I was a stressed, angry monster of a person... now I'm having fun

ELLA WALKER takes a trip to Ynyshir Restaurant and Rooms, to meet its chef owner

GARETH WARD does dinner differently. “You know what you’re getting, but you don’t know how you’re getting it,” says the chef owner of the one Michelin-starred Ynyshir Restaurant and Rooms.

Eating his food is like following a Hansel and Gretel trail of mouth-sized morsels. The menu is simply a list of ingredients for you to speculate upon.

Dinner starts when you arrive, mid-afternoon. Upon check-in, we sip hot bowlfuls of duck broth, fragrant with coriander. It’s good groundwork for the 20 courses ahead.

“It’s just a lot of fun, our food. No bulls**t, no pretentiousness,” says Gareth, who grew up in County Durham and was named Good Food Guide Chef of the Year 2019. “It’s a group of guys in the kitchen, cooking with some incredible ingredients.”

His food is ‘ingredient led, flavour driven, fat-fuelled, and meat obsessed,’ and it works. Ynyshir won Best Restaurant in Wales at the National Restaurant Awards 2018.

But the Ynyshir (‘un-isshear’) you find today – fire pit, open glowing kitchen, guests at the ‘pass bench’ in the heart of the kitchen, chatting as the chef barbecues – is the product of Gareth hitting a point where things just felt broken.

“I was this stressed out, angry monster of a person, and I actually damaged myself,” he says, recalling how several years ago, his behaviour led to him doing service entirely alone – his team had walked out.

“I couldn’t get any staff because I was just horrible to everybody,” he says frankly. “No one wanted to work here, and it was just making my life harder, so I thought, ‘I have to change. It’s not them, it’s me.’”

Now there’s no shouting in the kitchen. “I don’t believe in it any more,” he says. “I’m here to have fun.” And if something goes wrong? “It happens,” he says. “Let’s just rectify it.”

There might be no shouting, but the dining room throbs with the record choices of Gareth and his partner and general manager, Amelia Eiriksson. “I’m mad for music,” says Gareth. “I can’t stop buying vinyl. Music just makes the whole experience better.”

The restaurant in mid Wales, sits on 14-and-a-half acres, up against Ynyshir RSPB. You can cut from one to the other, meandering past Gareth’s beehives.

The beach is a 10-minute drive away, and makes for good samphire hunting. It’s where they source sea purslane – its leaves bob in the Martini, and tangle with a crab dish beneath a pickled sliver of turnip.

The line between inside and outside is fuzzy. The two blur. Take Gareth’s birch syrup, which is used in place of maple syrup.

From the end of February, it requires head chef Nathan to be out of the kitchen for a month, tapping birch trees across the property. Last year, 1,000 litres of birch water resulted in just four litres of syrup. “Nathan drills the trees, puts the plugs in, catches the water, and then he’s got to reduce it down by 98% – and get it preserved,” says Gareth.

Gareth and Amelia have plans beyond the demands of foraging and preserving, too. Ideas for glamping, a pub, bakery, shop, summer festival and a secret cocktail bar are all smouldering away. “I want to make it into this really cool mini-village,” he says.

For now though, he’s busy enjoying his open, aggression-free kitchen. “It’s like cooking at home, innit?” he says. “This is our home, this is our kitchen, and these are our guests.”

And Gareth’s guests are sent home with a slice of apple tart each, because he’s never quite done feeding you.