Category Archives: Eating out

A great way to spend a Sunday evening: Dylan’s, Criccieth

Eating out, Food, Restaurant and cafe reviews, Wales, , ,

There were rumours this was happening for some time. Whispers, vague speculations, gossip. But if we believed everything we heard, all sorts of things would be true that patently are – well, rubbish. However, these rumours became more concrete – almost literally. Dylan’s, the restaurant beloved of those lucky people in Menai Bridge, was coming to Criccieth.

And in what a building.

Dylan's Criccieth

It looks Art Deco, but it was actually built in 1954 – it’s a typical Clough Williams-Ellis design, in that it’s a classy pastiche. It was built as a cafe, but not one like Dylan’s; in fact one of the owners in the early days was Billy Butlin, and people staying in his holiday camps would come for tea dances; after that, it was rented out. It’s listed (grade II), and it is indeed made of concrete.

As soon as we knew Dylan’s were taking bookings, we rang and got in as early as we could – you’ve got to test these exciting developments – and so we piled into the car yesterday evening and set off for our supper. An hour’s drive, yes, but we knew it would be worth it (the Menai Bridge branch has been well, er, researched).

ready and waitingWe were booked in quite early, and when we arrived the place was almost empty, allowing us to have a good look around. It’s a delightful, airy space, with full-height windows giving an magnificent view of the sea and lots of light. The restaurant seems very spacious and I suspect it will continue to do so, however frantic it gets at the height of the season.

Almost empty though it might have been when we arrived, it soon filled up – it was fully booked, in fact, as a few speculative ‘walk-ins’ were being told. The service was – no surprises, given past experience – great: efficient, friendly, chatty without being intrusive. The major problem was deciding what to have. Pizzas (such as the Menai Strait, with lobster and scallops)? A burger (maybe the felafel burger, with its sourdough bun, chunky chips, relishes and pickle)? Mussels (perhaps the Drunken Mussels, steamed in Welsh cider, with leeks and bacon)? A lobster salad?

We eventually went for other things. After all, we can come back and check out the pizzas and burgers – and indeed everything else – quite easily now. So I started with Gravadlax, salmon which had been cured for 48 hours in beetroot and gin, and which was served with a potato salad, including lots of fennel (I thought I detected dill instead, but it may just have been very strong fennel). Beautiful.

I follDylansowed this with a Ceasar Salad. I know it may seem boring, but I reckon that’s a good test: the dressing, the quality of the chicken and the Parmesan, even the lettuce – I’ve had some horrors over the past few years. This was a good one. In fact, this was a very good one. The chicken was perfect, and there was plenty of it – another good test: one anaemic, tasteless slice doth not a Caesar Salad make.

I decided to test their chunky chips too (someone has to do these things), and can report back that they were delicious, and I can also say that the house white was a perfectly respectable Sauvignon Blanc. The others had roast halibut and a hake fillet with a herb and parmesan crust, and were equally impressed – but we were too happily full to test the dessert menu. One for another visit…

Finally – the setting:

Dylan's boardwalk

Imagine this in a winter storm, with a warm and welcoming restaurant to watch it from. Perfect.

Dylan’s Restaurant, Maes Y Mor, Criccieth, Gwynedd, LL52 0HU;
01766 522773 – open 11a.m to 11p.m

 

 

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Whatever happened to afternoon tea?

Baking, Cakes, Coffee shops, Eating out, Eating out - issues, , , ,

I’ve been fiddling about in the basement office – well, I say office, but at this time of year it’s a store for garden furniture, kindling and unwashed fleeces – and I came across a book from the 1980s, Jane Pettigrew’s Tea Time.

afternoon tea...A little idle flicking through brought instant nostalgia – for the habit of afternoon tea, not for the scary big hair in the author photograph: 1986 may have been a good year for teashops, but it was evidently a fantastic year for anyone selling hairspray.

A brief read of the intro was enough to make me realise that a great gulf of time had suddenly opened up, however. And some of the recipes – Downton, pure fantasy Downton. Admittedly they were self-consciously nostalgic even in the 1980s, but kidney paté on toast? Did anyone really make that? Devilled sardines?

All of this made me think seriously about the role afternoon tea has played in my life. It’s barely conscious, but it is a constant. And it’s quintessentially British, too – not English, oh no, it’s got a fine place in Scotland and Wales, and in Ireland. Especially at funerals, but that’s a specialist sub-set of the afternoon tea. And of course it’s present in literature – the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, for instance.

