I feel like I am going to get used to the drive to Ynyshir. The nondescript hard concrete of the motorways and a-roads until Shrewsbury, with Welshpool marking that we have entered a different country. From there its rolling green hills and sheep and not much else. Roads meander in direct correlation with the streams that tumble alongside them. Homes are sparse and thinly spread apart out here – the scenery is ample friendship. It’s beautiful. I love how much the seasons have altered the landscape in the five months since we last visited. Winter has rooted itself firmly in rural Wales; the trees have exposed their souls to the elements, grass sodden and under the permanent shadow of cloud. Even in the company of a woman, the last two of the three and a bit hour journey is peaceful and revitalising.

We roll through stone posts that mark the entrance and wind around to the large white building. There have been some tweaks made. The white linen has been replaced by oversized wooden tables . The bowls and plates more dramatic, as are the hand carved spoons that greet the first course. It is a deliberate ploy to be more in tune with the surrounding environment. And it’s working. My best meal of 2017 just delivered an even better one in 2018.

I won’t go over every dish again – there is all of that on my previous post. Dinner here takes up to four hours and involves a large quantity of small dishes. The not French onion soup is still the first thing you eat and is still perfect. This is followed by a wedge of duck leg, cooked slowly, blasted through hot oil, dressed in sesame oil and topped with spring onions. It’s like the best crispy duck from your local Chinese. We have the bread course again. The sour dough seems to have improved – the pockets of air beneath the dark crust less restrained, the flavour deeper.

Mackerel is warmed through on the pass lights so that the texture has altered but the fish still retains the bright qualities of its raw state. With this is a rhubarb ketchup, slices of fermented rhubarb, and grated lardo. It is a dish that leans on acidity. It is bright and brilliantly conceived. A crab dish with sweet corn was a highlight of our last visit, this time the seasons dictate that we have turnip with the crustacean instead. It improves the dish, the earthiness working with the sweet meat and soy dressing that has the flavour of roasted shells. It is a nailed on three star dish. We have the wagyu beef burger course that takes the profile of a Big Mac and putting them in a dice sized piece of beef you hold between finger and thumb, and then the short rib from the same beast with shiitake mushroom and seaweed. I’ve eaten both dishes three times within six months. They still amaze me.

When I’m asked about Ynyshir I always say the same thing; nobody in England does flavour like Gareth Ward. Every dish is built around the maximum impact, that smashes you in the mouth with a closed fist. Duck liver is whipped with a little tofu, with grated smoked eel, a spelt cracker, and cubes of apple that cuts clean through the richness. It has pinpoint balance. We have the grilled prawn with umami rich soy bisque again. The langoustine, fat and sweet, is the best I’ve eaten, anywhere. The seasons have been kind.

We surge on to more protein. Duck breast with salted plum excites me a lot less than deer with crisped fat and pickled black beans. There is nothing technically wrong with the former, the breast meat just fights a little too hard to keep up with its company. The latter has more bravado, more swagger. It threatens to be too big until you grow a pair and man, or woman, up. Pork belly with a sauce using last year’s cherries is equally massive. I have no idea how long and slowly it takes to cook pork belly this well but my guess is that it’s long enough for a man, or woman, to grow a beard.

A salt baked swede, alit and sinister looking, marks the cawl course. I don’t like it. The bits of lamb heart at the base are lovely, but the rest of the stew is a bit nonplus. A dish based around swede – that watery root veg – is always going to be an uphill struggle with me. And then it’s the same two Welsh lamb courses that marked our first lunch here. The lamb spare rib is still in my top three dishes ever, the lamb neck with kombucha still the best lamb with mint sauce you’ll ever eat.

Two courses bridge the savoury to the sweet. The first is less conventional; onions, cooked for a couple of days in beer and wagyu fat, in a bowl with thickened cooking juices and torn sour dough. They call it bread and gravy, though to me it echoes French onion soup. It’s dark and heady and absolutely delicious. Beauvale cheese with pear takes two ingredients in peak condition and let’s them run with one another.

There are four desserts. The first is Manjari chocolate, cremeux-like in texture without (I think) the cream. A shard made from shiitake mushroom might not seem an obvious ally but the chocolate makes the fungi taste like coffee. It’s super clever. This is followed by a dense reduction of parsnips where the sugars have released and caramelised the veg. On to this goes a puddle of maple syrup, rye, and nitrogen set verjus. The combination is a revelation, sweet, nutty, slightly acidic, not like anything I’ve ever tried before.

S.T.P might sound like something I caught in 2004 Tenerife but the smart amongst you may know it to be sticky toffee pudding. This has the sponge replaced with dates that have been dehydrated and glued together, onto which is placed the strongest vanilla ice cream I have ever tried and that all important toffee sauce. I have no idea what they have done to the sauce to make it taste so good, but it is a skill to rework a dish purely around the memory of the best bit of an iconic. They use the same tactic with rhubarb and custard, the fruit mostly an acidic foil to the reimagining of custard that tastes just like the Birds custard that I grew up on. Its rich and oozy and probably the result of a trillion egg yolks. I could eat this every night of my life and be happy. We finish with that tiramisu course which I firmly believe is the best sweet course I have eaten. It simply cannot be improved.

