The Welsh chef running one of the world’s 100 best restaurants
TOMOS Parry initially arrived at Cardiff University with hopes of being a journalist, but while there he found a job in a restaurant in the city.
Now he runs two successful London restaurants, has a fan in Jay Rayner and his first restaurant baby, Brat, has been named in the Top 100 Restaurants in the World as well as snagging a Michelin star.
Not bad for an Anglesey lad who started pot-washing at local restaurants at the age of 13.
The restaurant he landed a job at in Cardiff was Le Gallois, run by Grady Atkins, a chef who Tomos credits as his mentor and who brought an unfussy, seasonal style of cooking to Wales which dominates the best restaurants in the city these days.
But just over a decade on, Tomos has carved out an impressive niche in London, opening his first place, Brat, back in 2018, opening a second, and just as popular eatery at the height of the pandemic last year, while gathering accolades galore.
Brat is a mix of Basque-inspired cooking over coal and wood, which uses the best Welsh ingredients on offer.
Its signature dish is whole turbot, but its menu is flush with seafood from our west coast, all the way up to his homeland of Anglesey. The Shoreditch restaurant uses Menai Bridge shellfish, game from north Wales and flour to make the Brat bread from Felin Ganol watermill, near Llanrhystud, Ceredigion.
It has a Michelin star and last month was named by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants collective as one of the 100 best restaurants in the world – and was also the highest new entry from the UK.
The son of nurse Elen and electrician Gareth, father-of-two Tomos was destined to work in a practical field, gaining experience in kitchens from the age of 13 near home and eventually finding his niche when he worked at Le Gallois.
“I cooked at Le Gallois part-time really,” Tomos told the Western Mail. “I was doing it for free at the beginning and they took me on after university. I really loved it there and they were a good bunch of people and at the time it was the only good restaurant in Cardiff.”
I was definitely keen to draw Tomos on the Cardiff restaurant scene, but he didn’t hang around, citing Asador 44 as his favourite place to eat when he comes back to the Welsh capital, as well as mentor Grady Atkins’ new bar Bacareto, both a stone’s throw from the Principality Stadium.
“I was back in Cardiff for the Wales/New Zealand game last week,” said the 35-year-old. “There are lots of people doing good things. I really like Asador 44, I like the guys there, they’ve got a really good restaurant.”
So would Tomos actually come back and open a place in Cardiff, or elsewhere in Wales? Not at the moment he answered, but it’s not quite a closed door on that subject.
To be fair, though, Tomos and his Brat family have had quite a two years.
He explained: “At the start of the whole thing [Covid] we just didn’t know what to do, this was before furlough too. And I remember at that point I thought we might have to let it go because we weren’t taking any money. But, thankfully, that only lasted a couple of days.
“We tried the shop idea and that didn’t work, it was more hassle than it’s worth and we didn’t make enough money to pay the team.
“So, back in 2012 I ran a little popup in Hackney just testing out my ideas and it was great and it was outside. I thought about this concept at that point as we knew Covid was going to be bad and that Brat wouldn’t open that year, and I needed something to do with the team. So I thought, ‘Let’s make a version of Brat outside’.”
The outdoor Brat at Hackney’s Climpson Arches took off as it was one of the only restaurants in London where you could eat outside. Not only was it a win for diners, but Tomos and Brat were able to grow their hardworking team. At the same time, Tomos and wife Georgie welcomed daughter Delilah, joining son Idris on the second day of the first lockdown in 2020.
So what about that Welsh restaurant? “Not at the moment,” Tomos said. “If Covid hadn’t happened I’d be thinking differently about stuff. But at the moment it’s trying to lock these two restaurants down and make sure they are safe and the team are happy.
“If anything, we’d probably open another one in London. But maybe a pop-up restaurant in Wales, but that’s not definite at the moment. We have to be quite careful with our investments.
“I would love to be in Wales, obviously. For the team as well, it would make sense for them to cook and be next to the mountains and sea – they hear me talking non-stop about Wales, I have people working for me from across the world and they’ve not been to Wales, they just hear me banging on about it. So it would be nice for them to see what I’m actually talking about.”