When it comes to eating at quirky Thai venues in my vicinity, I’ve been fortuitous so far in my life. Moo Moo Thai Tapas on City Road have been known throughout Cardiff for years as an excellent little place, their panang pbed and pbed makham dishes on the verge of local folklore and ones that had me there twice in the space of a week over the Christmas period. View fullsize View fullsize Speaking of well known dishes in Cardiff, I’ll nod to Brother Thai on Whitchurch Road. Their Thai roti wraps are what kickstarted their business, and their Thai fried chicken is also an extremely popular di ..read more

Abergavenny. It’s a town of natural beauty with a strong community, recently named as the best place to live in Wales by the Sunday Times, host of the much revered annual food festival, and a place I am fortunate enough to call my hometown. However, I hold the belief that there is a lack of plausible and trustworthy information available when it comes to eating out here. This food guide has taken me several weeks to compose - though the research, knowledge, stories, and images (of which there are 190) have been collated over months and even years. Whether you’re a new resident to the town, pas ..read more

I went to see Snac Casual at Brecon Tap fourteen months ago, in December 2022. They had recently started up and were in the early stages of figuring out the route they wanted to take with their pop ups. Back then it was an emphasis on street food type small plates cooked over fire. The Texas hot link sausage with pit beans encapsulated this initial strategy. View fullsize View fullsize Fast forward to February 2024, the brothers behind Snac brought it to the capital for the first time - and as luck would have it - only down the road from me at the grade II listed Insole Court. They’ve steppe ..read more

My first website blog of 2024 takes us to the outskirts of Abergavenny, in the village of Gilwern. The unassuming Gilwern is situated where the A40 trunk road and A465 heads of the valleys roads meet, meanwhile along the banks of the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal, lies The Towpath Inn. The family run village pub holds a traditional sense in both it’s picturesque surroundings and interior homely appearance - a hearth positioned in close proximity to a bar which sucks flames up through the chimney - but their pizza menu and street food vendors breathe a life and eccentricity into the quiet are ..read more

This blog has now been running for a whole year! One of my first ever pieces was my top 10 dining experiences of 2022, therefore I have decided to continue the tradition as we head into 2024. The list is not intended to rank restaurants against each other - it’s purely based on the overall experience I had at the time. It’s all subjective! 10. Summer Palace Fine, this list will actually include 11 restaurants. Kicking things off in joint 10th place is Summer Palace in Llandaff. The venue is on Llandaff High Street, in the shadow of the beautiful Llandaff Cathedral. View fullsize View fullsiz ..read more

I’ll cut straight to the chase: Parallel has cemented itself as one of my favourite places to eat in the entire city of Cardiff.  The team behind the ragingly popular Pasture certainly know how to run a restaurant. My first visit was a fleeting one back in the summer during August. We were on a miniature bar crawl and wound up there - I was fully expecting some great food based on things I had heard/read, but wasn’t expecting to be completely blown away by them.  We sampled some of their dishes that by now are well known throughout Cardiff: flat bread with beef butter, shallots, and ..read more

Late to the party. I’m not referring to a work Christmas do where I’ve delayed my arrival to avoid small talk with Barbara from accounting, and ended the night being reprimanded for redeeming too many jaeger bombs with the drink tokens.   For anybody not familiar, The Brass Beetle (TBB) is on Whitchurch Road in Cathays, one of the most exciting streets in Cardiff for food. I’ve spent a lot of time here recently - namely at Brother Thai for their well known roti wraps/Thai fried chicken and Tukka Tuk Canteen, the Southern Indian street food venture of Anand George. I hear plans for another ..read more

If you look up The Bulls Head, Craswall via an internet search engine, you will find several buzz words/terms to describe it: “traditional pub”, “flagstone floors”, “hole-in-the-wall bar”, “homely charm”. A bit more digging and you will also learn that they are mentioned in the Michelin Guide. All would appear well, but what you don’t see is the owners and local community have fought tooth and nail to make it to this point. The Bulls Head is one of the last unspoiled drovers’ inns in England, situated in the Marches countryside. Rewind hundreds of years and the inn was a farm with a small pub ..read more

For months I nagged my Mother in Law to go to my favourite restaurant. She eventually did and loved it. In return, she has been persisting with the notion of me heading to The Pig and Apple - a place she regularly visits. It’s the least I could do considering the first time we met, I consumed a bottle of Buckfast at her house and a scene straight out of Eastenders unfolded in the kitchen. Burger joints seem to be popping up anywhere and everywhere these days, but a farm owned by TV presenter Kate Humble on the outskirts of Monmouth isn’t a place I’d expect to find the latest big hitting restau ..read more

A small trattoria nestled into a row of houses a 10-minute walk from the coast sounds like a Venice dinner setting from Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film: The Talented Mr Ripley. However, within this piece, I visited La Parmigiana - which can be found on Duke Street in Uplands, Swansea. Yes Uplands, home to the famous Uplands Diner which offers the ‘Mega Beast’ breakfast - you can see a picture of my friend Elliot attempting to tackle it after a night out several years ago. La Parmigiana was brought to my attention after I got sent here on a judging assignment for a National competition: The It ..read more