When your restaurant reservation comes with an official warning about flashing lights, you suspect you’re in for something special. And then you pull into the driveway and you’re faced with a life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex replica gifted by regular patron Ed Sheeran – and then you know it’s going to be special.
Everything at Ynyshir Restaurant & Rooms is turned up to 11. Well, technically 30 – as that’s roughly how many courses you receive at dinner – each one an explosive mouthful, more technical and tasty than the last.
It’s been a blockbuster summer, from sporting spectacles to cinematic masterpieces. If you’re looking for a suitably epic meal to match it, set your sat nav to Ynyshir. (But make sure you select the one near Snowdonia, not Cardiff, to avoid potential divorce proceedings.)
It’s a proper road trip to get to Wales’s first and only two-Michelin-starred restaurant – and it’s well worth the 4.5 hours from Central London. You’ll wend your way through Artists Valley, named by the Victorian landscape painters who fell in love with the area and flocked here to capture its rugged beauty and cascading waterfalls.
If you arrive early, an RSPB reserve neighbours the restaurant, with beautiful butterfly trails and more birds than you can count. There’s actually no need as they’ve done that for you – more than 50 different species had already been spotted that day. Shout out to the Willow Warbler.
Joshua Greenwood
Joshua Greenwood
James-Edwards / Hybrid Media Productions
Your reservation card also playfully announces that ‘Gates open at 3pm’. I had assumed this was merely a suitably rock’n’roll expression for this headlining culinary act. But it turns out, the gates are literally locked until then. Once opened, you’re welcomed into 14 acres of undulating gardens. Beehives, finished in a multitude of pastels, resemble miniature Brighton terraces. Wildflowers bring a further burst of colour, while paths guide your exploration – one leading to a wood-fired sauna for guests to enjoy.
At the head of the estate stands a converted 16th-century hunting lodge – now the arena for some of the best cooking in the UK, led by Chef Patron Gareth Ward and his partner (and master of ceremonies) Amelia Eiriksson.
Amelia Eiriksson
James-Edwards / Hybrid Media Productions
Gareth Ward
Lafont Hospitality
Ward sharpened his blades under Michelin-starred chefs Sat Bains and Aaron Patterson. Since 2013, he’s been leading the culinary charge at Ynyshir. And while Ward has won multiple ‘Chef of the Year’ awards and the restaurant has twice picked up the ‘Best Restaurant in the UK’ gong, qualified architect Eiriksson has transformed the former hotel into the resplendent restaurant with rooms it is today.
Our bedroom had a proper sense of place: original Welsh slate flooring; chunky oak furniture handmade with traditional dovetail joins; leather chairs strewn with local sheepskins. Tate-worthy arrangements of dried flowers mounted in driftwood border the large windows that look out onto drystone walls. Look close enough and you’ll spot a small statue of the Michelin man peeking back at you. There's a wood burner and cosy dressing gowns for colder nights.
James Edwards / Hybrid Media Productions
Once you’ve had time to refresh and marinate in the gorgeous Goodwash Company toiletries – the Barry Island company makes Aesop look lacklustre – it’s time for the real fun to begin. Dinner awaits – just follow the music…
Ynyshir takes its soundtrack almost as seriously as its cuisine. So seriously, it employs its own in-house DJ, Jacob Kelly. Played through audiophile-approved Bowers & Wilkins speakers, Kelly spins the vinyl for the evening, the beats matching the menu’s progression. Where the first courses are more delicate and light, the sounds follow suit – and when more spice is introduced, the tracks take on more heat, too.
Eleonora Boscarelli
But before your first bite, you’ll be taken on a short sojourn to the restaurant’s underground Himalayan salt chamber. Inside, we spy Ward slicing through Balfegó bluefin tuna in preparation for one of the night’s first dishes.
There are only 16 covers in the intimate dining room, couples sitting side by side, facing the open kitchen at the far end. There’s almost a Narnia vibe to the space – with fur coats hanging on the walls.
You’re served by a troupe of smiling staff – each dressed head to toe in black, equipped with earpieces and lavalier mics so they can communicate with the kitchen in real time. They’re somewhere between stagehands and performers; the assistant restaurant manager tells us she actually has a background in theatre, and there is something balletic about the way they flow around the dining floor. She tells me they average 25,000 steps during service alone. Your water cup – handcrafted by SUS Gallery in titanium so the water stays ice cold – will never be less than two sips down before it’s topped up.
Each member of staff has an encyclopedic knowledge of the courses and sources, which is admirable at any restaurant; astonishing at one that serves up to 30 dishes in one sitting.
James Edwards / Hybrid Media Productions
The odyssey begins with an exploration of Ward's love for both Japanese cuisine and culture. A cup of dashi – infused with a combination of three- and ten-year-aged kombu – prepares your palate for a delicate Japanese madai with white soy and wasabi dressing. It’s a study in simplicity and balance. Hamachi, prized for its rich, buttery texture, follows with a teriyaki sauce emboldened by Wakayama budo sansho – a rare, premium variety of Japanese pepper known for its bright citrus aroma and tongue-tingling heat.
