Menai Bridge, Anglesey, Wales: where to eat and drink
Where to eat, drink and stay in Anglesey, Wales in 2016. Find out where to feast on fresh-from-the-creel seafood, Welsh whisky ice cream and deconstructed bara brith
Looking for the best restaurants in Anglesey? Here are the best places to eat and drink on the Welsh island, including Menai Bridge...
This pretty, pastel-painted village, linked to the mainland by Thomas Telford’s suspension bridge and the sturdy Britannia Bridge, was for years bypassed by holidaymakers heading for the pier at Beaumaris or the Irish ferries at Holyhead. Today, Beaumaris, a sailing haunt, has a faded elegance, but the high street in Menai Bridge bustles with independent retailers including high-class chocolatier and patissier Benjamin Lee.
Dylan's, Menai Bridge
This contemporary restaurant down on the waterfront dishes up local seafood straight from the creel beside floor length picture windows onto the strait. Seafood starters include salt and vinegar whitebait, crispy sea bass tacos and homemade crab cakes. Show-stopping fish mains range from roasted local lobster with garlic butter and skinny fries to hearty seafood chowder with Menai mussels. There are plenty of pizzas, too, topped with local ingredients such as Dolmeinir Farm lamb.
Sosban & the Old Butcher's, Menai Bridge
An exciting addition to Menai Bridge is Stephen and Bethan Stevans’ rustic restaurant Sosban & the Old Butcher’s, the original slate from the butcher’s shop still cladding one wall.
Stephen worked for Marcus Wareing in London before heading back to his native Anglesey. Open from Wednesday to Saturday evenings, this is touted as a dining experience rather than as a traditional restaurant. There’s no menu – the eight to 12 courses are a ‘grouping of ingredients’ – and while dishes sound simple, the result is pure theatre: ‘celeriac, coffee, apple’ is a sort-of risotto, the chopped celeriac resembling rice, served under a cloche filled with smoke. ‘Bitter chocolate, passion fruit, olive oil, peanut’ is a chocolate sphere of passion fruit and peanut dissolved at the table by liquid caramel.
Halen Môn Saltcote and Visitor Centre, Menai Strait
Granted PDO (protected designation of origin) status, putting it in the same league as champagne and parma ham, Halen Môn is intensely salty. A smooth, long-lasting salty. Try it as part of a guided tour and tasting at the new Saltcote and Visitor Centre (halenmon.com), a £1.25m stunner of a building on the banks of the Menai Strait, Anglesey.
Alison and her husband David started a business growing oysters and mussels on Anglesey and then opened a sea zoo before turning their attention to salt. It was the zoo’s fussy seahorses happily breeding in these waters that made them realize how pure the seawater was. They’ve now gone full circle and have started farming mussels once more, on the shore. But it’s salt that has put them, and Anglesey, on the culinary map. Alongside products like smoked water (famously used by Heston Blumenthal and good in a risotto, apparently), Halen Môn salt is now exported to 22 countries and sold by Waitrose, M&S and Harvey Nichols among other stockists, including sixth-generation butcher John Swain-Williams in Menai Bridge.
Take part in a salt tasting, ranging from basic table salt to rock salt, European sea salt and then, sparkling like freshly fallen snow in the sun, the brilliant white crystals of Halen Môn, or Anglesey sea salt.
Red Boat Gelato, Beaumaris
This ice-cream parlour boasts over 200 flavours (Penderyn whisky knocks spots off rum and raisin).
Where to stay in Anglesey
The Outbuildings, Llangaffo
Stay in this restaurant with rooms, in Anglesey’s southwest corner. The four bedrooms and one very pink shepherd’s hut at The Outbuildings are surrounded by farmland. Anglesey was once dubbed the breadbasket of Wales, so fertile was this 276 square-mile island – there are views across to Snowdonia’s mountains and a five-mile beach at Llanddwyn is only minutes away, too.
Tucking into scallops seared in Penderyn whisky with owner ‘Bun’ (Judith) Matthews, she told us about her recently-launched gourmet supper hampers (crab lasagna, chicken and lobster pie) and plans to open a crab shack this summer in an old barn in rural Rhoscolyn on the west coast. The aim is to keep it perfectly simple: lobster pots, candlelight, fresh Anglesey crab and sundowners with a sea view.
Double rooms at The Outbuildings cost from £75, B&B, with dinner an extra £30-35pp (theoutbuildings.co.uk).
For more info on Anglesey, see visitanglesey.co.uk.
Menai Seafood Festival
Visit in August to tie in with the Menai Seafood Festival.
Words Lucy Gillmore
Photographs Alamy, Getty, Kieran Ridley
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