The Nant Ddu Excitation

Soooo...you know that d and I are pretty big foodies, right? After all, one does not get to write a blog about the need to avoid surgical intervention to lose a shedload of weight by eating salads all one's life.

We've been back in Merthyr a year and a half now, and more than the theatre, more than the pulse of the city, the one thing we've really missed is really good food places. Which is not to say we actually tripped over these little goldmine places in London - they were rare and beautiful jewels, and when we found one, we couldn't stop talking about it for days.

In more than seven years, we found plenty of "good" places to eat, and one or two "really great" places to eat. Then there are the places that we don't even have to name - the ones where we can just look at each other, with the thought in our head, and watch the smile spread across the other's face.

We found our first one in Wales today.

First, it's probably fair to let you in to the secret of a few of our London "look" places.

The first of them would be the Golden Bird - a Chinese restaurant on the Mile End Road. The Chinese restuarant on the Mile End Road in fact, to which we introduced my mother on our trip in March this year. We've probably now been there a few too many times to remain as utterly awestruck as is strictly due to the place, but the first time we found it it was as though choirs of Chinese angels opened up the clouds and sang for just we two.

Then, not to over-enforce the theme here, there was another Chinese restaurant. It was the unassumingly-named Hong Kong restaurant in Barking, run by the family of a friend of ours, and I have to tell you, if the Golden Bird had its brilliance dulled even a little by repetition, this place never did. You want the best Chinese food this side of China, you don't necessarily bother with Chinatown. Go to Mr and Mrs Li in Barking. A proper family atmosphere, the most insanely good food, magic tea with beautiful and bizarre underwater Triffids in it, and occasional, moderately demented Elvis Tribute Nights. This place knocked it out of the park, and was far enough away that it remained, to the very end, a place of majesty and wonder. The very end coming about not with our leaving London, but the apprently necessary close down during compulsory Barking remodelling. For all I know, Barking now looks all kinds of hot and sexy, but damn, it's lost one of its biggest jewels - the only real place to spend Chinese New Year. Or British New Year, come to that...

I don't know the name of the next jewel. We always just knew it at "the place at the top of our street". There was never anyone in it, which was a crime against gastronomy, because the chef there - who perversely always had time to stop and chat - was waaaay above the class of the local area. He created proper gastronomy that satisfied, and charged a pittance for it.

Which is presumably one of the main reasons he went out of business. That place was like a culinary Brigadoon - we were so entranced with it that when we came back from a culinarily mortifying honeymoon in Paris (which is probably what happens when you inadvertantly book a hotel in the red light district!), we ran straight from Heathrow to "the place at the top of our street" with a bottle of our wedding champagne and put instantly right a world of Parisian wrongness. To this day, both of us carry a little guilt in our hearts about not shouting his praise from the rooftops and packing the place out when we could have. It was eventually replaced by a Caribbean chain restaurant...y'know, cos there aren't enough of those in East London...Sigh...

No danger of replacement though for what was probably our final London "look" place. The Mint Leaf on Regent Street was posh from the word go. I booked it for one of d's birthdays and it had the potential to be up its own arse - cocktail lounge before you got to the restaurant, all neon and £6 per drink.
But then the food started coming, and the conversation stopped, as a parade of "mmmm" sounds, all low-key and orgasmic, started sliding their way across the table. Seduction food at its most exact and exquisite...except of course, you don't want to stop eating there until you're far too full to enjoy any attempt at seduction. Not, by any stretch of the imagination, a cheap night out. But worth it.

Ahhhh but enough about London's real crown jewels. You want to know about tonight's Welsh experience, presumably. It's called The Nant Ddu Lodge, and I've been there only once before - about 20 years ago. It wasn't like this back then.

From the moment we sat down in comfortable chairs to peruse the menu, it was evident that someone with an intelligent palette had been at work. There was diversity, there was choice, but every dish was crafted and described with such love and intelligence it took us quite a while to choose what we wanted. In the end, d tried the scallops with sweet chilli jam, and I went for a daily special soup, in this case, sweet potato and chorizo. Sublime. Both of them, sublime. These people know how to really sear scallops. Go there, just for those if you have to.

For the main, it turned out that we'd both chosen the same thing - slow roasted Welsh lamb with sweet potato, onions and a mint jus. I added simple new potatoes to the mix, and d, able now to double back and add to our experience, quickly swapped to what had been our joint second choice - pork in a brandy and peppercorn sauce. When they arrived, we liberally swapped chunks of falling-to-pieces lamb for tender-as-baby's-butt pork. I could happily have eaten both meals, and then finished off Ma's insanely soft and flavoursome gammon steak to boot.

On all the cooking shows, they say a thing - respect the ingredients, and do simple things, well, elevating them to a new experience for your diner if you can.

They can at the Nant Ddu. They do - consistently it seems. So consistently that they forced me out of diet-retirement to have a dessert. I originally chose the chocolate and morello cherry trifle with shortbread fingers...but it's apparently rather popular: it had sold out today by 1 o'clock.

When you need to book an appointment with dessert, you know the restaurant's on to something. Next time, trifle-boy...next time...

I went instead for the bizarre-sounding homemade rice pudding with rhubarb crumble. Yes, I know, it really shouldn't work.

It did. Someone had tried this out mannnnny times, I'm thinking, and tweaked it till the crumble topping, the rhubarb and the rice worked together on the palette, rather than engaging in what should have been war and carnage. d's lemon tart was light and sunny and though technically, Bake-Off judges would say its base was too thick, I for one think it needed it to stand up to the sweet-tart lemon curd in such quantity. It came with a scoop of vanilla ice cream that had a homemade, love-instilled creaminess...if it's not home made, I want to know where the hell it's commercially available!

We finished with complimentary - and again probably home-made - chocolate truffled, and cafetierres of de-caff, and came home raving about every "mmm"-filled mouthful. Birthdays just got a whoooooole lot easier to plan.

If you've never been to the Nant Ddu, do. Travel if you have to - just get there. Yes, it's completely blown my Tuesday weigh-in figures. No, my dear, frankly I don't give a damn. To eat a meal like that is worth whatever comes...