Annwn
Narberth, Pembrokeshire
No. 14
*Annwn has moved from its old Potting Shed premises in Lawrenny to a new home on Narbeth's Market Square. Watch for a new review coming soon.*
Is this one of the UK’s hottest new restaurants? The tiny 12-seater on the edge of a Victorian kitchen garden at The Little Retreat glamping site is run by Matt Powell, who has worked with some top chefs, including Raymond Blanc. Now he has taken his cooking to the next level, trading big kitchens for a life of foraging: many of Annwn’s dishes have their roots in meals he cooked up under a caravan awning at the end of wild food courses run on Pembrokeshire’s coastline. These days he's to be found in a gleaming open kitchen, frequently venturing into the classily rustic dining room to offer top-ups of sauces and explanations of the often complex processes – some taking more than a year – that go into creating his extraordinary dishes. Most of the ingredients are foraged or home-grown – the wild bounty on offer here includes shellfish, wild herbs, mushrooms and a dizzying array of seaweeds – bolstered by the best local meats, fish and cheeses. A 'softly fudgy' slow-cooked duck egg yolk, for example, is served with a silky, sweet umami chanterelle and birch-syrup broth, along with vibrant hedge garlic, bitter cress, sorrel, jack by the hedge, and three-corner garlic. Limpets are cooked gently for two days before the reduced juices are used to make a seductively nautical limpet mousse, served in limpet shells perched on pebbles awash with five local seaweeds, from pickled sea lettuce to bladderwrack – the pods creating deliciously salty explosions in the mouth. Patience underpins this cooking: a beetroot cooked in the water bath for five hours, roasted gently then dehydrated for 12 hours, becomes as rich and meaty as a fine steak; it's paired with slender discs of salted beetroot, chard, Dolwerdd Blue sheep's cheese and a rich mahogany beetroot sauce. Kelp dried and aged for a year, cooked for two hours then left for a week, is combined with butter and seaweed vinegar to make an astonishing, pleasantly bitter broth served with silky siphon weed emulsification, pepper dulse, scurvy grass, sea radish, and feathery fronds of siphon weed. The dazzlers come thick and fast: home-cured, air-dried local lamb is served with wild garlic 'preserved in its life cycle' (leaves, sweet flowers and caper-like seeds), whipped cultured butter enriched with roasted lamb, and warm, pillowy rolls made from Hen Gymro, a native Welsh grain. One of several sweet courses on an epic 10-course menu is homemade cheese curds flavoured the old way, with meadowsweet, and slicked with gleaming local honey, while a snowy eggshell is filled with gorse flower custard and served atop crumbly birch-vinegar meringue. The wines, as you’d expect, are natives: among the six options are Velfrey sparkling wine from Pembrokeshire, Ancre Hill Chardonnay from Monmouthshire, and Pinot Noir from Montgomery. Prices for such artisan offerings are reasonable, starting at £31 a bottle. Annwn takes its name from the otherworld of Welsh mythology – and, in the words of one visitor, 'what a magical world Matt [Powell] has created here'.
Dining Information:
Wheelchair access, Parking, Deposit required
1 Market Square, Narberth, Pembrokeshire SA67 7AU
07308 313107
