there was still plenty to enjoy in the rich, tender meat and foraged sea vegetables (samphire, and sea beet).

If miso carrot, smoked tofu and spiced gnocchi sounds like a rather eccentric collection of ingredients, well, you're not wrong. But actually, other than the fact we didn't quite work out what was "miso" about the carrots (they just tasted of normal roasted carrots), it worked surprisingly well. It probably could have done with losing an ingredient or two, but the gnocchi were well made and toasted peanuts added a nice crunch.

Best of the mains though was sea bass, caught that morning (so we were told) and cooked to absolute perfection, with a gently transluscent centre and delicate crisp skin. A little potato dauphinoise was indulgently creamy, and pickled mustard seeds were an interesting texture, but really this was all about the fish, which was worth the price of admission on its own.

Desserts were a little more uneven. An apple "tarte tatin" had a very thin amount of soggy pastry, and tasted unsatisfyingly savoury. Also, the "crème fraîche" ice cream on top was unpleasantly sour.

Peanut butter parfait was better - you can't really go wrong with peanut butter and banana, and the vanilla ice cream on top was really good. Still, part of me wishes we'd steered away from the desserts and just ordered the Welsh cheeseboard. There are some really good cheeses in Wales.

All in all though, despite Cocktailgate and Crayfishgate and the odd bit of underseasoning, there was still more to enjoy at Llys Meddyg than criticise. It's not a destination restaurant, but isn't really trying to be, it's just a friendly, relaxing place to spend an evening serving local food well enough to easily be worth the money they're charging for it (in this case, £33 a head with a bottle of wine, which is great value I'm sure you'll agree), and, well, sometimes that'll do. We very much enjoyed our weekend in this most beautiful part of the country (Llys Meddyg is a hotel as well, and the rooms are lovely), and will have very fond memories of it. As long as we try and forget those cocktails.

7/10

Coastal Foraging with Craig Evans, Pembrokeshire

I can't imagine any holiday or short break of any kind that doesn't in some way revolve around food, but this trip to Pembrokeshire was a little unusual. Instead of hanging the weekend around a Top 50 Gastropub or high-profile foodie favourite, our signature Saturday night meal would be something of an unknown quantity, at a boutique hotel in the pretty coastal town of Newport, reviewed well for its rooms and location but with very little to go on when it came to the food. My interest had been piqued by the existence of a kitchen garden, various mentions of foraging on the menu and the fact they ran their own smokehouse, but more than that, I was in the dark. To be honest, it could have gone either way.

So as insurance against a potentially disappointing dinner, we had organised what would surely be the runaway highlight of this weekend, and indeed would turn out to be most probably the highlight of the rest of the year - an afternoon seafood foraging with YouTube star Craig Evans. For those of you who don't know, Craig has built up a dedicated following for his short videos of himself hauling a bewildering variety of shellfish and crustacea out of the Pembrokeshire coastal sands. The video in particular that got me hooked involved Craig, up to his neck in murky tidal water, fishing around with his bare hands in a terrifying dark crevasse, before triumphantly swinging around and belting the camera with a giant blue lobster. Free lobster! It's the foodie's dream.

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Foraging! With @coastal_foraging_with_craig

A post shared by Chris Pople (@chrispople) on Oct 12, 2019 at 4:20am PDT

Off we went, then, to a secret location near Carmarthen Bay (Craig, quite understandably, guards his favourite spots quite closely) to meet the man himself, another dedicated foraging fan, and his handsome dog Llew, a golden retriever with a gentle personality and a pull on the leash like a grizzly bear. First stop, to make the most of the extreme low tide, was an area of mussel beds beneath a promentary, where a good haul of plump shellfish were frantically wrestled from the rocks and bagged up in the 15 or so minutes we had before the tide started to creep back in.

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Cockles! @coastal_foraging_with_craig found hundreds. I got about 6.