Alice

It’s been a constant for me for as long as I can remember (though dormice in teapots have been remarkable by their absence).

Constant right from being a child, when we regularly had afternoon tea at my grandparents, all fine china and salmon and something slithery my step-grandma called ‘shape’, or when we went on celebratory trips, all dressed up, to Betty’s of York. Then it persisted, in a bastard but equally enjoyable form, though college – Fitzbillies cakes and crumpets cooked by being slapped onto the bars of a gas fire – and my first years down in London, where I indulged at Fortnum and Mason; I know, I know, but I worked almost next door. It was a marked feature of holidays in Ireland and of holidays in Yorkshire.

(An Irish friend developed a Yorkshire–English phrase dictionary. This included such phrases as ‘let’s just stop for a cup of tea’, which was translated as ‘let’s just stop for a few buckets of tea, a sandwich, an unfeasibly large scone and a ginormous piece of chocolate cake’. I can’t think what she was going on about, really… it’s not unique to North Yorkshire. And nor were the arguments about who was paying, either. Think about Mrs Doyle and Mrs Dineen slugging it out over afternoon tea payment in Father Ted. and you’ve got about the right image – er, apart from our appearance, that is. We were both goddesses and neither of us wore a hat.)

But it’s not a constant now – or not in the classic sense. We seem to have lost the habit of afternoon tea. Or perhaps it’s just changed (and got infintely, unbelievably expensive if you will have it at the Ritz). No more devilled kidneys, no more sitting down over cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, no more smoked salmon pinwheels. When did you last see a three-tier stand with sandwiches on one layer, little scones in the middle and elegant small cakes on the final one? Rather than one filled with lurid cupcakes or, more latterly, equally lurid macarons?

But there’s a lot more ‘meeting up for a coffee and a cake’ going on (and notice the pattern on the oilcloth – referencing afternoon tea):

coffee and cake

Perhaps we’ve turned Viennese, with our kaffee und kuchen instead. I’m not decrying that; I love it, it’s really enjoyable and damn near perfect when you’ve got good places to go like the Llew Glas Deli In Harlech and T H Cafe in Dolgellau (though there can be a downside, which I’ve moaned about elsewhere).

There’s no doubt that there’s a baking revival underway, with the Great British Bake Off, things like the Clandestine Cake Club and the popularity of cupcakes (they’re not popular with me, though: I detest the oversweet, sticky, tasting-of-damn-all-except-sugar, squishy little sugar transporters – and no apologies for repeating ‘sugar’, either). And there’s been an increased interest in good tea, too. But it seems to me that the interest in afternoon tea as such is more style than substance. So far.

Maybe it is time for a 1980s-style revival of the 1930s interpretation of the nineteenth-century tradition of afternoon tea. Maybe we need to be hunting out those china three-tier cake stands in junk shops and using them as they were intended to be used, and laundering damask tablecloths. Maybe we need to revisit parts of the 1980s – not the hair or the politics, please – and go full throttle for reinventing the British tradition of afternoon tea. It’s ideal, sometimes. If you’re going out in the evening, why rush over eating a meal which then leaves you doubled-up with indigestion in the theatre? Why not have a good afternoon tea instead? Oh, I know, work. It gets in the way of so much. But perhaps we could introduce proper afternoon tea breaks? Just a thought. No more polystyrene, get out the bone china. Yo!

well, quite

(I’m sorry about this. I found it on Pinterest, sans credit, and couldn’t resist…
Those animals are stuffed, and possibly the child too.)

Service, or tablecloths?

Basics, Eating out, Eating out - issues, ,

Casual dining is apparently bang on the button, it’s the cat’s eyebrows, It’s now, it’s so hot it’s cool.

Sorry about that – they’re all phrases (well, except for feline facial hair, but it’s probably only a matter of time) I’ve seen or heard which describe the fact that Marcus Wareing’s reopened restaurant is introducing a ‘new informal style of service’. Another top chef has dispensed with tablecloths: Kenny Atkinson was quoted in the Guardian as saying ‘I can’t spend £13,000 a year on laundry.’ None of this, of course, means that these places are suddenly going to be anything other than very expensive, but hey. Maybe it’s a start.

