We’re halfway through the 28-course tasting menu at Yenishira two-Michelin-starred restaurant near the North Wales coast, and the background music began to rise in speed and volume. Each course arrives at a breakneck pace with songs played on vinyl by a live DJ in the open kitchen. Everything is the best possible version of itself: a fatty piece of raw blue tuna from Fuentes from Spain and A5 Wagyu from Japan, perfectly crispy Silverhill Ranch duck breast in hoisin sauce, and tiramisu soaked in Ethiopian coffee. It feels like a very exclusive party, especially when the disco ball lights up at the end during one of the dessert courses.
“It should be fun,” Gareth Ward, who relaunched Ynyshir in its current form in 2016, told the Observer the next morning. “There’s no point in going out to dinner and it’s really serious. I’m not that kind of guy. I want this to be a great experience where we all have fun, including the team. We take what we do seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. There’s no ego or pretension. Just a group of people who are completely obsessed with doing what we do, and we want to share that.”
Going to Yenisehir is a dining experience, not just a meal. To get there, we drove five hours from London through winding country lanes. There are approximately three sheep for every person in Wales, and most of them seem to graze along exactly these roads. The restaurant can be found in a green valley not far from the town of Machynlleth, down a narrower country lane. A huge T-Rex statue greets guests as they arrive, a gift to Ward from his friend Ed Sheeran. Most guests stay on the picturesque grounds in one of the ten bedrooms, which are as elegant as the rest of the property.
Ward, 45, and his wife, Amelia Erickson, designed the spaces together, transforming the 15th-century building, once a country hotel, into something unique and contemporary. There are black walls throughout the common areas, which Ward points out “kicked off a trend for dark restaurants.” Fur coats hung on the walls as decor. There is a fire pit outside named after Yenishir. The chairs in the lounge, where pre-meal drinks are served, look like something out of the ordinary game of thrones. All this is a reflection of Ward’s own inclinations.
“I have no right to sit in restaurants with tablecloths and no music and the service is really stifling,” he says. “And I love cooking for people, but I don’t do it for them. I do it for me. I’ve sacrificed 27 years of my life to cook. And I did it because I’m obsessed with cooking. I’m obsessed with food. This isn’t a job. It’s a lifestyle. If I love it and if I’m into it 100 percent, there’s a good chance you’ll love it too.”
Becoming a chef was not an inevitable path for Ward. He originally started cooking because he needed a job. As a child growing up in Durham, England, he wanted to be in the fire brigade or the army, but neither came true. He wasn’t interested in food, but got a job at a local bar called Seven Stars to earn money. He quickly fell in love with cooking. “You know when you do something and it feels like home?” He says. “This industry attracts a certain type of human being. We are like pirates or social outcasts. We cannot survive in a normal life.”
After working at the bar for a few years, Ward moved to a much higher level Hambleton Halllocated a few hours south in Rutland. At the time, I was a picky eater. “One of the chefs made a rabbit Wellington, which is one of their classic dishes,” Ward recalls. “He cut the end off and showed it to me. I said, ‘No, thanks.’ And he was like: Do you want to be a chef? It was one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. I can still taste it. That was it Ratatouille The moment when something was triggered in my mind. “It has become an absolute obsession.”
Ward remained at Hambleton Hall for five years, working under Chef Aaron Patterson. Go to Seaham Hallthen Hart And then Sat Pines Restaurantwhere he became sous chef in 2011. When Ward began looking for his first head chef, his search led him to Ynyshir Hall, a traditional Relais & Châteaux hotel in Wales. He had never been to the area. “I remember driving here and being completely blown away,” he says. “It was very different then, with the manicured lawns, but I couldn’t believe it.”
Although it was a very classic British hotel, the owner, Joan Wren, was interested in hiring a chef who could do something unique. “She wanted someone to come in and put their stamp on it,” Ward says. “She was really good at choosing people who had their own personality.” When Wren died a few years later, Ward had the opportunity to take over and turn Ynyshir into his own restaurant, with rooms. He has co-owned the restaurant with a silent business partner since 2016. That’s when the menu began to expand in length.
“I want to give people the perfect ingredient experience, and to do that, everything has to be small,” Ward says. He compares it to the Japanese style of nigiri, which is a perfect morsel of fish, rice and wasabi. “I thought: We can do this with our menu without a Nigerian preparation,” he says. “I can give you a bite or two of intense flavor with incredible ingredients over and over again. I started making the dishes smaller, and the menu grew. One of the worst things is that when you finish, you’re still hungry. I’d rather you leave feeling very full than starving.”
He adds of the menu: “It’s not just that we throw a huge amount of food onto plates. It’s all sequential. Things match. Things go one after the other. It’s designed.”