With this the record player in the corner changes from Kings of Leon to Bob Marley, and we head off to bed to sleep off another outstanding meal. An experience like this doesn’t come cheap; dinner with a couple of bottles of wine, cocktails, and a bed for the night clocks close to six hundred, but it is just that: An experience. Fat Duck withstanding, I know of no place that evokes such emotion through the gentle suggestion of food memory. Coming to Ynyshir requires commitment; the travel and the expense. It pays this back with course after course after course of brilliance. I’ll reiterate what I said the last time I wrote about here: Ynyshir is right now the most exciting restaurant in the UK. And we are in it for the long haul, watching it every step along the way.

My girlfriend is a fellow food blogger, a statement which, if you know my general disdain for the term, is something that will require therapy on my behalf to overcome. It’s not her fault; she’s one of the good guys whose interest extends further than the pique-assiette culture of never paying for a dinner. Plus, it has it’s upsides. She acts as a sub editor for my piss-poor grammar and provides the funnier observations over dinner that I steal for my writing.  And, loving food in the same way that I do, she takes me to Ynyshir for my birthday. Whadda woman.  I still can’t believe that my greatest love sprang from my greatest enemy. It’s like Romeo and Juliet, only far shitter to watch.

And so, let’s move onto Ynyshir, a beautiful white walled residence in the middle of bloody nowhere, or, as the locals would prefer me to say, in Elgwys Fach, at the southern tip of Snowdonia National Park, near Machynlleth.  I have this theory in remote restaurants in that the journey makes a part of the experience.  Anyone can hop on a train to London, but to commit to here, or The Three Chimney’s, or L’Enclume takes a certain amount of commitment.  And boy, are we committed to food, as the next nine thousand (I’m guessing) words will show.  Those with a short attention span may want to look away now.  Those with a culinary porn problem may want to cover their modesty:  This is going to get Filthy.

The dining room pans out towards the rolling green hills of the Dyfi valley at one end and straight into the open kitchen at the other.  It is as much as a blank canvas as interior designers will allow it to be, with warm purples occasionally interspersing wooden floors and thick white linen table clothes. It is all about the food here with the first course making us sit bolt upright – a position that we would remain in for the two hour lunch and then some afterwards.  ‘Not French Onion Soup’ would transpire to be a bowl in which kombu stock was poured onto onion puree, tofu, onion oil, and pickled shallots.  It’s a whack to the face of umami, followed by a kick to the balls of acidity.  It’s big and brave, with the first sign of Japanese influences such as the dried kelp stock and miso in the onion puree.  It is perfect.  And this was just the first course.

What follows is a further ten courses that would set the marker for what I consider to be the UK’s most exciting restaurant.  A sourdough bread features a crust blacker than my soul, served with a Wagyu fat spread that overshadows an excellent miso butter.  Mackerel follows, barely cooked and draped in a pineapple jelly. Charcoal oil adds a depth, beansprouts and puffed rice texture.  As with so much of the food that follows, every flavour is amplified to eleven.

A cube of Wagyu short rib, cooked until it is only just holding it’s shape, is served with shitake mushroom, puffed rice and seaweed. The umami rich accompaniments are present to bolster the flavour of the beef, the seasoning as bold as it possibly can be. Following on from this was Mayan gold potato lightly dressed in pheasants egg, with shallots and truffle butter sauce.  We are back on the now familiar territory of umami and acidity, with the potato dice coated in a little yeast paste and the slight tang of vinegar in the sauce.  It’s a brilliant blend of two of the five basic tastes which give the dishes light and shade.  Claire says it is one of the best dishes she has ever eaten.  She’s right, but better is to come.

Lunches main protein came in the way of two courses of lamb.  The first is a rib glazed with soy and shizo that disappears as quickly as it arrives, the meat undressing from the bone at the slightest of suggestion.  The barbeque neck which follows is the first time that we would notice a familiar theme which would run through *spoiler alert* dinner the same night, in that dishes have a familiarity on the palate far removed from the world of fine dining.  The neck fillet is topped with a kombucha (a fermented Japanese herb tea) gel which echoes the best lamb with mint sauce you will ever eat.  It’s astonishing in delivery and concept, moreish to the point that it will eventually end up with it’s own addicts group.  In a day where the high points kept on rising, this was for the me the real eureka moment.