Where many chefs boast about sourcing all their ingredients locally, Ward doesn’t constrain himself by geography. If it’s available nearby, of course, that will be the first port of call – even sap from their own birch trees is extracted for one of the courses. But whether it’s the Japanese female A5 rib eye (the highest official grade of wagyu beef) in the next course, or the Western Australian winter black truffle in the following, Ward will go wherever necessary to put the best on your plate.
My favourite chapter of the menu included a triptych of dishes that showed just how much smoke can elevate a dish to frankly ethereal levels. Brilliantly paired with a buttery dry furmint from Tokaj, the first was smoked carabineros prawns served with wild garlic (the crustaceans from the Spanish coast; the alliums foraged from the restaurant garden). The second was Hokkaido scallop with a miso foam topped with N25 Kaluga caviar – enough to make me salivate at the mere recollection. And finally Atlantic black cod was brought to life with a positively filthy smoked butter. It was about this point where my wife sighed contentedly, “Well, this is basically food sex, isn’t it?”
Eleonora Boscarelli
Joshua Greenwood
Another element to the whole experience that is objectively sensual is the cutlery. In the early stages, you’re armed with a wooden set of utensils made by Marunao, each feather-light piece painstakingly crafted by a single man and sanded to a finish as soft as silk. Alongside the restaurant’s deference to world-class craftsmanship, there is a genuine ergonomic benefit to these – both their smoothness and the way they remain neutral in temperature reduce the barrier between you and the food. The same principle is upheld by the handblown Zalto glassware – so wafer-thin that the wine seems to be projected onto your tongue by teleportation.
The courses build in richness and flavour, bursts of heat bouncing from wasabi to jalapeño to chilli. The Singapore chilli crab was a real standout, not least because it was served with a doughnut-like fried bun perfect for swooping through the bowl and sucking up every last drop of the fiery sauce left in the crab’s wake.
Barbecued lobster then blue-belly shrimp wrap up the ocean part of the journey, before new fighting irons are brought to you for the meat courses. The metal cutlery is just as noteworthy – made by on-site blacksmith Lee Jones. Yep, Ynyshir has its own resident blacksmith who not only makes knives from recycled railway spikes, but forges everything from the door handles to shelf brackets, and even sharpens the chefs’ knives. There is something rather Game of Thrones about this – the steak knives honed enough to take out the Night King.
Miso-cured duck liver with Hokkaido scallop and green strawberry brings you firmly into the carnivore zone. And it's followed by an inspired reinterpretation of traditional Chinese duck.
Joshua Greenwood
In this case, a Silver Hill duck – an exclusive hybrid breed developed in County Monaghan, Ireland – is aged for two weeks, slow-cooked to render the fat and finished on open flame with a crisp, glazed skin. It combines the deep flavour and fat content of the Peking duck with the finer, softer texture of the Aylesbury. Naturally, it’s served with a homemade hoisin sauce and pickled cucumber. (Hold the pancakes.)
French squab pigeon with smoked eel sauce, spring onion and roasted sesame seeds comes a close second, while the A5 beef makes a welcome return in a one-two punch that knocks the savouries to a knockout close.
Desserts begin with Japanese crown melon grown exclusively in Shizuoka, its melt-in-the-mouth texture and rich, elegant sweetness is a result of unique pruning that ensures only one fruit is grown per vine.
The subsequent kuzu custard prompted my wife to declare, “I could happily bathe in a vat of that.” While my favourite of the sweet courses was the slow-churned banana soft-serve ice cream [pictured below], which comes adorned with the aforementioned Ynyshir birch syrup and a generous topping of salty N25 Kaluga caviar. Frankly, it shouldn’t be legal.
James Edwards / Hybrid Media Productions
Another signature dessert – tiramisu laden with rocket-fuel-strength Ethiopian coffee – is accompanied by the DJ’s biggest drop of the night: ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat and a disco ball to light up the room.
It’s a fittingly theatrical end to an evening that has rarely stopped surprising. After you’ve finished, you won’t need to eat again for a week. More troublingly, I’m not sure food will ever taste quite the same again.
This August Bank Holiday, Ynyshir is also hosting The Elemental Retreat – a new three-day experience combining Gareth Ward’s acclaimed cooking with a programme of cold water immersion, sauna, breathwork, guided walks, foraging, bushcraft and knife-making in rural Wales. The retreat has been created with James O’Keefe, a high-performance coach and breathwork instructor, and Chris Wimshurst, a business psychologist and cognitive behavioural coach. Together with Gareth, they have shaped a programme centred on performance, recovery and resilience, with food, fire and the wild Welsh landscape at its heart.
The dinner experience at Ynyshir starts from £450+ 20% VAT per person. See more at ynyshir.co.uk
