Feasts from the sea
Cai Ross and Toby Watson have spent decades immersed in the north Wales food scene – and now they have released a beautiful guide to the region’s sh and seafood which includes everything from recipes to a directory of the top producers, writes Jenny White
FROM Conwy mussels and iconic sh and chips, Cai Ross and Toby Watson’s new book, North Wales Fish and Seafood shines a light on many of the region’s nest produce and top producers. e pair are well quali ed for the task: Cai is a food writer and restaurateur who runs the Paysanne restaurant in Deganwy, and Toby is a chef who previously ran Sands restaurant just up the road from Paysanne, and now runs Llandudno-based Outside Gourmet Catering, creating bespoke menus for high-pro le clients.
Between them (and with beautiful photography by Huw Jones) they have created a de nitive guide to north Wales’ sh and seafood which combines recipes by Toby with Cai’s interviews with producers. It also includes a comprehensive list of local sh and seafood suppliers in north Wales.
“It was my lockdown album, of a sort,” says Cai. “We’d come to rediscover north Wales anew when we were slowly released, and we found all these amazing coastal paths that I’d never known about.
“We were eating a lot of local sh too. Some of the shermen were going out and leaving their catches in honesty boxes, so we were eating fresh crab, mussels and even lobster, all for insanely reasonable prices!
“e book came about from a sense of giving something back, but really, I wanted to do something that would advertise to a wider world just what an amazing place north Wales is and what a great foodie area it is.”
e book showcases north Wales as a natural larder teeming with all of these creative, passionate food creators.
“Fish and meat are the obvious things, but cheeses like Snowdonia and Castell Gwyn, or the bara briths of Siwgr a Sbeis, chocolatiers like Baravelli’s in Conwy with their unbelievably ornate Easter eggs that they sell in Harrods,” says Cai.
“Plus, the amount of successful craft drink producers that have developed over the past 10 years is extraordinary! Purple Moose and Wild
Horse breweries, and gins makers like Aber Falls and Snowdonia Distillery. It’s not hard to eat like a king up here without using a single ingredient that isn’t from north Wales, even the salt.”
While Cai focused on interviews, Toby drew the recipes from the thousands he has developed during his career.
“It was nice to step away from my day job and do something a bit di erent – to put them down in some kind of structural order and almost bring them to life rather than just have them led away,” he says. His favourite recipe in the book is for
nd moules marinière.
“I’ve spent quite a lot of my life in and around France so I may be a bit biased, but this is a great combination of avours,” he says. “We have the added advantage that the best mussels in the world are on our doorstep.
“As well as mussels my other favourite ingredient would have to be the scallops. ey are only in season for a short period, but once you’ve tasted them, you won’t bother ordering frozen out-of-season scallops.”
While Toby’s career has taken him down the outside catering route, Cai still runs the muchloved restaurant he took over from his parents 20 years ago.
“My parents set Paysanne up in 1988,” he says. “ey’d been running a pub near Corwen, and Mum was really eager to move on from scampi in
‘performance’ feels di erent.”
Cai has seen some big changes over the past few decades. When Paysanne opened in 1988, most of the other restaurants in the area were equally small, family-owned places with similar cover space.
“You were just starting to get chefs who wanted to push the boat out a bit and make names for themselves – this was post-marco Pierre White and Harveys,” Cai recalls. “ere wasn’t a great deal in terms of variety back then, but now you have a much wider spectrum.
“Conwy’s a good example of this: you have everything from a classic Indian restaurant – really good one, actually – to well-made pub food, or something a bit more re ned like Signatures on the marina, then you have Nick Rudge’s Jackdaw, with its elegant, exclusively north Walian tasting menu. at kind of stylistic breadth is now par for the course in north Wales in a way it wasn’t 20 years ago.”
Remarkably, Paysanne has only had four chefs in 36 years: David Hughes, who has been there since 2009, took it over with Cai about 10 years ago and they run it jointly.
“It works a treat,” says Cai.
Having been immersed in the north Wales food scene for so long, it was easy for Cai to draw up a list of interviewees for the new book.
“A lot of them were names I’d known having bought their wares over the years and I knew they knew what they were talking about.”
He credits Colin and Charlotte Bennett – frequent diners at Paysanne – as being very helpful.
“eir story is fascinating,” he says. “ey’ve cultivated an enormously successful vineyard, Gwinllan, growing several grape varieties, winning armfuls of awards, and all just o the A55 near Colwyn Bay.
“Others I had to seek out but were extremely gracious in their assistance, and you can tell with every one of them that they were in it for the passion and loved what they did. I wanted to get an interesting variety of interviewees with di erent stories to tell.
“Danny White-meyer, for instance, was obsessed with the sustainability of sh stocks and how best to harness that ethos within his awardgarlanded sh and chip shop, Enochs – which is superb and accounts for at least nine of the extra 14 pounds I put on over lockdown.”
Along the way he learnt some interesting new facts. Carl, a lobster sherman, told him all about how the algae dictates the way the lobsters feed and spawn; and he learnt how the tides a ect the quality of the salt at Halen Môn near Menai Bridge and give it its speci c avour.
Cai did also sneak in one recipe from Paysanne: its ever-popular sh soup.
“I love cooking but it tends to be the same French-country style recipes that my mum taught me, and we’ve already released a Paysanne cook book,” he says. “If I had done the recipes, it would have just been more of the same. Toby’s wheelhouse is much broader and international, so he was able to bring all sorts of in uences to bear on these recipes.”
Cai especially loves Toby’s mackerel rillette recipe and is now eyeing up his cured sea trout recipe to make a starter for friends.
“It’ll have to be rainbow trout as sea trout isn’t quite in season yet, but don’t let on!” he adds.
He hopes that the book will encourage people to eat more local sh.
“Also, I hope that anyone coming here on holiday will take a copy home with them and have it in their kitchen as a permanent reminder of that time they visited a truly stunning part of the world, and even encourage them to think about coming back again, maybe with a shing rod,” he adds.
Toby has similar hopes. “I hope people can read it and appreciate north Wales’ great local produce, and also appreciate the bene ts of eating food that’s in season,” he says. “We’ve become so used to supermarket access to produce all year round. It would be nice if there was more of an acknowledgement of how much tastier things are to eat when they are in season – not to mention the obvious environmental bene ts.”
It was my lockdown album, of a sort. We’d come to rediscover north Wales anew when we were slowly released, and we found all these amazing coastal paths that I’d never known about