So it is that time again, with my passé (I don’t care) round up of last year’s eating and drinking as the new year rolls in.

Been another tricky year for hospitality, with Covid (forgotten, at least by most) being replaced by sky high inflation (who knew printing money 24 hours a day, day in day out would cause that – worryingly not the Bank of England it would seem), rapidly rising  interest rates (I still remember the early 90s and rates at 15% – hell of alot easier to repo a house back then too) and increasing costs (don’t forget if you have to pay more so do the restaurants etc.) across the board eroding everyone’s buying power.

Notwithstanding the black clouds of economic doom, I still got out and about a fair bit (although looking back I think I did pare it all back just a tad).

A New Year’s resolution of mine is to try and be a bit more succinct with the blog  Whilst I will undoubtedly break this in this post and many, many (OK all) others, in the spirit of observance I am keeping each category to a top three

Best snack/amuse bouche

I rather like the current craze (long may it last) for a prelude to a meal or snacks to wash down the booze. That little taster that tantalises the tastebubs and brings the promise of what is to come or which helps the wine slide down (as I get older I need food with booze).

Hiraeth comes in third with a delightfully summery prelude to a lovely taster menu

Pretty as a picture and not a case of style over substance by any means. Lovely delicate sunshine flavours on display here.

Thomas by Tom Simmons tends to be my go to place for a bit of a blow out and his June collaboration with another Tom (Tom Peters) brought a taste of summer to the table

The anis of dill paired perfectly with refreshing cucumber gel and a delicate cream cheese affair, all packed in a wafer thin brick pastry. Classy start to a high class meal.

Gorse (this time at Insole Court) was always going to feature heavily (someone give this man a restaurant to operate from in Cardiff please) and here a coddled egg (we don’t see this enough) number was the absolute business

Gooey, rich, egg yoke was mixed with a seaweed and cultured cream, with crispy croutons. Really moreish combo, with the egg seasoned beautifully by the salty seaweed with the latter tempering the richness of the cream and egg. Simple, but simply delightful. I could have eaten a baker’s dozen of them.

Best fish/seafood dish dish

Didn’t eat as much fish/seafood as I would have liked last year, which I think I should put to rights in 2024 (less meat, but better quality in an admirable resolution – probably do the latter, but doubt the former if am honest).

The Spanish are rightly renowned for their rices dishes, but I think the Portuguese give them a run for their money. The first of my top three, from a trip to Lisbon in September, took us to the very palatial Nunes Real Marisqueria in Belem and a bountiful seafood rice dish.

Lovely rich stock and on point cooked fish, shellfish and molluscs, with plentiful prawn heads (the best bit) to suck the brains out of. Hot sauce (applied judiciously) worked a treat, and it all paired perfectly with an Azorean wine

Another Lisbon dish, this time at Antiga Wine Bar in the Alfama district, was stunning in its simplicity

Just perfectly cooked sweet claims,  copious amounts of garlic, a few herbs and white wine. Nothing fancy just a few  really good ingredients cooked bob on. Sometimes less really is more.

Again the perennially underrated Portugues wines, this time a top notch vinho verde, offered up the perfect foil

Best fish/seafood dish, however, was much closer to home in Blighty at the Gorse pop up in Insole Court

A substantial piece of sweet lobster tail was accompanied by a deep rich and velvety shellfish bisque. The rather intriguing addition of elderberry sauce brought tartness to balance out the richness and sweetness. Clever stuff and absolutely delicious.

Best meat dish

The Heathcock provided a beautiful bit of game, at their Autumn tasting dinner (these events are always excellent value, not least due to an absolute bargain wine pairing).

Ruby red, top-notch venison, cooked on point

with a really nice balance of earthy and sweet from mushroom, fruit and root veg. Autumn on a plate.

I have been following the two chaps behind Hiraeth for a fair few years and their short tasting menus are a total steal, with quality across the board. A stand out from a few visits was a beef short rib dish, which was everything you would want to from this excellent cut of meat. Beef dripping cooked veg added an exuberant coup de grace.

Sad to see the pub in Llanworney closing (a rapacious landlord is such an unusual thing!!!!), but I wish them the best of luck at the new home at Court Colman Manor hotel (with cooking like this no luck needed) near Bridgend.

Top place goes to a sublime meat dish as part of a two Thomas collaboration at Thomas by Tom Simmons

Perfectly cooked ruby red lamb, with an ample, but crisp (properly rendered down), fat cap

had lovely herbal notes. A meat jus, a wild garlic puree (middle class mint sauce) a hit of cheese from the croquette and of onion  from a charred baby leek all added nicely to the mix and operated to frame the brilliance of star of the show lamb (beef is always seen as the big hitting heavyweight, but to me lamb is that middleweight champ packing a big punch but still light on its feet flavour wise).

