Ynyshir Restaurant review: ‘This, I soon realised, was going to be wild’ (original) (raw)

Shall we start with the reasons not to go? It seems a bit curmudgeonly but seeing as you’ll never get a table anyway, it’s probably a mitzvah. So, for a start, it’s miles away. And not just from London. It’s three hours from Cardiff, Manchester and Bristol, two and a half from Birmingham and Liverpool, and three and a half from Leeds, Leicester and Swindon. To be fair, it is only 20 minutes from Cwmyrhaiadr. But if you live in Cwmyrhaiadr, then you’re probably one of the chefs.

I’m talking by car, of course. The train takes even longer, and that’s if the trains are running, which they mostly aren’t, which is how I got a table at Ynyshir just days after it was crowned National Restaurant of the Year. You see, the national train strikes led to table cancellations (so cheers for that, Mick Lynch) and I happened to know someone (my dear friend Tom, a fellow restaurant critic) who knew someone who knows the chef there, Gareth Ward, and so we were in.

It’s also expensive: £350 per head for the set menu, no à la carte, no substitutions, no hypoallergenic or veggie options, and then the booze on top. But the dinner-plus-room deal is only £495 and the rooms are world-class and worth £250 a night of anyone’s money. So make a weekend of it and I’d say you’re quids in.

Then again – and I’m still with the negatives here – when you do finally get to Ynyshir, you’re not really there at all. You drive five hours from London (what with widdle stops and a pub ham sandwich in the borders), the last two hours of which are through the most beautiful countryside in Europe, and then when you arrive they march you straight inside to the black-painted interior and a pitch-dark kitchen, where you sit at wooden tables, in rows, all facing forwards like schoolchildren in the 1950s, watching four blokes doing nothing you can see very clearly, with the eyes of the rest of the room boring into the back of your head for four hours, occasionally turning round to look at the small window at the back and, through it, the lush, blue mountains in the distance, slightly wishing you were there.

Ynyshir Restaurant and Rooms

CHRIS FYNES

And it’s loud. Very, very loud. House music, more or less, with the volume going up all the time, until by the end there are strobing disco lights and the beat is pounding like an old-fashioned Rotterdam techno dungeon.

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And the cushionless wooden chair you sit on for those many hours, in the dark room, with the loud music, gets to be pretty uncomfortable.

Which is why, I think, a lot of people won’t like this place at all. Certainly not the type of pampered three-star Michelin junkies who enjoyed the Waterside Inn and thought Ynyshir sounded like it might be “nice”. So itis only fair I warn you of that.

And it is certainly a strange crowd that foregathers in the bar for the obligatory preprandial drinks (some provincial habits die hard): big, pink, short-haired women in sleeveless dresses with tiny bald husbands in floral shirts they bought in Agnès B in 2002; fidgety urban couples going backwards and forwards to the loo all night (which was the principal entertainment from our seat at the front; that and the back of some metal cabinets and, in the depths, Ward himself, vast, round-shouldered, stubble-headed, leather-aproned, peaceful, all-seeing, lit by roaring fires, slicing and stabbing), and one table of girls with bright pink hair, men with scabrous mullets and multiple piercings, and a lad in little green running shorts and a green vest like he’d just come off the 1981 Dublin marathon. “Almost certainly Scandinavian chefs,” said Tom.

Eeh, it were weird. When we arrived, they immediately fed us a “Not onion soup”, standing up at the front desk, which was a dashi stock poured over a Japanese savoury custard called a chawanmushi, with a slice of miso-cured duck liver, herb oil and croutons and then slid back the top of that very desk to reveal a chiller cabinet containing: a big steak of A5 wagyu, the meat so intensely striped with white fat as to resemble pink seersucker; a fillet of very fatty tuna, the only sustainable (because farmed) blue fin in the world; a duck; a Bramley apple; four strawberries; six eggs; a live crab; a bottle of rice wine; some very fatty pork belly; a half-pint bottle of Jenkins llaeth organig (organic milk); six white aubergines; four kaffir limes.

“F*** me,” I said. “Are we going to play Ready Steady Cook?”

