Perfect dining – Wales’ 2023 Michelin stars
■ Ynyshir – Machynlleth, Powys
Two Michelin stars
Gareth Ward’s Ynyshir in Machynlleth became the first Welsh restaurant to ever receive two Michelin stars in 2022, cementing its reputation as Wales’ most acclaimed restaurant.
From its peaceful setting on the Dyfi Estuary to its luxurious bedrooms, Ynyshir is everything a destination restaurant with rooms should be. But it’s Gareth’s cooking that’s truly memorable and driven by a mantra of “flavour-driven, fat-fuelled and meat-obsessed”.
His 30-course tasting menu features dishes such as miso cured black cod with pickled shiitake mushrooms.
■ The Walnut Tree Inn – Llanddewi Skirrid, Monmouthshire
One Michelin star
Located just a few miles from Abergavenny, The Walnut Tree has been an iconic Welsh food destination since the 1960s.
Nowadays it’s part-owned by Shaun Hill, a true veteran of British cooking, who serves boldflavoured yet unfussy French cooking with a scattering of international influences, including dishes like fillet of beef with salt brisket hash and sticky toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream.
■ Home by James Sommerin – Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan
One Michelin star
With its moody, dark interior, blacked-out windows and high-end cooking, Home was the new restaurant from chef James Sommerin and his family. A previous Michelin star holder at Restaurant James Sommerin in Penarth, which closed in 2020, he has shown that his cooking is still of Michelin standard.
■ SY23 – Aberystwyth, Ceredigion
One Michelin star
SY23 is co-owned by Nathan Davies, a star of Great British Menu and a former sous chef at Ynyshir. At his Aberystwyth restaurant, he serves a menu of locally-sourced meat and fish cooked over charcoal. Many of his ingredients come from the SY23 postcode in which the restaurant is based.
Influences on Nathan’s cooking come from across Europe and Asia and foraged, pickled and fermented ingredients all feature on the menu.
■ Sosban and the Old Butchers – Menai Bridge, Anglesey
One Michelin star
This cosy restaurant on Anglesey is run by chef Stephen Stevens. Located in an old butcher’s shop, the Michelin Guide praises Sosban for its “boldly flavoured modern dishes with original, personal touches”.
Stephen cooks singlehandedly at this eight-seater restaurant and makes the most of locally-foraged ingredients including mosses and seaweeds, which he sources from the Anglesey coast.
■ Beach House – Oxwich Bay, Swansea
One Michelin star
Set in a former coal store with panoramic views over Gower’s Oxwich Bay, the Beach House is run by Hywel Griffith, who is passionate about celebrating local Welsh produce.
According to Michelin, at the Beach House “sophisticated, classical cooking is the focus and dishes are reassuringly recognisable”.
■ The Whitebrook – Monmouthshire
One Michelin star
Chris Harrod’s high-end cooking focuses on locally-sourced ingredients and freshly-foraged herbs and sea vegetables.
A former Great British Menu banquet winner, 90% of Chris’ ingredients come from just a 12-mile radius of his rural Wye Valley restaurant.
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“The actual building is exactly the same – this bar, it’s been spruced up a little bit, but it’s the same as it was,” said Pauline, who recalls that packed-out services would see four people crammed around the tiny cast-iron-legged, round tables which are synonymous with British pubs up and down the country, and if you ordered one of Franco’s huge platters that had to go on the floor!
“It would be terribly busy. I thought I’d try for a week and I wouldn’t last a week, but I did. I’d never done this sort of thing before, but to be honest I needed the money and the wages were fabulous,” said Pauline, who you get the feeling would take no nonsense but once you’re a regular you couldn’t imagine the place without her. So much so that when Shaun took over and reopened the place, he rang her up to start back in her role.
“It was something like £2.50 per night, I think,” Pauline continued, who mentioned it was “absolutely heartbreaking” to see the restaurant close in the mid-2000s.
“An old schoolfriend was working here at the time and she said, ‘You’ll be all right, give it a go’, and things were tough. I’d been married, which was a disaster, and I had this baby. I told her, ‘I don’t like people much!’
“But I gave it a whirl, for £2.50 a night I had to. She talked me through the menu during the afternoons and she went off to become a nurse and left me to it – and I’ve been here ever since.”
Pauline says she’s met an “awful lot of lovely people” over her years and can’t believe how time has whizzed by. I ask her who The Walnut Tree regulars are. She must have spoken to hundreds of them over the years, but it turns out she made an impression on them.
“Last year I had my 50th anniversary party here and a photo of me ended up on Abergavenny Voice on Facebook – I was horrified,” she tells me and added: “Having said that, I had 175 messages from people who have known me over the years, it was absolutely lovely. People were saying, ‘I can’t believe you are still there’.
“There was one from a boy who lived in the same street as me and he worked behind the bar, he became a journalist, but in the last days of her life he’d bring his old mum, she must have been 86, 87 then. They’d sit in the bar after they’d had their food and I’d ask her if she wanted a little tot of brandy.
“‘Just a little one,’ she’d say. And her son would ask her if she knew who I was. After saying I was a ‘nice lady who worked at The Walnut Tree’, he said I was just around the corner from where they lived. ‘Oo,’ she said. ‘I used to drink whiskey with your mother!’ I told her my mother was a lady. ‘Aye, she was a lady, but she loved a whiskey in the pantry with me!’” Pauline laughed, with the knowledge that she probably has a million lovely stories like that.
“It’s lovely, though.”
One of her favourite moments at The Walnut Tree came last year when straight-talking, sweary Harry Potter star Margolyes popped in for dinner while she was at the nearby Hay Winter Festival.
“I watch everything she’s in,” Pauline said and remembers instructing the other staff that if the star turned up to let her know and she’d be there in a flash.
“The Friday went by, nothing,” she recalled. “On the Saturday lunchtime, this young lady came in and she said, ‘My name is Charlotte, I have a table booked’. Well, behind Charlotte, in came Miriam. And I said, ‘You’ve made my day!’
“‘Why’s that?’ she asked. I told her I was halfway through her book and I couldn’t wait to get back to bed to read it. She was great, exactly as she comes across on TV, and we had pictures. She told me to get her the book and she would sign it, well it was by the side of the bed. Anyway, she wrote me a lovely note and it was fab.”
Pauline confesses she loves it when people tell her they wonder if she’s still behind the bar, but dodges the question of retirement... much like her boss Shaun.
“Every day someone asks me when I’m going to retire and I can’t bear the thought of it,” she said. “It’s a very hard thing for me to think about at the minute.
“I don’t think my job has changed over all these years. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I’m past it now. So I just do what comes naturally.”
the pudding, pictured above, was great, so light yet packed with delicate hunks of the meat – it wasn’t a pastry pudding by the way, the fillings were encased in jelly and so the accompanying homemade crisps (yes!) and the remoulade added a nice extra texture to the starter. It was a light, pleasing starter and I loved the flavours, both of the pudding solo and all the elements together.
■ Book to eat at the Walnut tree by visiting www.thewalnuttreeinn.com