‘We really are very lucky,’ Amelia Eiriksson tells me as we bounce our way around the lanes to Ynyshir, a restaurant with rooms in the Welsh countryside. She runs the place as general manager while her partner, Gareth Ward, heads up the kitchen team. This stunning location, wedged between the foot of Snowdonia national park and the sea, is like a panacea for the fug and flurry of London. We (I’ve brought my partner) have rattled along for four long hours on the train but our problems seem distant by the time tires crunch their way up the restaurant’s gravel driveway.
The house is set within extensive grounds, fourteen whole acres in fact, so if you’re visiting, make sure you arrive in plenty of time to work up an appetite by rambling across some of them. Even the immediate gardens are impressive however, and really show off the unique microclimate of this area. Areas of Snowdonia are basically temperate rainforest and the humidity hangs in the air. In the gardens, we see tree trunks fuzzy with damp moss, gigantic-leafed aquatic plants lurking like Triffids and ferns aplenty.
Nooks and crannies of the garden explored, it’s time for a cuppa in our beautiful room – cue comments about the bathroom being the size of our London flat – and we discover that Ynyshir provide the best glazed pastries known to woman alongside their teabags. If you’ve ever eaten a kouign amann (a sort of sugar-crusted butter-laden cake) then this will remind you a little of one, perhaps crossed with a palmier. It’s basically a glorious swirl of buttery pastry with a sweet glaze that, once bitten, offers no return to the path of resistance. Top tip: Ynyshir will refresh them as many times as you like.
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Gareth Ward at Ynyshir: mixing Welsh produce with Japanese techniques