Importing components from all over the world requires a high level of precision. Sometimes a team has to plan six months in advance to make sure everything is available when they want it. Silverhill Farm’s ducks come from Ireland, where they are bred to listen to jazz music. They are cured for a week in a dedicated salt aging room, and two are cooked each night for service. Tuna comes once a week from Spain. The A5 Wagyu comes from Japan in parts. About eight months ago, Ward discovered that female cows had more tender meat, with a buttery flavour. He now only offers cuts from female cows.
“I stumbled into this by accident because one of my suppliers sent me my beef for the month, and the two cuts were completely different from the rest,” explains Ward. “He couldn’t figure out why. So I said, ‘Well, it’s amazing. We need to know what it is.’ So when I went to Japan, I went to visit a wagyu farm, and I talked to the farmer. He said, ‘I think it’s a female.'”
Sourcing this way is difficult. “There are only two farms in Japan that kill 100 percent female beef,” Ward says. “The guy in Japan who selects my beef has to go to the slaughterhouse and find female meat and buy it for me. So, it’s a very difficult process at the moment.”
Four years ago, Ward visited Japan for the first time. The trip greatly influenced his cooking. He now considers Japan the best place for ingredients in the world. He has been there eight times since then, and imports many products from around the country, including mirin, soy sauce and watermelon.
“The care, love, passion and dedication they show to things is unparalleled,” he says. “Every process is done with such love. When you are in Japan and you see one person on his hands and knees without shoes or socks on a mat, picking the fruit with his hand, smelling it, feeling it, weighing it and checking for any defects, you really see the love.”
Although Japanese ingredients and cooking techniques are evident on Yenishir’s menu, especially in the first half of the dining experience, Ward is clear that he is not cooking Japanese food. “I’ve never worked in Japanese cuisine,” he says. “I respect it so much, I love it. It’s my favorite food in the world. All I’m doing is just taking my experiences in this country and eating this food. I’ll bring the ingredients back, and do it my own way.”
The menu I had in early June opened with a series of raw fish dishes, including Japanese madai, Japanese hamachi and bluefin tuna. Each was seasoned with a special flavor, including wasabi oil and Novo olive oil made from first-harvest oils. As the cooked dishes began to appear, the flavor expanded: grilled lobster with robust Thai nam jim seasoning, a sophisticated dish of Singaporean chili crab, and French fish à la Cantonese char siu. There are hints of Wales, including birch syrup made on site and dairy products from down the road, but Ward wants to showcase the best of all worlds.
“I was using Welsh wagyu, which doesn’t really exist,” says Ward. “It started out really good, and then it went downhill. The more popular it got, the harder it became to maintain consistency. I decided to stop using it. I thought, ‘If I’m going to use wagyu, why not use Japanese?’ Because it’s the best beef and the consistency is unbelievable.”
“I can go and buy limes at the grocery store,” he adds. “But why do that when I can buy the most amazing limes from the other side of the world? The best limes I’ve ever tasted come from Thailand, and they’re absolutely delicious. They’re the lemons of dreams. If you say, ‘What does a lemon taste like?’ Well, it tastes like that.”
Ward is in the kitchen at Ynyshir for every service, four nights a week. restaurant dj, Jacob Kellyis also present in every service — a full-time employee just like servers and cooks. Ward believes everything in a restaurant should have soul and meaning, from the crockery and silverware (made by an on-site blacksmith) to the music. It wasn’t long after opening Ynyshir that he had the idea to acquire vinyl collections and hire someone to curate a mostly nightly playlist. House music. Kelly is the second DJ to work in Ynyshir. It’s all part of the atmosphere Ward wants to cultivate for himself and his employees.
“It starts off great, around 5 p.m., before guests even get to the dining room,” says Ward. “Then you build and build and build. The music is for us, not for you. It keeps us going. We can relate to the music, and it becomes the driving force in the kitchen. I always say, ‘If you don’t like the music, it’s okay.’ It’s not yours.”
It’s the same thing with food. Ward would never serve anything he wouldn’t eat. In fact, he wouldn’t serve anything he didn’t fully believe in. “I want to eat everything that comes off my card,” he says. “Why do you think I’m so big?” He paused, pointing at me. “You like your art, your music, your fashion. You like your coffee a certain way. We all like different things, so I can’t please everyone, right? All I can do is please myself. That’s how I feel honest.”
As Ynyshir approaches its 10th anniversary, Ward has a lot of ideas for how it can grow. It is possible to add more casual taverns to the land, as well as more craftsmen such as a blacksmith. In 2022, Ynyshir became the first restaurant in Wales to be awarded two Michelin stars. He hopes there are three stars on the horizon. Ward has all of his Michelin plates mounted on a tree outside, but he has other plans for the three-star plaque. “When I get three stars, I’ll put them in the tyrannosaur’s mouth,” he asserts.
“I thought we got three stars this year, but I think some things might have spoiled us. This restaurant is a three-star restaurant. I’m not being arrogant. It’s that simple. But we have to keep doing what we’re doing. We’re better this year than we were last year. We haven’t gone backwards. We’ve only moved forward,” he adds.