Not foreseeing the later bout of gluttony, we take the optional cheese course.  It’s cauliflower cheese, just like grandma used to make it.  Of course it’s not, I’m shitting you.  Cauliflower is compressed with -8 vinegar and topped with Beauvale that oozes and fills with a richness.  It is cauliflower cheese, right down to the breadcrumb topping, just not as you know it.  ‘Lager and lime’ really is just that, a cleansing course of yogurt panacota prepared tableside with continental lager and lime.  It takes me back to my teenage years when I used to drink my pints with a splash of cordial.

Our first dessert arrives, a blueberry dish that for me drops down to one Michelin standard – an achievement given that the restaurant presently has one star.  It’s good – the fermented berries bright in flavour, the buttermilk adding a subtle layer of fat.  We finish with a take on tiramisu.  It is glorious.  Various dots of coffee and vanilla, a shard of something crisp and see-through, with mascarpone granita and grated bitter chocolate.  It’s balanced and refined, a real statement that the sweeter courses can be to the same impossibly high standard of everything else.  We walk through the open kitchen for liquid nitrogen poached meringue filled with fennel purée, seemingly inspired by the aniseed sweets you get at the end of a curry.   I like that idea.  Anything inspired by curry houses is fine with me.  

Now that should be it.  I should surmise about a perfect meal worthy of a special journey and we should all move on with our lives.  Except I can’t, because as I alluded to earlier, that girlfriend of mine couldn’t turn down the chance to extend my birthday lunch into twenty or so more courses at dinner.  I argue that I’m not worthy of that expenditure for all of about twenty seconds before concluding that I probably am. I’m sorry but you’ve come this far to no avail, but stick with me, I promise it’s worth it.

Dinner starts with the dish that is most definitely not a French onion soup, moving on to what is most definitely a glazed slice of duck leg topped with sesame.  Another mackerel dish follows, this time with a sweet and sour ketchup made from bramble, with wood sorrel and grated lardo.  The cured pork backfat is the inspired part, coating the mouth and improving the flavour.  And we’re back on that word again.  This place is all about flavour.  Everything else is secondary to the question “does it taste the best that it absolutely can?'”.  And I like that idea.  I like it a lot.  

The following two courses are two of my favourites.  Crab and sweet corn is remiscent of chowder, light and clean in profile until you hit the dark funk of a crab soy.  Duck liver is whipped with a little tofu, glazed with birch sap syrup, and topped with spelt and a grating of smoked eel.  It’s smoked bacon.  Honestly.  The fat content, the back note of sweetness, the meatiness and the smoke.  I want this with a thick slice of bread and a cup of coffee.  But I can’t, so bottle number three of wine will make do. 

Duck with pickled black beans and black garlic is, of course, duck with black bean sauce.  Likewise tomato, lardo and basil is a BLT.  You get the picture; inspiration from the everyday took to a level up there with the very best.  You have to taste it to believe it.  

I can’t pinpoint the inspiration behind the barbecued langoustine but I can tell you it was damm right delicious.  It’s grilled to a meaty texture with wild garlic and a glorious dressing of roasted shells and soy sauce.  The pollock that came afterwards is, in my opinion, the weakest of the evening.  I  see what they are aiming at with the miso glaze on the fish and the dashi stock to slurp afterwards, it’s just disjointed and lacking the brutal hit of flavour of everything else we ate.  A deconstructed Caesar salad pulls it back.  The lettuce emulsion is vibrant, the Parmesan whey and anchovy crumb full of umami.  It needs the grated cured egg yolk to pull it all together, which it does brilliantly. 

Wagyu returns for three courses.  The first makes me shout “it’s a burger!” a little too loud with the addition of pickled gerkins and a genius addition of bread mayo.  This happens before a piece of sirloin that has been aged for 192 days – I’ve had engagements that have lasted less time.  The meat is unlike any I’ve ever tasted, a bastardisation of beef and blue cheese.  Served only with a grating of fresh wasabi, this is as close as I am likely to get to the prime steak houses of Tokyo.  Wagyu fudge concludes the trio.  You read that right, it’s fudge made with wagyu fat.  A genuine game changer.  Thorntons should nick the idea.

And this, Dear Reader, is where the post concludes, despite there being many courses left.  It was at this point that the days beers, the champagne, the cocktails, and the four bottles of red wine took hold.  It all became a little fuzzy and if I can’t remember it properly, I simply can’t write about it. I remember the lager and lime again, a brilliant strawberry dish that tasted like Summer Cup, and raspberries on toast.  Indeed, looking through my notes now, the dishes maintain the same form; most at the two star standard, with more at three star than one.  It seems a given to me that this restauarant is gaining a star this year and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it joins the top four in the coming years.  It is exhilarating; a riot of taste and precision, all hand delivered by a team of chefs who clearly love working here.  It is the best meal I’ve eaten, trumping all of the two and three star places I’ve been fortunate to dine at. And for once I wasn’t the one picking up the bill.  Gareth Ward and his team at Ynyshir have created a restaurant which rivals the very best in the country.

10/10