It opened in 2013 and gained its first Michelin star a year later. It received another in 2022, making it the first site in Wales to win two stars. Prices start at £468 per person.
The restaurant scored one out of five from a visit by Food Standards Agency officers on 5 November, meaning “major improvement” is necessary.
Now, whether this defence is true or not is another matter. But it’s an interesting defence:
“I’m buying sashimi-grade fish from Japan and they’re questioning, ‘Well, we don’t know the water, so how do we know it’s sashimi grade?’
“Well, it is sashimi grade, this stuff’s eaten raw all over the world and just because our rules don’t fit their rules, they’re questioning it … I’ve got a salt chamber for ageing fish but they obviously don’t like the idea of ageing stuff.
Who to believe, eh, who to believe?
It’s so difficult getting to grips with the idea that the local council employees are ignorant cretins, isn;t it…..
I know we don’t like council jobsworths here, but London has a number of Michelin-starred Japanese restaurants with a food hygiene rating of 5, so the rules definitely don’t stop you using Japanese sashimi grade fish.
It might well be the case that the inspectors in mid-Wales are not as familiar with foreign stuff as those in London but:
So it’s not just the council jobsworths failing to understand his art then….
I’m certainly not one to stick up for over-officious council officers, but a) I think keeping an eye on hygiene standards in businesses that serve food is a sensible idea and b) I do not think that giving someone a pass just because they have Michelin stars is very smart.
There is ‘keeping an eye’ and then there is ‘keeping an eye’.
When your job involves managing people who are out ‘keeping an eye’ on things then, to justify your job and (more importantly) to justify more resources for your job (and yourself) you’ll find more and more things that need to have an eye kept on them.
I’ve seen it where I used to work. Over a 30 year period the food safety rules got more and more strict – despite there not being a single food-safety problem at this venue during that time.
It wasn’t about food safety at the end, the city had changed over that time and the city wanted the venue gone. We were all too low-class for them.
I’d be inclined to agree with Marius and Toby if Mrs Grist hadn’t started to take a fancy to Wales because of the old castles there and I’ve seen a few places that call themselves restaurants and have 5 star ratings where I’d sooner smuggle in a Big Mac than eat any food served there. And I have met many local government employees so…
Don’t you get it? We have to regulate ourselves to prosperity. There’s no other way!
Aging fish in a salt chamber!? FISH!?
Apparently dry aging fish is a thing. Well, I saw something on YouTube about it…
I do know that sushi chefs in Japan often ‘age’ and otherwise prepare some fish for a few days before serving, it’s not all landed at dawn on on the table by lunch.
Pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before; one of the local pubs consistently got it’s five stars from the council; had stopped doing food five or six years before the system came in. All the landlord did, was fill the logbook in with the chiller temperatures a couple of times a day. Five stars, everytime.
Watched the landlord furiously scribbling away one evening (different place) – turns out he was making up about 9 months of entries before the inspector bowled in the next day. Did suggest he swapped between black and blue biros about once a week.
One other place – zero stars, once. Turns out on particular member of staff just never wrote the numbers down when she was working.
Pointless system.
A wet only pub still needs a food hygiene certificate but as the risks are low, it doesn’t have the same requirements as a restaurant.
There is no way a place could get zero stars on paperwork failure alone.
Sashimi-quality fish has to be fresh enough not to smell, and have been frozen to -24C for at least 24 hours to kill any parasites, then eaten immediately it has thawed.
Do this, and so long as you haven’t eaten any fugu liver you’ll be fine. Oh, and use (but don’t over-use) the dipping sauces: by itself, raw fish isn’t particularly tasty.
“You knew it was Wales when you built it.”
The Times‘s review of this place mentions continuous thumping house ‘music’. No thanks.
Quite. Last London restaurant I was in it was earplugs or 120db of tinnitus. Either way, no communication, so we ate the meal in silence. My wife, who’d wanted to try the place on recommendation, was mortified but understood.