Food review: Ynyshir, Machynlleth

Let’s start with the plaudits. Ynyshir is the number one rated Restaurant in Wales 2018. It has one Michelin star and five AA rosettes, one of only 14 British restaurants to hold that many.

In the Good Food Guide, it is ranked Britain’s 12th best restaurant while the Hardens Guide is broadly in agreement, rating it 15th.

It won Best Restaurant in Wales at the National Restaurant Awards and Best Place To Eat in Wales at the National Tourism Awards. The nation’s culinary brains trust have tipped it as the British restaurant most likely to achieve a second Michelin star, when those gongs are handed out later this year.

Set in 11 acres just south of the Snowdonia National Park, it is a country house restaurant offering a Japanese-inspired tasting menu that focuses on the best produce available in Mid and North Wales.

But that’s where convention ends. For the chef patron, Gareth Ward, and his partner, Amelia, have created a dining experience unlike any other in the UK. Gareth doesn’t give his diners menus; he sends them 20 plus tasting courses of whatever is in season.

He doesn’t pipe Bach or Mozart through the speakers; he plays AC/DC, Arctic Monkeys or Iggy Pop when service starts. He doesn’t separate his guests from the sanctity of the kitchen, he lets them sit on a bench at the pass so that they can watch him cook and chat with him during service. And he doesn’t offer the traditional starchy accompaniment to his beguiling plates of food: his modus operandi is to serve phenomenal meat with big, ballsy sauces and gels. Chefs are just as likely to be taking a couple of days off to harvest birch sap, seaweed, wild brambles and elderflower as they are to be cooking at the pass.

Vegans can stop reading now. So, for that matter, can vegetarians and pescatarians – unless either are prepared to flick the switch and make the change. In Gareth’s view, meat is beautifully tasty, eating it is entirely ethical when sourced from the nation’s best farms – so why deny yourself the pleasure?

Few restaurants in Europe are as uncompromising as Ynyshir. Few restaurants are as beautiful, either. Ynyshir offers a spellbinding three-or-four-hour dining experience that is the stuff of dreams. To quote Ward’s unique selling point (USP): he is ingredient-led, flavour-driven, fat-fuelled and meat-obsessed.

Diners in Shropshire and Mid-Wales aren’t unaccustomed to rare moments of genius. At the start of the millennium, Ludlow boasted three Michelin-starred restaurants, including Claude Bosi’s imperious, two-star Hibiscus. Gareth offers food that is even more ground-breaking that the dishes once offered there. He has a more singular vision, a more evolutionary approach. He is, in short, a Premier League big gun hunting down the best there is. More simply, he’s the best of the new breed of British chefs and over the next decade he’ll change the culinary landscape for good.

He cut his teeth at Sat Bains brilliant two-star Restaurant Sat Bains, where he was sous chef. When he arrived at Ynyshir, it was a Relais and Chateaux property whose owners conformed to accepted traditions and norms. So food was served along more traditional lines and Gareth started to build his reputation as a leading head chef. That changed when he and Amelia acquired Ynyshir and over the past two years it has undergone transformative change. He no longer offers a traditional menu: these days, it’s all about 20-course tasters.

Don’t be daunted by figures, however. You’ll leave Ynyshir feeling pleasantly full, rather than intimidated by food. For each courses is the tiniest taste, the most modest mouthful. Ynyshir is all about creating food memories by offering the best of the best of the best. And it does precisely that.

Service is brilliantly organised, though delightfully informal. A tattooed team of staff are light on their feet – and are frequently joined by the restaurant’s waiters – as they move up to 400 tiny plates of food per service.

We’ll come to the food momentarily, but there is much more to Ynyshir than that. Each pot, plate and bowl has been individually made by a local pottery; so that it is utterly unique. There are wooden spoons to eat with, beautiful black sheep rugs, huge chunks of oak that have been hewn into tables and door stops and a collection of vinyl that ranges from Kings of Leon and Biggie to The Verve and Bowie. The atmosphere is also different to other restaurants. Visiting Ynyshir is like being at a gig, rather than a restaurant. It’s an immersive experience in which guests are made to feel as though they’re part of proceedings, rather than a paying adjunct. It is the coolest restaurant in Britain. No contest.

The food is otherworldly. It is the stuff of kings. When my partner and I visited, we sat at the pass bench, next to sous chef Nathan and chef patron Gareth, watching them fly as we tucked in.

There were frequent moments of breathlessness; from two wagyu beef courses featuring tender and flavoursome pieces of meat slow-cooked for two days to a sensational duck hoison course, with pickled cucumber and crispy leg. A not-French-onion soup was brilliantly irreverent and packed full of flavours, while a sweet and sour mackerel, with sashimi and nitro-frozen raspberries, was absolute perfection.

Bread served with miso-infused cultured butter and whipped wagyu dripping was luxurious and a piece of char siu pork belly, which took Gareth a year to perfect, was jaw-droppingly, melt-in-the-mouth beautiful.

A tender, sweet prawn was served with garlic oil; a loin of lamb, perfectly pink, with a sharp, acidulated mint; and a lamb rib was so soft and tender that it pretty much fell off the bone before I’d had chance to lift it.

Desserts were remarkable: a miso treacle tart offered a hit of umami to go with sweet, fudge was made with wagyu fat rather than butter and a deconstructed tiramisu knocked the spots off Simon Rogan’s Sticky Tacky Pudding.

I’ve eaten at some pretty good restaurants during 30 years of gluttony; from a three Michelin star on Paris’s Champs Elysees to The Fat Duck, L’Enclume, Bibbendum and some of the stand-out restaurants in France and Germany.

And I’ve had some pretty extraordinary dining experiences; from eating sashimi-ed king fish in New Zealand, freshly caught with my own hands, to eating chunks of perfectly-crackled fire-roasted suckling pig on a Sardinian mountain.

For my money, Ynyshir is one of the top two restaurants I’ve ever visited while it provided one of the top four dining experiences of my life. Gareth Ward has redefined what it is to visit a restaurant. It rips up the template and creates something new, exciting and utterly exceptional.

The service is brilliant, the music thrilling and the food at a new level. Gareth, Amelia and their team have taken dining to a new level. Their achievement is truly extraordinary.