The Heathcock, 58-60 Bridge Street, Cardiff CF5 2EN (029 2115 2290). Lunch £7-£13, mains (evenings) £15-£24, desserts £7-£8.90, wines from £19
On a slow news day in the summer of 2016, I became the subject of headlines for giving a Cardiff restaurant a good review. To be fair, it was less the nice things I said about the Classroom, which is staffed by catering students at Cardiff and Vale College, than my assertion that it was a boon to the Welsh capital because the city was short on great eating options. I’d liked both the Potted Pig and Purple Poppadom, basically anywhere beginning with the letter P, but after that, choice had seemed limited.
Some people in Cardiff agreed with me. Others were aroused to a frothing digital rage. They sent me lists of terrific kebab, pizza and burger joints, all of which are marvellous things. You’ve got to love a city which boasts a street nicknamed Chippy Alley, for the number of establishments spanking the deep fat fryers. I was dismissed as an insufferable snob; a dreadful flaneur who was only interested in fancy-pants faine daining. Some said I was no longer welcome in the city. This peaked with Marco Pierre White announcing, during a press interview to promote the opening of his new Cardiff restaurant, that I specifically was not invited. Bless him.
A man employed to distinguish between the execution of one pig’s head croquette over another really shouldn’t challenge a charge of insufferable snobbery. And yes, I can get as excitable over a bit of gastronomic ambition as the next over-entitled, expense-accounted keyboard jockey. But, in truth, the strength of a country’s food culture is not defined by a handful of gilded gastro-palaces, infested with espumas and granitas, and dripping with chandeliers like crystal tits, but by the presence of those places you’d keep going to repeatedly, because you just want something nice to eat.
Happily, a number of interesting-looking restaurants of that sort have opened in Cardiff since my 2016 lunch: Asador 44, Sopra 73, Milkwood, North Star, Heaney’s and its sibling oyster bar Uisce, Thomas by Tom Simmons, Nook, and a few more. Then there’s the Heathcock, a reassuringly solid lump of a pub, located amid the tree-lined lanes of Llandaff to the city’s north, which is where I went, and where I would go again.
It’s a second venture from the team behind the Hare & Hounds at Aberthin a few miles to the west of Cardiff. In its pleasingly straightforward approach to the business of feeding people well, it has a touch of St John about it. It feels as though the doctrine of chef Fergus Henderson has been read and fully understood – identify the good things, do them well – and then shaped for the space in which it finds itself. Both the main bar and the dining room next door are white, utilitarian spaces, as are those at St John in London’s Farringdon. Offal is embraced, as it is at St John. Ox heart makes a showing. So do pickled walnuts and duck fat.
The bar menu offers a homemade sausage roll, which comes with their own brown sauce. It’s a bronzed, big-shouldered wonder of flaky pastry and dense, well-seasoned sausage meat. There are local ales on tap, including Grey Trees Drummer Boy from Aberdare and Bragdy Twt Lol Twti Ffrwti from Pontypridd. Any suggestion that I am merely copying out words at this point, and don’t have a clue what any of this means, is extremely scurrilous. The point is that the Heathcock is very much a pub which also has a dining room. For £4.20 you can get a three-strong ale flight, plus there’s a heavily French wine list, almost all of which is available by the glass, carafe and bottle.
In the evenings the food menu follows a classic starter-main model. There’s lamb with Jerusalem artichokes and green sauce. There’s venison with button mushrooms, roasted beetroot and blackberries. Most of those mains cost around £20. But at lunchtime it’s a selection of small plates only rarely priced into double figures. Slices of cold roast beef, served soft and pink, come curled on a slab of duck fat toast, and topped with hefty fronds of peppery watercress with a big grating of fresh horseradish. More grated horseradish turns up with a silvery fillet of pickled mackerel, alongside a cucumber relish, that reminds me in a sweet, nostalgic way of the stuff in jars that I loved as a kid. Both elements rest on a lake of a sweet-sour blood orange dressing that is so good we ask for a spoon so it isn’t wasted.
We have butter-yellow ribbons of pappardelle with a ragu made from rabbit leg that has been braised unto collapse then given a helpful boost from handfuls of chopped tarragon. For texture it is topped with golden fried breadcrumbs. There are slices of salmon pastrami, with a dry, dense texture and a spiced and brown sugared edge, that has me dabbing at the plate for any last crumbs of the massive flavour bomb of a rub left behind on the plate. Chunks of celeriac get the buttermilk fried chicken treatment and come with wild mushrooms and a purée of themselves.
Dainty pieces of grilled ox heart arrive perched on what has been described as a duck fat chip. It turns out to be the same as the multi-layered, then deep-fried confit potato that we have ordered as a side. Having two portions of this on the table is no hardship. (Incidentally, I tried making these at home recently courtesy of a recipe from London’s Quality Chop House, which is credited with inventing them. While delicious, they are an enormous, 24-hour faff and should be left to restaurant kitchens.) Our other side dish is hispi cabbage which, in a radical departure, has not been chargrilled. It turns out you can just shred and butter hispi cabbage. Who knew?
For a last classical flourish, the kitchen knocks out a perfectly engorged rhubarb soufflé tasting brightly of its star ingredient. There is also a wobbly and gently tart buttermilk pudding with honeycomb and leaves of sweet white chocolate. Even allowing for a pandemic-enforced gap, it’s taken me a while to get back to Cardiff. After a lunch like this I can’t fail but be delighted I’ve returned. Does the thoughtful and thoroughly satisfying cooking at the Heathcock mean I was wrong to be so down on the city’s possibilities back in 2016? No, it just suggests things have changed, and so very much for the better.
News bites
A large and growing group of chefs and restaurateurs have come together to raise funds for Unicef’s relief work in Ukraine under the hashtag #CookForUkraine. The restaurants, including St John, Sabor, Blacklock and Soho House have so far raised more than £65,000, some by adding an extra charge to the bill, others by putting a Ukrainian themed dish or drink on the menu. The Ukrainian food writer and cook Olia Hercules, one of those behind the venture and whose family are still in the country, said: ‘I don’t want people to get stuck in the headlines and to lose sight of the human beings behind this story. And what’s more human than people getting together and sharing food?’ Restaurants wanting to get involved can email CookForUkraine@gmail.com. Home cooks are also being encouraged to stage fundraising supper clubs. Any donations can be made here.
In other Cardiff news Lee Skeet, former head chef of Hedone in London, has more than achieved his crowdfunding goal of raising £25,000 to buy new kitchen equipment for his restaurant Cora in the Welsh capital. After a series of sold-out pop-ups, Cora opened in January. It serves tasting menus costing £50 at lunch and £75 at dinner, and seats just 12 guests. The crowdfunder actually raised over £28,000. The extra money will be invested in new staff and crockery.
Elsewhere in Wales, the company behind the vast Celtic Manor Resort just outside Newport is to launch a new seafood restaurant in Milford Haven. Dulse, named after the edible seaweed, will be part of the Tŷ Hotel Milford Waterfront. It will open in April and promises ‘pure freshness from the Pembrokeshire coast and countryside’. At milfordwaterfront.co.uk.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
• This article was amended on 6 March 2022 to correct the spelling of Pontypridd.
