I went out in Cardiff on Friday night and had the best-tasting dish I've eaten in years

North Wales Live

20 hours ago

We're lucky in Cardiff to be spoiled rotten for choice when it comes to the quality of restaurants and places to eat. It wasn't always this way — and it wasn't that long ago people were bemoaning how badly the city lacked good places to eat.
Now you can find half a dozen (at least) places with superb food in Cardiff Market alone. Then there's the city centre brasseries and neighbourhood Indian and Italian restaurants that have kept their loyal customers coming back again and again for years, the pop-ups serving lip-smacking street food from improbably small converted vans and the gastropubs being praised by national restaurant critics. Even some of the chains are excellent. You can see our pick of the best 55 restaurants in Cardiff here.
And then you come to the "where to take someone on a special night out" level. Not so long ago, this category wouldn't have amounted to more than a small handful, now it's almost impossible to pick from the embarrasment of riches available.
On Friday night, I found myself in one of those restaurants for a birthday. I had never been there before. Even before walking into Mesen, the evening was off to a great start, having called into another place I'd never been before, The Rhiwbina Tap, for a drink before food. It was bustling and had a great selection of beers from several excellent breweries.
After a pint, I crossed the road to the restaurant for the main event. Mesen specialises in sharing dishes cooked over charcoal. If your eyes are already glazing over at the mention of "sharing dishes", resist the temptation to immediately stop reading this article — honestly, it's worth it!
The weekly food menu is written in chalk on a blackboard in the simply-decorated restaurant, where you can sit on stools at the bar, the room's focal point, or at one of the handful of tables around it. Mesen also has a good reputation for its cocktails and I'm told you might even get one mixed for you ad hoc at the bar if you ask — but the cocktail menu itself has plenty to choose from so there's probably no need to do that. The wine list is good too. But, anyway, the food.
The pleasingly short menu is bang on point, with dishes like "scallops, Marmite butter, black pudding" or "buffalo carrots, ranch, pickled celery, parmesan" immediately drawing comments at the table like "oh wow, that sounds amazing". The dishes are a fairly intuitive mix of small and large, meaty and vegetarian, so it's not too hard to choose a good mix of between four and six dishes, with staff on hand to advise anyway.
Our hardest decision was whether to go for "pig's head" or t-bone steak as the main dish of the night, and we deferred to our server who went for the steak (we should have thanked her for excellent choice, though I'm sure the pig's head would have been great too).
We also chose padron peppers with hummus (£8), the scallops with Marmite butter and black pudding (£13) and the buffalo carrots (£15). They were all superb. I eat about a wheelbarrow's worth of hummus every week and this still stood out. The black pudding came as crunchy crumbs, awash with the scallops in the moreish Marmite butter. And the carrots were massive, the size of chip shop jumbo sausages (I thought they were sweet potatoes when they first arrived).
But the stand-out dish was the prawns in garlic and chilli butter. That description in no way comes close to doing justice to how good they tasted. The prawns had that wonderful charred flavour from being flame-cooked but the sauce was out of this world, silky smooth and amounting to way more than the sum of its parts. Long after the prawns were gone I scooped at the sauce with my fork to get as much of it into my mouth as I could (which is not that much when you're using a fork). I considered ordering something else from the menu to scoop it up with. I think it's been years since I've eaten anything that tasted as good.
This deliciousness doesn't come cheap. Our bill for two (which included one chocolate cake dessert and a £45 bottle of wine) came in just short of £200. That's hefty. But it's the food I've been talking about enthusiastically ever since, not the bill.