Some restaurant meals simply provide you with lovely food and a full stomach, whilst others are an experience.
They can leave you with a sense of wonder or nostalgia and even teach you a thing or two.
One restaurant which falls into this category is Annwn, a 12-seat restaurant hidden away in the upstairs of a converted potting shed in the corner of a Pembrokeshire walled garden.
Read more: The 50 best restaurants in Wales in 2022
It’s owned and run by Matt Powell, a chef with over 20 years experience who has worked for Raymond Blanc and in Michelin-starred restaurants across Europe.
For the past 10 years he’s run a food and foraging business on the Pembrokeshire coast but having rediscovered his love of cooking, he decided to return to the stove and opened his own restaurant late last year.
Annwn, which is the name of the underworld in Welsh mythology, is the result. It’s a fine dining restaurant where Matt creates dishes using ingredients he’s foraged from the local area and vegetables he’s grown in the walled garden. It makes for a very unique experience.
At £120 a head for a 10-course tasting menu, this is very much in the special occasion category of restaurants. But, there’s clearly a huge amount of time and effort which goes into preparing each dish and there’s excellent and informative service from Matt and his partner Naomi.
Having managed to find the restaurant tucked away in the village of Lawrenny (it currently doesn’t have a sign, which made it even more of a challenge), we settled down for the night in the intimate upstairs dining room which looks onto the open kitchen.
The first dish, which used a combination of foraged ingredients and an historic Welsh recipe, set the theme for the rest of the meal.
Pickled wild garlic was served in the three stages of its life cycle - its leaves and flowers were light and sweet whilst the berries were sharp like capers.
It was accompanied by bara planc, a traditional Welsh bread that’s cooked on a bakestone, resulting in a soft crumb and toasty scorched crust. Served warm, it was great slathered with homemade butter.
Slices of cured and air dried lamb were like a Welsh equivalent of Parma ham. The tender pieces of crimson flesh had a compelling lamby intensity and delicate saltiness. Made with another old recipe, it’s certainly a dish which was long overdue a revival.
A plate-sized pebble beach was scattered with shells filled with intensely savoury, salty and creamy limpet mousse served with a variety of seaweeds. The pickled seaweed was sweet and zingy whilst the fresh stuff tasted like drinking a mouthful of seawater. Whilst I enjoyed it, it was probably more interesting rather than delicious.
Next up was a superb bowl of onion soup. Grains of Hen Gymro, an ancient Welsh wheat with a nutty taste, provided the bulk for a rich and sweet onion broth topped with onion ring-like battered leek roots, pieces of compressed leek, and creamy and funky Dolwerdd blue sheep cheese.
A savoury, salty and bitter broth made with dry aged kelp and sea buckthorns was a full on yet tasty experience. It was served with a rock topped with blobs of rather unappetising looking soft and truffley black siphon weed, that thankfully tasted a lot better than they looked, as well as a creamy siphon weed mayonnaise and sharp shoots of sea radish and scurvy grass.
Whilst all the components hit the mark, I’m not quite sure how they combined to make a complete dish. Perhaps a nice hunk of white fish might have helped.
An egg shaped bowl filled with a beautifully funky and creamy wood blewit mushroom soup and a rich and fudgey slow-cooked duck egg yolk was one of my standout dishes of the night. It was a lush bit of comfort food.
I don’t think I’ve ever had hare before but with its dark colour and light gaminess, a loin and leg reminded me more than a little bit of venison. Dressed with a rich and glossy meat sauce, a fruity and tangy damson puree, preserved mushrooms and hazelnuts, and more foraged leaves, this was a great piece of meat cookery.
Onto the palate cleanser and a scoop of super smooth crab apple sorbet, with a fresh zing, tasted just like the cider lollies I used to enjoy as a kid.
The first dessert was a simple yet delicious combination. Thick, creamy and light fresh cheese curds that had been scented with meadowsweet, a vanilla like herb, were drizzled with floral local honey.
Designed to look like Pembrokeshire’s Stack Rocks and the eggs of the guillemots which nest there, shards of light and delicately chewy ash coloured meringue were joined by an egg shell filled with a gorgeously creamy gorse flower custard.
Finally, crisp chocolate shells were filled with a super tart yet fruity sea buckthorn puree. It was another delicious seashore-inspired dish and a fitting end to the meal.
We had a lovely meal at Annwn. It’s a restaurant which feels more in touch with its local surroundings and Welsh heritage than almost any other I’ve visited. If you’re looking for an experience rather than just a meal out then I’d highly recommend seeking it out.
The details:
Address - The Old Potting shed, Lawrenny, Kilgetty, Pembrokeshire SA68
Telephone - 07308 313107
For the latest food and drink news, reviews, and interviews sent directly to your inbox, sign up for our weekly Food & Drink newsletter here
