A food critic who provoked outrage when he pilloried Cardiff's dining options six years ago has returned to Wales capital - and this time he likes it.
In 2016, the only place Guardian food writer Jay Rayner could find that he wanted to review was the student-training kitchen at Cardiff and Vale College called The Classroom.
He wrote of the fifth-floor dining room on Dumballs Road: " I could claim it’s a useful addition to Cardiff’s burgeoning culinary scene but this would be a lie because, while the city has many good things to recommend it, the eating opportunities are not among them."
A year later, he doubled down, suggesting the best place for lunch is Central Station so you can catch a train to Bristol. His comments were met with outrage from people proud of the diversity and innovation in Wales' capital's food scene.
Yet the man with the acid pen and a thick skin has now returned to review The Heathcock pub in Llandaff and the burgeoning dining scene in the city has impressed him enough to say he'll come back.
Writing about a dish of silvery pickled mackerel and horseradish on a "lake of sweet-sour blood orange dressing", he writes that it is "so good we ask for a spoon so it isn't wasted". A rhubarb souffle is "perfectly engorged" and "tasting brightly of its star ingredient".
" Even allowing for a pandemic-enforced gap, it’s taken me a while to get back to Cardiff. After a lunch like this I can’t fail but be delighted I’ve returned," he concludes.
In his complimentary piece, he name-checked several other restaurants that have opened in Cardiff. They weren't, he said, "gilded gastro-palaces, infested with espumas and granitas, and dripping with chandeliers like crystal tits", but "places you’d keep going to repeatedly, because you just want something nice to eat".
He wrote: "A number of interesting-looking restaurants of that sort have opened in Cardiff since my 2016 lunch: Asador 44, Sopra 73, Milkwood, North Star, Heaney’s and its sibling oyster bar Uisce, Thomas by Tom Simmons, Nook, and a few more. Then there’s the Heathcock, a reassuringly solid lump of a pub, located amid the tree-lined lanes of Llandaff to the city’s north, which is where I went, and where I would go again."
At the end of the article, he also found space to give a plug to "Lee Skeet, former head chef of Hedone in London, has more than achieved his crowdfunding goal of raising £25,000 to buy new kitchen equipment for his restaurant Cora in the Welsh capital."
Rayner wasn't about to apologise or back down from his original criticisms of the city's dining scene however, writing: "Does the thoughtful and thoroughly satisfying cooking at the Heathcock mean I was wrong to be so down on the city’s possibilities back in 2016? No, it just suggests things have changed, and so very much for the better."
Describing the angry reaction to his 2016 article, he wrote: "Some people in Cardiff agreed with me. Others were aroused to a frothing digital rage. They sent me lists of terrific kebab, pizza and burger joints, all of which are marvellous things. You’ve got to love a city which boasts a street nicknamed Chippy Alley, for the number of establishments spanking the deep fat fryers. I was dismissed as an insufferable snob; a dreadful flaneur who was only interested in fancy-pants faine dining".
You can see Rayner's full review of the Heathcock here. The pub also made it into our list of The 12 best things I ate in Cardiff in 2021.
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