The well-known rural Welsh restaurant, Annwn in Narberth, has been awarded a Michelin Green Star. Chef Matt Powell shared his unique approach to food, which combines wild ingredients, Welsh tradition and strong ecological values.
Chef Matt Powell is full of ideas about food. He's planning to use beech leaves, UK-grown lentils, medlars and crab apples in various dishes, and he's excited about the possibility of sourcing sand eels and rare heritage grains.
Sustainability and Welsh culinary traditions are key themes in his cooking. He has a large collection of Welsh cookery books, many out of print, that have inspired dishes like tender Welsh lamb braised in Cleddau honey, with sea buckthorn emulsion, sea radish, scurvy grass and honeycomb a dish on his 10-course tasting menu.
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Matt doesn't just copy old recipes, but they do influence the flavour of his menus. The changing seasons and the abundance of wild foods in Pembrokeshire also play a part.
His restaurant, Annwn, was born from eight years of running foraging courses in Pembrokeshire.
Matt, owner of the Pembrokeshire countryside restaurant, would cook dishes using ingredients collected during his foraging expeditions. Due to the popularity of his cooking, last year he opened a new version of his restaurant in an old bank Narberth.
The Good Food Guide ranked his Lawrenny-based eatery Annwn as one of the UK's most exciting restaurants in 2022.
The relocated restaurant has a rural Welsh charm with its slate floors and whitewashed walls adorned with hand-carved spoons. Just after opening, this place made it into the Michelin Guide and La Liste - a renowned guide to the world's best eateries. It also maintained its "exceptional" rating from The Good Food Guide.
On top of this, Michelin has just given the Green Star to Annwn for coupling excellent food with sustainable practices. Matt shared: "It's amazing," adding that sustainability is very important to them and is a way of life.
Living rurally, they've always used everything nearby and grown their own veggies. He told us that this ethos comes from his grandparents and it's part of their DNA. Maximising utilisation of available resources, especially pairing ingredients that grow together, is part of their approach.
"With the state the planet is in, I think Michelin's Green Stars are set to become ever more important to diners and to chefs, and I expect there will be an increase in the number of smaller restaurants that minimise waste as much as possible." says Matt. He and his partner Naomi Andrews run Annwn by themselves, making it a cosy experience.
Matt cooks in an open kitchen and personally introduces the inspiration, ingredients and techniques behind each dish. They've been busy due to the attention the restaurant has received. Naomi often goes foraging, gathering a variety of seaweeds twice a week, while Matt's 77 year old friend Richard Evans provides him with ingredients like rosehips, acorns and beech leaves.
Other ingredients are grown in Matt and Naomi's kitchen garden, and when they need to buy from growers or farmers, they source as locally and sustainably as possible. This led to Matt's recent quest to find lentils grown in the UK for a reworking of an old Welsh dish. Despite the fascination with wild ingredients and Welsh traditions, Matt's cooking is based on the solid foundations of French Classical cooking that he learned in his youth.
Growing up in Bridgend, his earliest culinary influences were familial his great grandfather, who was a chef in the Welsh Guards; the garden and greenhouse where his great
Matt's grandparents grew lots of vegetables and he loved the smell of bread baking in his great-grandmother's oven. He also enjoyed foraging for mushrooms and chestnuts with his grandmother. Matt didn't like school much, preferring to be outside shooting wood pigeons and rabbits for dinner. One day, he and a friend entered a cooking competition run by a local chef and won! The prize was a job in the chef's kitchen and a place at college to study cooking.
'Priceless' Raymond Blanc
"I loved college because Dave Bassett, my tutor, encouraged me a lot," he says. He then started reading books by famous chefs like Marco Pierre White, Raymond Blanc, Pierre Koffmann. He also read The Caterer and Hotelkeeper every week: "It was full of stories about successful chefs. It was a really exciting time."
Dave encouraged Matt to try new things and one day suggested that Matt should work somewhere really good when he finished college. So, Matt wrote to Raymond Blanc and that's how his career took off. He worked in Raymond Blanc's restaurants, Le Manoir and Le Petit Blanc, when he was just 17 in the 1990s. These restaurants were often visited by celebrities and very rich people.
"You'd have people flying in from Japan to have lunch they'd come from Heathrow in a helicopter, and then fly back again," he remembers. He says the cooking skills he learned there were priceless.
"Even though my outlook is different now, I still love French food. And you've got to learn the basics of French food as a basis for creativity," he explains. After working with Raymond Blanc, he moved on to top restaurants in Europe.
He worked under Jean-Jacques Menanteau at the Hotel de l'Europe in Amsterdam and Schilo Van Coevorden at Blakes, another Amsterdam hotel. Here, he first experienced fusion cooking.
Then, he moved to country house hotels in Ireland and England, including Sheen Falls Lodge and Cliveden House. Eventually, he settled in Pembrokeshire where he reconnected with nature and its ingredients by running fishing and foraging courses. It's also where he met Naomi and welcomed their daughter Freya.
Sustainability is in our DNA
He balanced work with looking after Freya and he would get outdoors as much as possible: "My biggest influence is still from being outside. It gives me so much inspiration and new ideas, which is frustrating because there's only a certain amount of hours in the day."
"Being confronted with Mother Nature every day seeing gannets, seals, dolphins - it shapes you as a chef; it makes you humbler because it opens your eyes to the vastness of nature. Even in a little area, going snorkelling for example and seeing the different seaweeds."
Sustainability is hugely important to Matt and it's always been a way of life for the couple. Living in rural Wales, they have always used everything that's on their doorstep and they have grown their own vegetables. "It's what my grandparents taught me to do and it's in our DNA," he says. His new cooking style, developed over eight years, is a poetic reflection of his experiences.
His dish 'Wild Garlic Preserved in its Lifecycle' (preserved wild garlic flowers, seeds and leaves served with bread made from the heritage Welsh grain Hen Gymro and cooked on a planc plus home-cured and air-dried lamb leg and lamb butter) is a tribute to traditional Welsh culinary techniques, wild ingredients, and the changing seasons. Now, he focuses solely on his dishes, while his colleague Dan Moar runs the foraging courses that can be booked through the Annwn website.
'True to our roots'
Reflecting on the time he spent running the courses and cooking at the end of them, he said: "It was quite mad really because it was taking people out foraging and then cooking much of the same menu I cook now. I was working crazy hours because I was still in love with cooking and I knew deep down that I wanted to go back to that someday, but on my own terms.
"Sustainability is hugely important to us, and it's always been a way of life for us. "Living in rural Wales, we have always used everything that's on our doorstep and grown our own vegetables. It's what my grandparents taught me to do and it's in our DNA.
"The experiences of those eight years combined to make me a chef that I never otherwise would have been. Much of it was about feeling so small so aware that there are bigger things going on than you, and then you start reading the Welsh cookery books and everything just connects. You find yourself looking at this stuff you're walking past every day, thinking, 'How can I use that?' I want to do a woodland version of Wild Garlic Preserved."
He's also been working on a new grain-based dish: Hen Gymro cooked in onion stock, adding lightly pickled leeks, topping it with leek roots crisped in season rye flour and finishing it all with an onion sauce and blue sheep's cheese. Looking to the future, he plans to keep researching and creating. "We're staying true to our roots and keeping everything as local as possible," he says. "We're going to keep the restaurant small, only order what we need, and keep discovering new things and old Welsh recipes."
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