Welsh Lamb, Laverbread, and Bara Brith: A Food Lover's Guide
North Wales has a food culture as distinctive as its landscape. Here's what to eat, where to find it, and why it matters.
Welsh food has spent decades being undersold. The country that produces some of the finest lamb in the world, that has a seaweed dish — laverbread — with no equivalent anywhere else in Europe, that bakes a fruit loaf so good it's been eaten at royal tables, somehow convinced itself that its cuisine wasn't worth celebrating.
That's changing. A generation of Welsh chefs has started treating local ingredients with the seriousness they deserve. At Sosban and the Old Butcher's in Menai Bridge, a tasting menu built entirely on Anglesey and Snowdonia produce has earned a Michelin star. The cooking is technically brilliant, but what stays with you is the sense of place — every dish tastes unmistakably of here.
For something less formal, the farmers' markets at Llangollen and Caernarfon are the best introduction to what North Wales actually eats. Salt marsh lamb from the Conwy estuary. Unpasteurised cheese from small dairies in the hills. Honey from hives kept on heather moorland. Bara brith — the spiced fruit loaf — still made to recipes that predate the industrial revolution.
Laverbread deserves its own paragraph. Made from laver seaweed harvested from the Welsh coast, cooked down to a dark, intensely savoury paste, it's traditionally served with cockles and bacon for breakfast. It tastes of the sea in the way that only things that actually came from the sea can. Try it at least once.