Giles Coren visits Wales' best restaurant and ends up 'battered' in the garden (original) (raw)

British columnist and well-known food critic Giles Coren paid Wales' best restaurant a visit and ended up "battered" in the garden after the "free-flowing booze" and delighted the dishes weren't just "a procession of gloopy French show-offy horses**t". Gareth Ward's now-famous two Michelin-starred restaurant, Ynyshir, has recently been named the best restaurant in the UK, a hugely prestigious accolade.

It led to Times food reviewer Coren paying a visit to the secluded restaurant, which has long been highly-regarded within Wales (it features on our 50 Best Restaurants in Wales list here ). He found dishes "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".

Although the review seemed to be heading in a different direction to start with, as Coren listed the reasons you might not want to visit ("it’s miles away", "it's expensive", "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") he ends up blown away by the "world class" rooms and, of course, the multi-course dinner (details of which you can find here ) which sets him "properly on fire".

Read more: The three Welsh restaurants named among the world’s best

Chef Patron to Ynyshir, Gareth Ward (Image: Richard Swingler)

Giles Coren, food critic for The Times, recently paid Ynyshir a visit (Image: Doug Peters/PA Wire)

After rattling through dishes like Orkney scallop bound in wagyu fat under a sliver of duck liver; a tiny claw of lobster enveloped in a satay sauce with a pinch of chopped peanuts; and black cod in miso with a "stunning" shard of eel under kaluga caviar, Coren is fully in awe of the food, the chef, the rooms, the restaurant and the location. To read the whole review, visit The Times website.

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