It’s a one-time chicken shed on a Welsh caravan park, with half-wood, half-breeze block walls and a corrugated iron roof.
Not quite the type of place you’d expect to be bracketed with the culinary elite such as the Ledbury and Le Gavroche perhaps. But turn off onto a quiet patch of countryside in the south of Anglesey and you’ll find the surprise addition to this year’s prestigious Good Food Guide – the Marram Grass Cafe.
“There’s something in the fact that it shouldn’t work. It’s a shed in the middle of nowhere,” says Liam Barrie, who runs the restaurant with his brother, Ellis, when asked for the secret behind its success. “What right do we have to be providing good food?”
The brothers set up the cafe in 2010 on the caravan site established by their parents, partially as a payback to them by Ellis after he went travelling. There had been plans to turn the building into a toilet block for the caravan site, but they were abandoned as the restaurant became increasingly popular.
At lunchtime on the day after its inclusion in the Good Food Guide, the cafe was packed out with customers including day-trippers from around the region as well as, of course, caravaners who can look forward daily to something that bit more special than a supermarket meal heated up on their gas hobs.
The restaurant puts an emphasis on local produce, with a menu that ranges from carrot, almond and tea-soaked raisin soup through to locally caught sea bass with foraged Anglesey samphire, as well as other mains based around local oysters, lobster with herb and lemon crust, and rump steak with local chard and sweetcorn. A typical dessert is Eton mess made from local fruits and home-made marshmallow.
Among contented customers were Chris Faircliffe and his wife, Emily, both NHS workers from Holywell who were visiting Anglesey and decided to take a detour to the cafe with their children after hearing about its success on the radio. “It’s just a really beautiful, simple idea ... isn’t it?” he said, tucking into a signature plate of fish and chips. “The fact that it’s all incredibly fresh really just adds to it. I’d happily travel back here again.”
Customers have already been making trips from as far away as London to sample the food, with the beautiful north Wales countryside a bonus. On a clear day customers can view the mountains of Snowdonia to one side, and gaze over green and golden pastures on the other.
For the brothers, connecting with the area was a priority from the start, although they were familiar with it from a young age. “Our parents slowly brainwashed us into being excited about caravan sites and when they bought the site I had just graduated as a surveyor, so I came to help them set it up in 2009,” says Ellis, 25. Meanwhile Liam, 27, who was in Australia after cutting his teeth in the food industry working at Filini restaurant in the Radisson hotel in Liverpool, came back to develop the cafe.
“It was really hard to find local produce back then,” said Ellis. “We were only 19 and 21 then, so two young Scouse lads knocking on farmers’ doors saying ... can we have some of your produce? ... It took a while for us to establish strong links, but as it happens, we’re also now seeing the emergence of a strong food group on the island.
“For us to be in the Good Food Guide is incredible. I mean, there are people like Gordon Ramsay there, people we would have looked up to as inspiration for food when we were kids and saw him on television.”
Today, the Marram is a 40-cover restaurant that has grown from serving 30 diners a week to up to 2,000 covers. Around 100 people come through its tiny front doors at lunchtime to squeeze behind tables and into nooks around a bar area inside the “shed”.
For Elizabeth Carter, the Good Food Guide editor, it is “an extraordinary find”.
The cooking had demonstrated “ambition and skill”, offering “a simple recipe for success that not many manage to get so right”. She added: “When one of the guide’s longest-serving inspectors tipped us off about a restaurant in a shed on a campsite, our curiosity was piqued. And what an extraordinary find Marram Grass Cafe turned out to be.
“The low building with its corrugated iron roof may channel scout hut and air-raid shelter in equal measure, but the interior charms and the cooking show ambition and skill.”
For now, the brothers are enjoying their newfound culinary fame, but plans are already in motion for expansion after the family recently acquired 14 acres of land right across the road from the site.
“The plan is to have a smallholding so we can start supplying our own produce. We also want to develop it in terms of an edible woodland-type set-up, opening up into little kitchen gardens and have an educational spine through it as well,” added Ellis.
The tin-roofed hut is here to stay, however. “People have asked us over the years if we are going to get rid of it. Are we going to make it bigger? But what’s important is the charm of the place. The simplicity is the key to it.”