This made me stop and think for a while. What do I most remember, the surroundings or the service? I certainly remember bad service. Slapdash in Dublin; bordering on the aggressive in a top chef’s place in central London – ‘you will be vacating this table in the next twenty minutes’; nope, it wasn’t a question and, yep, it was just after 8.30. There was a Chinese place in Soho which was so notorious that people actually went there to experience the terrible service (the food was OK, though). I was there once with a Cantonese-speaking friend. There was the most enormous argument, and later she said that the bad service appeared to be a deliberate choice. A reputation feeding on itself, perhaps.

Menu outside the Petite Syrah in NiceIn semi-defence of the entire restaurant industry I must say that bad behaviour from customers often engenders the bad behaviour from staff, and there was some wry amusement last year at a cafe in Nice, which charged different prices for coffee according to how polite you were (photo courtesy Nice Matin).

Now I’ve done some waiting in the past, and customers can be very strange*, even when they’re not spontaneously rude. I had one woman who asked for more napkins because a huge sunburn blister on her leg had just burst – nice – and everyone who has worked with the public will know that some people are just spoiling for a fight. They don’t really need a reason; maybe somebody pipped them to a seat on the Tube, maybe their boss stared at them in a funny way – and so they look for someone to bully who can’t bite back. I can, and I’ve never lost a job because of it.

When I was first in a position in which I had to manage people who dealt with the public I used to say ‘treat customers as you would like to be treated’. No grovelling, no aggression, no indifference. Be polite, be courteous, but without any forelock-tugging whatsoever; just be friendly and helpful. (Oh yes – and ‘get me if they’re really horrible’.) The more I think about the service I would like to receive now, the more I realise that I somehow got it right even though I was very young – right for me, at least. That’s exactly what I want when I’m eating out.

So has anywhere got it right for me? I can immediately think of one example: the late-lamented Yetman’s. This small restaurant used to be in Holt in Norfolk, where I hired a cottage every spring for a few years to get away from ‘work’ work and do some real work instead. There was a sense of occasion there, not least because of Alison Yetman’s great cooking, and the service (from Peter Yetman) was great. It wasn’t laid back, though some critics felt it was; I found it confident, relaxed and deeply enthusiastic about the food – ideal. Above all, it wasn’t intimidating: no ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ stuff; you didn’t feel out of place in jeans, and you certainly weren’t treated any differently if you did turn up in denim. But there were big vases of flowers, comfy chairs in which to relax while you ordered, crisp tablecloths and napkins, and I liked all that: it added to that sense of occasion, florist and laundry bills or not. And that was – let’s see – must have been in the late 1990s.

So I don’t see why this ‘informal’ approach is being treated as though it was something new and insightful in a ‘fine dining’ (lordy, I hate that expression) establishment. It’s not. Informal service is not synonymous with bad service; top-end restaurants (and Yetman’s did have five stars in The Good Food Guide) do not have to have eighty-five waiters hovering around each diner, filling up wine glasses and brushing down crumbs every five minutes. Obsequiousness is not the same thing as great service.

dessertsI don’t think it’s just me.

I was staying in southern Normandy a few years ago, and there were two excellent restaurants nearby. The food was equally good at both, both had been equally well reviewed, and they both cost about the same. Neither was exactly cheap, and both of them had tablecloths (mais bien sûr).

The major difference was the service. One was a classic, preserved in aspic from the 1950s; the other was more modern in its attitude, more like a bistro, much more informal.

You could get a table at one of them whenever you wanted. Guess which? Yup. I am definitely not alone in what I prefer.

* OK, staff can be strange too. I helped a maitre’d friend a few times at a rather trendy restaurant in – no, let’s fudge and just say er, um, ‘in London’. It was perpetually short staffed, hence me putting on my black jeans and waiter’s half-apron. But I wasn’t the only helper… the boss was into S&M, and if things were really difficult he would ask what he revoltingly referred to as ‘my girls’ to come and help as well. We wore DMs; they wore stilettos (eek!). The kitchens were downstairs, and you could track the chef’s mood by the number of crumpled pieces of foil about the place – volatile, generally. One summer evening there was a mighty scream, and one of the ‘girls’ came running into the restaurant, followed by the chef wielding a large knife. What I couldn’t see was that there was a large rat between them: she was running away from it and the chef was chasing it, intent on rodenticide. Fortunately it was a Tuesday and it was pretty quiet, but any decent customer service which had been happening died on the spot (unlike the rat, which apparently ran off through the open door). I defy anyone to recover from that one…

There are more than two coffee shops in Wales…

Coffee shops, Eating out, Food, Local suppliers, Wales, , , ,

Way back in January of last year, one national – hah, allegedly – newspaper published a list of the fifty best independent coffee shops in the UK. Wales, apparently, has – wait for it – two. Both in Cardiff. At least they restricted their choice of London coffee shops to ten, but there were still more in the EC postcode area than in the whole of Wales. Hello?