A post shared by Chris Pople (@chrispople) on Oct 12, 2019 at 5:08am PDT

Next, a walk along the beach to raid the cockle beds, a much more leisurely and almost theraputic persuit. You drag your fingers through the sand a few inches from the surface, and before long begin to bump up against the cockles, sturdy little things about an inch across. With a trained eye (ie. Craig's) you can dig up a couple of dozen every minute, although even I managed enough to dress a bowl of vongole. In the same fertile area of the bay, though, lurk some real monsters - soft-shelled clams, the size of your fist, which live about a foot under the surface. Grabbing one of these guys is a case of looking for a tell-tale circular depression in the sand and scooping away the top layer. If you are rewarded with a squirt of water (as the clam's siphon is retracted), then this spot is occupied. Then it's just a case of digging, and digging, and digging until you reach far enough down to carefully (their shells are fragile, and a broken shell means an inedible clam) bring the thing to the surface.

Before long we had more than enough to feed our party, so we headed to the back of the bay, where fresh running water made the cleaning of the haul easier, and lit the "Solva Stove" (Swedish candle), a clever bit of engineering which heats up a pan of fresh seafood just long enough to cook it before collapsing sustainably and environmentally into carbon. And of course, it all tasted wonderful. With no seasoning other than the animals themselves, we each enjoyed a bowl of richly-flavoured broth, studded with sweet cockles, miniature shrimp (that Craig had found the same morning), wild garlic (ditto) fleshy mussels and, on the side, carefully filleted portions of soft-shelled clam, meaty like squid. We ate our bowls of seafood, surely the freshest and most satisfyingly procured lunch it's possible to imagine, sat on the rocks in the bright Pembrokeshire sunshine. Then, when the final bits of clam had been handed out, we cleared up, headed back up the cliffs and left hardly a trace we'd ever been there at all.

Almost as soon as it was over I wanted to head back down to the beach and start the hunt for more clams, but who knows if my foraging skills will stay with me. Maybe it's like when you help with cooking a meal with a very talented cook friend, and by the end of it start to think you've got the hang of it, but the next time you attempt anything on your own it's a disaster. Or maybe that's just me. But even if the skills don't stick, and I never haul another half-kilo clam out of the ground with my bare hands again in my life, what an experience, what a day and what an incredible education on the bounty of our shores. I'll never look at our coast in the same way again - what once were barren stretches of sand and inhospitable rocks, I'll now see for what they really are. Lunch.

10/10

Bit silly to score a foraging course the same way I would a restaurant, but look, I've gone and done it anyway. Craig refused payment for the foraging afternoon even though we were more than willing to pay, so I suppose this is a kind of invite. So I mention it just for full transparency. Book your own course, year round on his website (he has customers from all over the world). Oh, and finally, to read a much better and more thorough interview with Craig get yourself a copy of Pit Magazine issue 6. A little plug for my mate's mag, there. For the meal at Llys Meddyg, watch this space...

The Whitebrook, Monmouthshire

Henry Ashby has been a forager for over 50 years, first in his native Yorkshire, later the Scilly Isles and more recently in Monmouthshire. In his own words, he's not a "survivalist" or a "bush crafter" or any such ridiculous macho caricature, he looks only for the very finest wild plants, herbs and funghi and sells them on to only the very finest local restaurants. More specifically, recently he has begun supplying exclusively to the Whitebrook, a Michelin-starred restaurant with rooms in the Wye Valley, whose menus are a hymn to the local estuaries and ancient woodland and changing seasons.

Wild plants, like restaurants, broadly break down into three categories. Firstly there are the booby traps - deadly species like Ragwort or the Yellow Stain mushroom, outwardly innocuous, perhaps bearing a resemblance to a benign weed or edible funghi, but capable of inflicting severe gastrointestinal upset and even, in extreme cases, death. These are the Hard Rock Cafés or Aberdeen Angus' of the foraging world, to be avoided at all costs, duping unsuspecting foragers in the same way a Leicester Square restaurant will lure in naive tourists, serve them frozen onion rings and broiler ranch chicken and charge them a stomach-churning bill.

Then there are the species that are edible, just not particularly pleasant. Bear Grylls may collect them if he was stuck out in the wilds of the Wye Valley with only a penknife and water purification tablets, in the same way as you'd go to the KFC at Heston Services if you were desperately hungry and it was too late to find anything better, but you wouldn't go back for more without very good reason.