Best veggie/non meat dish

I am an avowed carnivore and tend to treat plant based food (an excuse, all too often, for ultra processed crap) with a healthy degree of scepticism.

Notwithstanding this, when non meat dishes are good, they can make you think why bother with meat.

It takes some going for me to view a kale dish as the star of (a very good) show, but that is exactly the magic trick Manteca performed.

Glorious colour,

with the vibrancy of colour matched (and some) by the flavour. A truly great pasta dish this

Moving East, the Queen of Cups in Glastonbury delivered (as part of an excellent meze type meal) salt from grill nabulsi cheese,

sweet and sour from Persian lime honey and fragrant spiced pungency from jumbo leaves of fresh oregano. All made for an absolute flavour bomb of a dish.

The winner though takes us back to Cardiff and Thomas by Tom Simmons, with a salt baked celeriac number.

Lovely nutty earthiness to the main event veggie, with that nuttiness enhanced by brown butter spiked with sherry vinegar and a well judged level of truffle bringing rich earthiness. A welcome thwack of acidity came from dehydrated apple discs, which operated to keep all that richness in check.

Best pudding

I am more a savoury than sweet guy (most people who know me will say I am very far from being sweet) and as such I will generally opt for a starter rather than a pud. Having said that I can be tempted to go over to the dark (chocolate) side.

Hiraeth’s rather fine Baked (pretty sure it wasn’t – blowtorched I reckon) Alaska hit that sought after goldilocks point of sweet, but not too sweet. 

Crisp on the outside, but gooey on the inside Italian meringue encased a brown bread ice cream, blood orange segments, marmalade, a bitter chocolate ganache and a cake base. Lovely balance to this dish.

A pitch perfect salted caramel tart (up there as a classic with old school treacle tart to me) from the Heathcock

was a quintessential Autumn pud, with the salt extenuating the sweet without it being cloying.

The clear winner, however, was a cracking effort from Gorse’s Insole pop up.

The light freshness of the perfectly set milk pudding was a great foil for a dynamite oloroso aged whisky sauce, with the latter bursting with creamy vanilla, barley sugar, sultanus, peach and a hint of spikey pepper. 

Tom Water’s dessert at the previous pop up I attended (at Ground) was a crashing  disappointment (in an otherwise brilliant meal), but all was forgotten and forgiven after this superlative effort.

Best bargain

Whilst the spike in inflation has somewhat abated, the cost of everything is still sky high and spare cash to spend on those little luxuries (which now seem to include food) is in limited supply. A food bargain is therefore very welcome these days.

A fantastic meal at a Desi pub (such a good idea) in Wolverhampton tantalised the tastebuds without causes any pain to that vital organ that is the wallet.

Love to see some of these pop up in Cardiff, as this truly was a happy meal for a tight arsed git like me.

I find good Chinese food hard to come by in the UK, with many dishes just bland (MSG doing a lot of heavy lifting) and expensive (not a sort after combo that).

Jianghu in Cathays offered a pleasing  antidote to bland standard UK Chinese fare, with full on flavours, big portions and nice prices.

Great for a light snack (pork intestine  skewers are👌) or a fill your boots blow out (without too much wallet damage). Lovely spicing here (you do need to be quite partial to cumin mind).

Top spot bargain wise, however, goes to another no frills Chinese place, this time in Cardiff city centre.

The rather a mouthful named Chinese Fast Street Food offered up a massive mouthful (and some) of steaming duck soup for a mere tenner.

Great flavour to the stock and masses of duck and noodles.  Serious bargain this and if I still worked in town I would be in here all the time.

Best wine

I rather lost my wine mojo in 2023, with it often seeming to be more a chore than an enjoyable experience. With other things getting in the way, I missed many a good tasting at both the Mystere Wine Club in Cardiff and the Jeroboam Club in Bristol. A case of lots of strain with little of the gain and as a result the pickings for this category (I usually do a standalone post – breath a sigh of relief J) are a tad slim.

Azorean wines from Pico were a revelation and (if there were enough made – production is tiny) I am confident they would be the next big thing in the wine world. Move over Santorini, there’s a new wine Island in town.

Good as they were, they didn’t quite make my top three

Third place was that most traditional of white riojas in the form of a Lopez de Heredia Vina Tondonia 1998.

Beautiful golden hue, with heady aromas of lemon peel, peach, chamomile, toasted nuts and honey, plus backnotes of spicy ginger. Mouthcoating fleshiness (but no flabbiness) in the mouth, with bag loads of  intense citrus and stone fruit, as well as a distinct toastiness and a long honeyed finish. Years still left in the tank, but drinking beautifully now.

Good food deserves good wine and this was great with a meal at Thomas by Tom Simmons that yielded a fair few dishes on this best of my year list.