Now this might have been acceptable, or even vaguely accurate, about twenty years ago (then again no, it wouldn’t have been either) but today it is merely lazy and complacent. There are plenty of good independents. Plenty. Even in small towns like those near me. OK, there are some bad ones and some which are merely indifferent. But there are some which are stonkingly good.

I’ve had a bit of a rant about coffee shops here before, where I contrasted a bad experience and a good one. Just to show that there’s more than one good coffee shop in Gwynedd, despite what what the Daily X might think, I’m going to have a quiet rave about another favourite: the Llew Glas Delicatessen in Harlech. It’s just had its second birthday (as it were), but it’s already hard to remember what Harlech was like without it.

Sigh. What’s not to like?

cakes at Freya'sEvery time I go in I’m reminded of Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca.

OK, Rick’s featured a casino and not cake. And it’s not the gambling, the diamond dealing, the Nazis or Bogart in a tuxedo, either: it’s the fact that everyone ends up here. As Rene says in the film, ‘Everybody comes to Rick’s’. I have seldom been in the Llew Glas and not known anybody there, but it’s not just a local haunt – some friends of mine popped in recently, complete strangers to the area, and were made to feel just as much part of the scene.

I came up with several pointers for a decent coffee shop in that earlier post – good coffee, good alternatives, good food and good service were, predictably, my top four (the others were a little more, um, idiosyncratic, including a complete absence of religious quotes and seats you can actually sit on).

The Llew Glas wins on all those; the coffee is good, as are the non-coffs, the herb tea (me), the hot chocolate (not for lactose-intolerant moi but for almost all of my friends). The food is great. There are light lunches – soups, sandwiches, a choice of scrumptious quiches – which are freshly cooked and not bought in, as well as the usual staples of gorgeous cakes and, as the sign outside says, ‘probably the best scones in Harlech’.

But for me it’s the service which shines out. An Irish friend of mine used to do a splendid act as a waitress in a newly-flash, Celtic Tiger, Dublin eaterie. She slouched up, got too close, sniffed juicily and then said, loudly and in tones of deep boredom, ‘y’aright?’. Once upon a time service like this was the norm; customers were a nuisance who got in the way. Unfortunately there are some places which haven’t realised that times have changed (another friend of mine was asked recently whether he could ‘take down’ the – accurate – reports of bad service which a restaurant had received on TripAdvisor, and was berated when he explained that this was impossible). But fake, we’re-afraid-of-TripAdvisor, service is one thing. Genuinely good service is another, and that is what you get at the Llew Glas.

Many years ago, some friends and I had a drunken conversation about something that was missing in Harlech. There were pubs (two, then, in the upper town) and a couple of very traditional cafés, but we didn’t feel that they catered for us or our friends. A wine bar was our conclusion, then. The main reason we felt we needed one was that it would provide a place for us to socialise without going to one of the pubs – no reflection on them, but they were quite a male preserve. To an extent, and a very considerable extent, the Llew Glas has filled this niche – and it’s a tribute to how good it is that it has done so without selling alcohol or being open in the evenings. After all, ‘everybody comes to Rick’s’ or, in this case, Freya’s…

harlech castleDetails? Well, the Llew Glas Delicatessen is at 3, Plas y Goits, Harlech – just opposite the Plas restaurant, in what is often known as Blue Lion (Llew Glas) Courtyard.

It’s open 10-5, Monday to Saturday; Sundays in the season, and if there’s only one piece of raspberry and coconut slice left, you won’t like it. Honest. Leave it.

A tale of two coffee shops

Coffee shops, Eating out,

We’ve got a new coffee shop. Admittedly, it’s part of a chain – it’s a Costa – and it’s also in the town ten miles away (TTMA, from now on), but it’s an exciting new development. Well, it is if you’re me,  and judging by how busy it is, I’m not the only one who thinks it’s an improvement. For one thing, their coffee doesn’t taste of old, charred, sock. So far.