Finally, at the top of the chain, there are the very finest specimens, plants that only grow wild but are at least the equal of any cultivated species in terms of vibrancy of flavour; woodruff, our British vanilla, floral meadowsweet, citrusy wood sorrel. These are your Michelin-starred plants, and are all that Henry is interested in for his clients. And it is these exciting and unusual plants that elevate the tasting menu by chef Chris Harrod at the Whitebrook into something very special indeed.

Chickpea may not sound like the most obvious way to start a British foraged tasting menu but actually these are grown by a local veg supplier and are the first fresh chickpeas I've seen in this country. They came with chicken skin crackers topped with a carrot purée, full of colour and texture. Next to them, cute little cheese crackers topped with nettle purée and wild flowers.

I forgot to write down exactly what this first amuse was, but I think was cubes of bright purple potato on a soft roe of some kind, like a white tarama. Very nice it was, anyway.

The first proper course was local beets with powerful local blackberries and an artistic selection of foraged herbs and flowers. The beetroot & blackberry jus poured on top had the most amazing flavour, not to mention a dark, thick colour like fake blood.

A generous mound of fresh Cornish crab meat, sweet and luxurious, on a layer of bright green mallow "cream" and delicate pickled kohlrabi. Talking point of this dish though were "cucamelons", strange grape-sized vegetables that taste like a cross between cucumber and melon, also grown by the Whitebrook's vegetable people.

Of all the dishes, these dumplings with salt-baked turnip was perhaps the only one that veered somewhat close to disappointing. The Golden Cenarth cheese used was a bit too old and strong and battered the other flavours to a stinky pulp, and though I get the idea of using croutons for texture, they held a bit too much grease and were a bit difficult to enjoy. A noble failure, though - it was at least a dish with ambition.

Fortunately we didn't wobble for long. This beautiful slab of bright-white Cornish turbot is a textbook example of how to cook fish, moist and meaty and sat on top of a silky buttermilk sauce. An array of vivid green, salty estuary plants decorated it, and heritage carrots had so much flavour I think they may have been salt-baked. Or perhaps they were just really good carrots, seasoned perfectly.

Suckling pig came in three styles, a little cube of belly, a tender pink chop on the bone and a neat cylinder of - I think - slow-cooked jowl. It was coated in one of those lovely glossy reduced sauces that the very top restaurants can do so well, as well as - naturally - a smattering of edible plants.

A pre-dessert of blackcurrant and "pineapple weed" (growing rampant in the woods around the restaurant) was a pretty little coil of blackcurrant jelly and cream, sat on a bed of some kind of granita. Also studded into the granita were blackcurrants, each with a powerful concentrated flavour a million miles from the usual supermarket type.

Violet parfait came dressed with some dainty little meringue "twigs" and a blob of lemon thyme sorbet. More texture came in the form of teeny rose jellies and I also - again - admired the Whitebrook's confidence in dressing their dishes with fresh berries, stunningly raw and unadulterated.

Finally here's a cherry and hazelnut cake, with cherry stone ice cream and meadowsweet meringue. Like most of what came before, it was first and foremost an accomplished high-end restaurant dish that satisfied on every level, but the use of unusual foraged ingredients both enhanced the effect of the clever techniques and grounded the flavours in local geography and precise seasonality.

The Whitebrook is a perfect - perhaps unique - collaboration between a master forager with an expert's eye and palate, and a chef whose classical training is put to ideal use with this abundance of dazzling ingredients. Only once previously in the last few years - at the Black Swan in Oldstead - has that crucial final mile between ground and plate seemed so short; here in the Wye Valley you get that same sense of immediacy and vibrancy, that indefinable correctness of eating food (barring a fish or two from Cornwall) exactly in the place it was meant to be eaten.

And even without all that, even if Chris Harrod was flying his vegetables in daily from China and using moon rocks as seasoning, he would still, I'm sure, be able to produce an impressive selection of dishes. With the abundance of riches on his doorstep though, and the skills of Henry Ashby at his disposal, it makes about as good a case for getting on a train out of London for the weekend as anywhere else you'd care to think of. The Whitebrook could exist nowhere else, and eating here is an experience like no other in modern British food.

9/10

Photos by Helen. We were invited to the Whitebrook, but the lunch menu is an incredibly reasonable £47, and £35 with some excellent wines paired by GM Andrew, photos of which are here.