The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Menus that sing of the sea, the hedgerow – and the insect farm
From fish and foraged fungi to chilli crickets, the county’s innovative food scene has it all, says Kerry Walker
Astiff wind rakes the Atlantic at Freshwater West, where dunes make a joyous leap down to a vast scoop of butterscotch sand. Hammered by Pembrokeshire’s wildest surf, this beach’s open horizons blow away the cobwebs and make you feel glad to be alive on a summer’s day. And never more so than when you are about to get your chops around a Café Mor lobster roll slathered in Welsh seaweed butter – each bite delivering a delirious burst of the sea.
Such treats come courtesy of Jonathan Williams, who heads up the “world’s first solar-powered seaweed kitchen” on the beach. A keen forager, Jonathan swapped a Swindon office for a Pembrokeshire food truck in 2010, and 11 years later it’s still love. He never tires of combing these shores in search of wild ingredients that go into the likes of brekky rolls with laverbread, and fish butties with home-made pickles and seaweed-chilli sauce.
Café Môr is just one example of how Pembrokeshire is embracing its culinary roots with new-found gusto. While
England’s south west, on the other side of the Bristol Channel, gets all the fuss, the food scene has been quietly booming here of late, with chefs pouncing on outstanding local produce and finding scope to unleash their full creativity.
Just to the north, the Little Retreat unfurls in glorious wooded seclusion on the shores of the Cleddau Estuary. In 12 acres of private land, it’s an alluring eco luxury escape, with chicly designed bell tents, geo domes with wood-fired hot tubs and, new this year, Lotus Stargazer tents. But the real highlight is the chance to go foraging, fishing and feasting with Michelin-trained chef Matt Powell (fishingandforagingwales.co. uk). Matt knows Pembrokeshire’s hedgerows and shores like the back of
his hand. After a day hunting for seaweeds, plants and fungi, he cooks private multi-course dinners with an exquisite eye for integral flavours and artistic flair.
“Everything about Pembrokeshire’s natural surrounds inspires me. There’s a deep feeling of an almost magnetic grounding for me here,” says Matt, whose “feasts” revive lost cooking traditions and champion wild ingredients in dishes like limpet mousse with shortpicked seaweeds, freshly caught lobster with sea vegetables, and a dessert called “stack rocks”.
Heading west to the southernmost crook of St Brides Bay, Marloes Sands is the kind of beach a pirate-obsessed kid might draw, full of ragged cliffs and caves and hidden nooks. The Pembrokeshire Coast Path threads above it to the Runwayskiln (runwayskiln.co.uk). Here chef Charlie Langrick and his partner Claire Pepperell have given a new lease of life to farm buildings and a former piggery. The aim was to raise the coastal dining bar in a season-driven, farm-to-fork way.
Now you have to book ahead to stand any chance of snagging a courtyard table for lunch, with dishes like cured sea trout with buckwheat rye bread and roast field mushrooms with braised puy lentils and cavolo nero on the menu. They also offer picnics, with cauliflower pakoras, carrot hummus and raspberryand-chocolate brownies that sure beat sandwiches.
Unless, of course, those sandwiches happen to come from Lobster and MôR (lobsterandmor.co.uk), just a pebblethrow north of Marloes in the laid-back, cove-hugging village of Little Haven. Tucked down a lane near the front, this coolly nautical deli is stocked with local crafts and picnic fixings: from Caws Cenarth cheese to Upton Farm ice cream and their own gin Tir & MôR, with notes of citrus and thyme. This is, apparently, a great match for the lobsters splashing around in the tank at the back. The takeaway menu is delightfully succinct: crab sandwiches, lobster brioche and ales infused with Pembrokeshire seaweed.
Swinging north along narrow roads that pass a string of Havens, you eventually reach Solva, with pastel-coloured cottages spilling down to a deep thumbprint of a harbour where boats lazily bob. For more years than she cares to remember, Mrs Will (facebook.com/ MrsWillTheFish) has been dressing crabs and preparing seafood platters. The concept is as simple as it is brilliant: call ahead to place an order, collect from her back door and head to the seafront to devour. She is rightfully a local legend.
Newer to Solva is MamGu (mamguwelshcakes.com) a retro-style café, all slate, reclaimed wood and limewash, where the humble Welsh cake has been elevated to new heights. It’s the brainchild of Thea and Becky, friends who travelled the world before landing in Pembrokeshire for a new life with a gazebo, griddle and sweet tooth.
If there is one thing all of Pembrokeshire’s food pioneers seem to have in common, it is a profound love of this land and coast. This shines through in St Davids, too. Billed as Britain’s smallest city and topped off by a whopping medieval cathedral, the coastal honeypot has a ravishing stretch of coast and some of Wales’ best restaurants on its doorstep. A new string to its culinary bow is the Really Wild Emporium (facebook.com/ReallyWildEmporium), the lockdown baby of foraging guides Julia and John Mansfield (facebook. com/WildAboutPembrokeshire).
They’ve waved a magic, vintagechic wand on a decaying Art Deco building, and peppering their refreshingly original menu with foraged ingredients: pan-seared lamb rump with pickled rock samphire, pea and laverbread-charcoal tartlet.
St Davids seems to attract great culinary minds that think alike. Moving into fine-dining waters, Blas (blasrestaurant.com) is the restaurant at minimalist-chic Twr Y Felin hotel, where Welsh architect Keith Griffiths has worked his magic on a former windmill. With 20 new rooms recently opened, the hotel has upped its gastro game further still by snapping up Gareth Evans as development chef, formerly sous chef at Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant Dinner.
And the food? Divine. The clean, bright flavours of Solva crab with cucumber, apple and radish are the perfect prelude to meltingly tender Welsh lamb sliding into the deep umami flavour of hen of the woods, black garlic and roasted onion. People are whispering Michelin star – and with good reason.
In meadows humming with bees just outside of St Davids, the Bug Farm (thebugfarm.co.uk) and Grub Kitchen (grubkitchen.co.uk) are the joint venture of Dr Sarah Beynon, an academic entomologist, ecologist and farmer, and her husband, Andy Holcroft, a chef who has forged his reputation by making edible insects centre stage in his menus. “Insects are the way forward in a world that consumes too much meat,” says Sarah.
Feisty chillied crickets, insect-studded pakoras and the signature Bug Burger, with a tropical hit of jackfruit are part of their grand plan to make entomophagy (insect eating) the sustainable norm, not the novelty. But the real surprise is they taste fantastic – richly textured and original. Here the grub is not only good, it’s the future.