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The answer to that was yes and no. These were (some of) the ingredients Gareth would be cooking with (don’t worry, he learnt bourgeois precision and respect at Hambleton Hall, then crazy big flavour wa-wa at Sat Bains) and were there to give some notion of the very serious produce at the core of his cuisine, the prominence of animal protein, the blend of locavorism with the wildly exotic, and his big southeast Asian bent.

We went briefly to our rooms to change but I just put on a fresh T-shirt, rather than the collared shirt I had packed, for fear of looking like Jacob Rees-Mogg at Glastonbury, and then to the bar for our first courses (of the 40 or so we’d be served, all just a mouthful or two in size) and the beginning of a seat-of-the-pants grog journey – through English champagne, a dry tokay, saké, mescal, a cloudy yuzu shochu that came on like Victorian lemonade and much more besides – conducted by a pony-tailed young sommelier who put me in mind in a very deep way, in looks, accent and shy charm, of Richard Beckinsale. Which was a surreal leitmotif to a quite bonkers evening.

And, of course, there was food. A sliver of raw lobster tail “nahm jim” in the bottom of a rustic mortar belaboured with fish oil, citrus and chilli that made me suddenly very excited, for this was not going to be a procession of gloopy French show-offy horseshit as these long menus so often are, but something thrilling and light and wild that would build and build…

A tiny claw of lobster now on a beaten metal plate, enveloped in a punctilious satay sauce with a pinch of chopped peanuts; a little shrimp green curry foaming away; a puck of crispy scampi, vibing off sesame prawn toast, with a sweet chilli jam; rich, very spicy chilli crab with a deep fried bun… This is all much more like actual food than meals I’ve had in other famous list-toppers like the Fat Duck or El Bulli or Noma, where it’s easy to feel as much like the victim of a laboratory experiment as a hungry man in need of dinner.

Though it is wacky as you like as well, with its animal skins thrown over chairs and fur coats hanging on rails, black napery and strange, primitive utensils. Tom says it’s all “very _Game of Thrones_” but I’ve never watched that, so my best TV reference might be some sort of Flintstones Nights – a smashing together of Stone Age past and Blade Runner future, with Ward always in vision at the centre, bare-armed, firelit, like Vulcan in his stithy.

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There’s an Orkney scallop bound in wagyu fat under a sliver of duck liver served on a cylindrical plinth which has Tom in raptures, but seems to me strangely underpowered in this rat-a-tat-tat of multiseasoned mouth-slappers; a beautiful yellowtail nubbin in a clay chalice with white soy, sesame, yuzu and strips of seaweed; that blue fin, two delirious ways; a riff on black cod in miso with a stunning shard of eel under kaluga caviar served on a wide-brimmed wooden bowl with a wooden spoon and three-pronged forklet; a salt cod, smoked butter and parsley soup of wondrous simplicity and directness…

And I’m starting to teeter. Free-flowing booze, dazzling mini-dishes and the company of a mad, funny, freewheeling foodie friend have set me properly on fire. I’m up at the pass begging shards of skin and fat from our (very gracious) Wagnerian host as he dismembers those fire-glazed ducks like a US Marine stripping his M27, throwing down chicken wing katsu and a black-edged, red and white slablet of that superfat ibérico pork belly I saw in the chiller, but this side of some serious char siu treatment. I remember pulling a blistered lamb bone from my mouth and feeling the fat and salt and smoke it left behind, and that the wagyu came three ways, with maybe a wee burger in there, then nine million desserts, little Bakewells, something from the soft-serve machine I’d been staring at all night, something licked from the belly button of a birch log…

And then we’re out in the garden at last, Tom and I, lying in the long grass and oxeye daisies, looking up at the stars, battered, with a bottle of something, smoking tabs we’ve ponced off that sommelier, watching the bats overhead as they swoop and hustle for their dinner on the wing and… You know all those reasons I gave you at the beginning for not going to Ynyshir? I can’t remember any of them.

Ynyshir Restaurant and Rooms
Eglwys Fach, Machynlleth, Powys (01654 781209; ynyshir.co.uk)
Cooking 9
Location 9
Niceness 6
Score 8