Second, was the original (1999) vintage of a classic garagiste wine from Cellar Alemany I Corrio in Penedes, Spain.

Big blackcurranty nose, with a pleasing touch of rose petal. Nice tertiary notes of singed meat, smoke and cigar box, as well as spice (star anise).

Still plenty in the tank here despite its venerable age. Classy wine drank with a classy meal (in the form of a Gorse pop up – took it and paid a very reasonable corkage fee).

Straying from my beloved Spain, my top wine of 2023 was a German riesling GG from Weingut Wittmann.

This was like a three star Michelin chef had been given the brief of bottling the quintessential essence of citrus and nailing it. Huge complexity, yet simply delicious, this was an easy winner in a high class Mystere wine club tasting. Riesling is such a wonderful grape and here it was at the height of its vinous powers.

Biggest disappointment

Actually I have done rather well this year with few outright bad meals and most gripes being part of wider meals with redeeming qualities. As such, I am keeping this to two (one likely to split opinions more than the other) where the whole meal was the issue.

Going against the flow, many rave about how good the place and it is, I really did not like the Chef’s menu at Parallel.

To me the format just doesn’t work. Too many dishes unsuitable for sharing and a break neck speed of service to the point of ridiculousness marred some otherwise decent cooking (some over egging of the pudding mind).

Just going for the small plates (as I did on a later visit) is much the better option in my view. Needs a better wine list (surprisingly when Pastures’ is so good) too.

Top of the bottoms was a lunchtime visit to Gaucho. Overly expensive (with wine prices that are simple outrageously gougey) and when a steak restaurant struggles to cook a steak, you know you are in trouble.

The greenwashing/holier than thou stuff is also a bit irritating. When you are flying meat halfway across the globe, it just grates a tad to get a hefty side order of ecoevangalism with your jetsetting beef.

To me, this place is the epitome of fur coat and no knickers (remindered me of the Ivy😬 – which at least isn’t preachy).

Best overall meal

Gorse’s pop up in Insole Court was a triumph with a full array of crackerjack dishes (few featuring above).

Only the beef (just a touch tough) stopped this meal from being pretty much perfect.

Tom Walters is one of my favourite chefs in Cardiff at the moment, and I would dearly love to see him open up a permanent base in Cardiff in 2024 – what a boon that would be for the city!

Two visits to Hiraeth in Llanworney brought two very classy and above all fun meals, with the second of the two

just shading the first.

Bold flavours, inventive combinations and a sheer love of cooking that shine through in the food is a heady mix and unlike some “inventive” combos (which in the wrong hands can seem like kitchen dares) it all works to produce stellar food. This was fabulously fun food at a very reasonable price point (£45 for the short taster).

Food lovers in South Wales and beyond should beat a path to their new gaff at Court Colman Manor hotel near Bridgend.

In the long distant days when I was employed by a big company, the food at the office party (when I could be arsed to go) filled me with utter dread. Usually it was bloody awful, so the fact that my office’s annual “party” was my meal of the year is perhaps surprising until you realise I now work solo and am the sole shareholder and employee of my company. As such, I have absolute control over the venue for the office party.

I have to say my taste was impeccable, with my choice being Thomas by Tom Simmons and a collaborative meal put out by Tom Simmons and Tom Peter.

Every course was bob on, with top notch ingredients, a mix of classic and inventive and above all tasty combos. Not a dud amongst all the course, I could have easy have had all the course on the lists above it was that good.

The icing on the cake was the classy wine

bought by me with corkage waived due to a slight mix up re our seating time (it didn’t really bother at the time).

Great food, good wine and fab company (Mrs. SF was my guest) are those real pleasures in life and this meal hit the pleasure G (glutton people) spot nicely.

Thomas by Tom Simmons is my go to place for a celebratory blowout in Cardiff and this meal showed perfectly why.

Verdict

So thanks for reading the blog (amazingly people from 113 countries read it in 2023) and thanks to those who have fed and watered (well wined) me so well. Here’s to lots more good eating and drinking in 2024.

Hopefully the “everything is a crisis” crises (God do the media love a crisis) will abate in 2024 and we can all get back to worrying less and eating out a bit more. I fear many a good place may not survive 2024, unless there is more of an economic uptick/less of an “the end is nigh” narrative from our Lords and Masters (unless we tax you more and then it will, of course, all be fine) and restaurants fill up a bit more. Very much a case of use them or lose them I am afraid.

So what am I looking forward to in 2024? Well, the Heathcock Bakery (in Llandaff – interesting crowd funder on the go at mo) and Bodega (in Lakeside) look right up my street. I also must get my lazy arse to Tukka Tuk Canteen on Whitchurch Road, Mesen in Rhiwbina and Hiraeth’s new abode in the Vale. Not forgetting the newly opened Alcatraz – only joking, as I think I would rather go to actual jail!!