This Maverick British Chef Is Rewriting The Rules Of Fine Dining

Forbes

a day ago

Chef Gareth Ward (left) and a colleague at Ynyshir
Gareth Ward believes fine dining should be fun. 'You're on a night out, for f*ck's sake,' says the iconoclastic British chef. 'Stop taking yourself so seriously. Let your hair down, kick your shoes off, enjoy the music. Eat some food, drink some wine, and just take 12 hours of your life out….
'Loosen your shoulders, do some breathing. Don't be so angry. You know what I mean? It's just like, What's the point? Don't come. It's all about going out. It's all about having fun.'
That's why a DJ booth has pride of place in the dining room at Ward's remote restaurant-with-rooms, Ynyshir, at the edge of Wales' Snowdonia National Park. It sits between the open kitchen and the handful of tables where diners sit side by side, schoolroom-style, to ensure that everyone has a view of the show on both stages. Bookshelves lined with vintage vinyl hang kitty-corner to racks of cooking implements in the kitchen.
To be sure, the soundtrack helps Ward through service—'I can't really work without music,' he says—and it works as a drumbeat for the highly efficient servers as they present and clear the impressive 30 plates that make up a dinner at Ynyshir, an experience that takes about five hours. But it's also part of the gastronomic immersion that Ward has dreamed up.
Diners at Ynyshir have pre-dinner drinks in the lounge
That's why Iggy Pop's 'The Passenger' and Bronski Beat's 'Small Town Boy' are listed as 'bonus tracks' on the fashionably cryptic printed menus that guests receive at the end of the evening. They're played as the final desserts are served. The lights go down and the disco ball gets fired up, cartwheeling mirrored light around the room.
'If you get the right crowd, it's absolutely buzzing,' says the chef, throwing in an expletive or two. 'You get people dancing, you get people partying, letting their hair down.'
It's an unusual way to describe a restaurant that holds two Michelin stars (the only one in Wales with such a distinction), but then, Ynyshir is a highly unusual restaurant. Since 2013, Ward has been relentlessly committed to innovation, bold flavors, meticulous craftsmanship and the very best versions of whatever ingredient he decides to serve. (And note that you will eat whatever ingredient he decides to serve: Ynyshir is an all-in experience, with no substitutions allowed.) Or as he describes it, it's things he wants to eat.
And he doesn't mess around with anything less than the best. 'We don't take ourselves seriously at all,' he clarifies. 'But we take what we do very seriously.' That means quality-obsessed international sourcing, carefully controlled aging in a state-of-the-art salt chamber, and an unfailing determination to be unique.
A slice of hamachi sashimi with wasabi
Ynyshir was named the Best Restaurant in the UK in 2022 and 2023, and now it's attracting diners from further afield. Ward says he recently welcomed a Canadian couple. 'They'd flown from Canada to London. They'd hired a car, driven to this restaurant, had dinner, stayed over, driven back to London, got on the plane and gone back to Canada. I was blown away. I was almost in tears when they told me,' he recalls. 'I was like, You kidding me? That's f*cking stupid, you know what I mean? And they were like, No, we wanted to come to this restaurant for so long. All of our friends want to come. We wanted to be the first to do it.'
Ward recognizes this both as an honor and as a responsibility—and as even more of an imperative to be unlike anything else in the world.
'I don't watch what anybody else is doing,' says Ward. 'I'm not interested. Not that anybody's not—there are some unbelievable restaurants and chefs out there—but I don't really want to be influenced by them. I want everything that comes out of this building to come from within this building.
'I think you can go to a lot of restaurants at the moment and have the same meal. There's nothing wrong with that if that's what they want to do. But I don't want to do that. I love going to a restaurant and being blown away by something different,' he continues.
An unrolled handroll of bluefin tuna with preserved black truffle
'The amount of restaurants that are doing the Parker House rolls and the little tarts—you have four of these little tarts before the meal, and it's the same. It's just the same thing. I went to London a few months ago and I went to two restaurants on two nights, and I had exactly the same dish at both restaurants. I went, I spent a lot of money coming here; I don't want to eat that twice. I want a different experience, and that's what I try not to do here.'
Unsurprisingly, he has little patience for trends like foraging and sustainability orthodoxy. His fish and A5 wagyu beef are flown in from Tokyo, his truffles come from Western Australia, and shelves behind the counter at the entrance—where he slices some of the hamachi, madai and Balfegó bluefin tuna that will begin the menu—display a global collection of condiments. There's Picual olive oil from Spain, Red Boat fish sauce from Vietnam and S&B curry powder in a red tin from Japan.
'If it's local, I want to use it, obviously. But if it's not, I'll go elsewhere,' he says, noting that his milk and shellfish come from quite close by. 'People go on about sustainability and stuff and local. Well, it's a great story, isn't it? Drawing a ring around your restaurant and saying, I'm not using anything outside of that? It's an unbelievable story. But if it's sh*t, what's the point? You're just lying to yourself and everybody else, and you're robbing people.'
He continues, 'So if the lamb isn't amazing around here, I'll get the lamb elsewhere'—mostly Scotland and another region of Wales. 'Some of the local stuff around here, it's just not good enough. Just because there's sheep in my fields doesn't mean I'm going to use them.'
A bedroom at Ynyshir
His respect for ingredients extends to storing, preserving and cooking them. Often, that means a willingness to do the minimum and let the products shine on their own. The first quarter of the menu is raw or nearly so (and heavily inspired by Ward's many trips to Japan): sashimi slivers of that madai, hamachi and bluefin are enlivened with white soy, tama miso or simple fresh wasabi.
From there, the menu moves around Southeast Asia, starting with fish and seafood—local shrimp with green curry, local lobster with nham jim—and then moving on to birds and meat. In keeping with his vision, Ward doesn't shy away from strong flavors. The Singapore-style chili crab is properly spicy, and the bird larb is even more so.
He comes back to Wales for the desserts, going heavy on the local dairy products, as in the cream in the custard that's served with a Pricia apricot, in the tiramusi that's laced with Ethiopian coffee and in the milk that's paired with mango and passionfruit. And one of the ingredients he's most proud of is his hyperlocal birch syrup, which is collected from trees on the estate. He serves it over banana ice cream and N25 Kaluga caviar.
Snowdonia is also heavily present in the dining room. Local sheepskins cover the chairs, the ceramics are made down the road, and much of the furniture was made onsite. Ward notes proudly that Ynyshir is perhaps the only restaurant in the world to employ a full-time blacksmith—instrumental not only in restoring the old manor house that became the restaurant but in maintaining its many handmade details.
The rooms upstairs, in the nearby garden house or in the smattering of tepees on the grounds are filled with the same attention to detail and spirit of serious unseriousness. Ward's fun nights out don't end with the last petits fours, and neither do Ynyshir's lasting impressions.