Ten years ago, the choice of coffee in the TTMA was comparatively limited. There was, and is, a small department-ish store with a lovely café where you could get a decent coffee and, er, pay well for it. The food was good, too, but for me – well, it reminded me too much of Saturday shopping when I was a child. Doilies, tablecloths, lots of ladies of a ‘certain age’. Don’t get me wrong; I still go there sometimes – it’s delightful. But it also has the ability to make me want to leap on a table, shout something outrageous like ‘knickers!’ and run away. There was also a deceptive café with plastic seats where the coffee was great even if the ambiance was dodgy, and another place where your coffee (soooo burnt sock) came with biblical quotes. That was it. We’ve had additions since then, but none of them have quite managed to get it right – in my opinion – though there is a deli which does do great take-away coffee.

Caught by the rain, I ended up in one of the additions recently. It’s popular, but – and we are back to singed-sock coffee, by the way – it takes more to create a cool coffee-shop ambiance than slinging a couple of sofas in your window. Especially if you have neon lights and chairs that punters slither off when they relax too much. And – and this is today’s bugbear – if the (very young) staff are not adequately supervised. When serving in a not-that-busy coffee shop you do not a) forget about a customer’s order until they come back to the counter and remind you of it, and b) forget about it because you are too busy discussing some customers’ appearance with your colleagues, certain that you cannot be understood because you are speaking Welsh and it’s the weekend when there are lots of visitors about. Wrong, on so many levels. They did have the grace to go bright red when I deliberately chased my order in Welsh (fairly bad Welsh, but there was no way I was going to let them assume I didn’t understand what they were saying).

So I took to scoring local coffee shops – the only newspaper available to read was the Daily Mail, and the sea hadn’t frozen over so I had to find something else to do while the delicate aroma of footwear and employee embarrassment faded slightly. These were my assessment points:

* Good coffee. Oh, all right, drinkable coffee. But definitely no socky element.
* Good alternatives, especially tea – which should not be an afterthought.
* Good food, or maybe that should be decent food (let’s be realistic). Not, preferably, bought in.
* Helpful, attentive staff who keep their personal opinions to themselves. In any language.
* A relaxed atmosphere.
* Lighting which doesn’t make you feel like the Gestapo are hanging around outside.
* Seats you can sit on (there’s radical), and which may – shhh – actually be comfortable.
* A complete absence of religious quotes, though I might make an exception for some of the more, ahem, colourful parts of the Old Testament.
* Moderate pushchair count – so that there’s room for the non-pushchair-pushers to get to seats / counter / loo without injury. Not a complete absence – the ideal coffee shop should welcome everyone – but customers and staff do need to keep their limbs intact. Plus, blood can be difficult to get off any upholstery.
* Atmosphere. Character. Individuality. Not being a Starbucks. There. I’ve said the ‘S’ word.

The coffee shop I was in scored a 1 because it’s a religious-quote-free zone. Maybe a 1.5, because the food can be good, though it has let me down. OK, a max of 2, perhaps a 3 because it does have some individuality and isn’t part of a chain, but then the bible-citation place would score on that scale too (though that one compensates for the evangelizing by having generally good home baking and being safely veggie, should you need it).

Now, about the same distance from my house in the other direction is another small town. No chain coffee shops here. Here we have something as near to perfection as is theoretically possible on my scale, an independent coffee shop in an ex-ironmonger’s. I was interested to see how it would stack up.

THAtmosphere? Well, the old shop counters still remain, as does the shelving along the walls and the whole of the cashier’s office, which makes a great snug / pushchair corral. There’s lots of polished wood, a display of local crafts, some newspapers (and they do help – except when the only choice is the Daily That’s Outrageous and It’s Someone’s Fault, free wi-fi, and home-made cakes so decadent that they should be made illegal. There’s not the slightest hint of footwear in the coffee and there is an amazing choice of tea: Russian Caravan? Rose Puchong? Organic Orange Pekoe? Citrus Rooiboos? Strange compost-scented tisane? No problems.

The lighting is fine, the seats are fine (yes, there are sofas, but they’re at the back and not statement sofas in the windows), the staff are welcoming nine times out of ten – nobody’s perfect 100% of the time, but I’ve never yet caught them talking about their customers – and the pushchair tally is also acceptable. And there are no passages from any holy book whatsoever to distract you, either. I think they get a 10. Maybe a 9.5, because perfection is impossible. But I’m sure they’re working on it – and let’s hope Starbucks don’t notice, given their predatory behaviour towards successful coffee shops. I trust we’re ostensibly too remote…