Ruthin Restaurant Guide

2023 Review: “Always excellent food” has built a strong reputation for local lad Tom Watts-Jones’s well-regarded pub in the Vale of Glamorgan. Chef’s CV includes stints at London’s St John and also The Anchor & Hope. There are numerous menus here, including an à la carte or nine-course tasting option.

2023 Review: This “buzzy hotel restaurant” in a “lovely sunny setting overlooking its vineyard” is “great to know about if you’re in the area”. Chef Andy Aston wins good ratings for cooking that is notably “good-value” for its quality.

White-painted walls and a sparse, woody interior add to the modernised feel of this ‘Pub & Hotel’ on the fringe of Cardiff, which now more gives the impression of “an interesting restaurant, with an excellent range of beer”. The stated aim is ‘not pretentious fine dining; it’s just about good food’ – so you can choose from the bistro-esque set menu (two courses for £39 per person) or there’s a fancier nine-course tasting menu for £75 per person.

This “excellent Chinese restaurant near the cathedral” was opened almost 40 years ago by the Chim family, originally from Hong Kong, and may well be the best-known and “best-value Oriental restaurant in Cardiff”.

2022 Review: “Worth a detour to the old docks” – a converted red-brick Victorian railway building “down by the Barry Island waterfront” is the new (May 2021) home for one of Wales’s best-known chefs, who closed his former Penarth HQ in July last year. It’s an attractive contemporary setting with 30 covers for a menu that’s not as chefy and expensive as his former Michelin-starred one – more affordable and in a style you might describe as ‘brasserie plus’. A range of steaks is a feature, and early reports speak of “classy cooking by James Sommerin's team from a short, well-realised menu”.

Set up by GBM’s Tommy Heaney and partner Nikki in 2018, this hip and haute suburban venue is “a breath of fresh air in Cardiff”, where the “happy, bustling atmosphere” is at poles to fine-dining starchiness. The “dead good value” tasting menu is rounded out by decently priced set menus and a hearty Sunday lunch. This year’s worst report? “I stopped just short of awarding a ‘5’, but surely this is one of the best places to fine dine in Cardiff?”

The French-inspired cuisine is quite straightforward and likewise the relatively traditional decor at Tom Simmons’s ‘Restaurant & Bar’ in Pontcanna, whose shortish a la carte features dishes such as Beef Short Rib or Fish & Chips; and where the tasting menu for £85 per person might include Roasted Monkfish or Creedy Carver Duck Breast. For whatever reason, it inspired no feedback this year, although it was rated very good across the board in last year’s survey. Reports please!

Keralan-born Anand George’s “outstanding, innovative” cooking has attracted a large following over the last 15 years for this first-floor venue whose “tasty menu is a cut above the usual curry-house fare in terms of variety and quality”. The chef, who trained with India’s notable Raj group, also owns a trio of more casual street-food-style outlets in Cardiff under the Tukka Tuk banner.

2022 Review: Raising the bar for local Indian eateries since it opened in 2007 (there's also a Penarth spinoff), this reliably packed venture – often drawing the local academic set – has a winning menu of thalis and other Keralan fare not always to be found at your average subcontinental.

For “well-priced, authentic tapas and Spanish wines” (they also offer sherries from the barrel), you’d travel far to better the flagship of the 44 group, also with outposts in Penarth and Clifton Village, Bristol. Those who haven’t been for a while report it “has much improved of late”, with “swish service” and “beautifully presented” food – no wonder the atmospheric, cellar-like space is “extremely popular” nowadays.

“Absolutely delicious Basque/Spanish food, and not a paella in sight!” – Owen & Tom Morgan’s asador grill specialist, inside a boutique hotel a dropkick from the Principality stadium, offers “some of the tastiest food in Cardiff” alongside an “excellent all-Spanish wine list – we had a very delicious Ribera del Duero red with our ex-dairy cow steak”. But note, “you do really have to like the smoky style of cooking (we honestly felt a delicate sole was not suited to the treatment given)”.

“Consistently excellent” Italian food is the draw at Calabrian-born Antonio Cersosimo’s city-centre restaurant, a fixture for 20 years – “it’s been going for such a long time, is locally owned, independent and you get a real view into genuine Italian dining and food”.

Nisha Katona’s Liverpool-based operation has two branches in London (Charlotte Street and Westfield Stratford) offering her “very tasty” Indian street food – “with the occasional hint of raw spice”. The Lancashire-born former barrister launched the business in 2014 and now has 28 outlets around the country, whose “enjoyable, authentic food” is “really great for a chain”.

Open in April 2025, just as our annual diners’ poll came to an end, this new ‘neighbourhood bar & bistro’ sits on the border between Canton and Pontcanna and looks promising. It’s the brainchild of Nick Saunders, and chef Jake Lewis, until recently executive chef of Pasture steakhouses in Cardiff, Bristol and Birmingham, but the menu goes well beyond red meat (e.g. chicken schnitzel, tuna loin, tempura smoked tofu). The name ‘Sonder’, in case you’ve been worrying, is taken from John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express; and means ‘the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own’.

2024 Review: Next door to the more formal Heaney’s, this two year old spin-off (whose name means water in Gaelic) is a no-booking affair, serving small plates. Oysters are the speciality.

On a Pontcanna site that was for many years Bully’s (and briefly No. 5), this late 2024 debut is run by Tommy Heaney of nearby Heaney’s and Uisce and Dave Killick, previously of the Heathcock in Llandaff. We have no feedback as yet on its mix of modern British (often Italian or Med-inflected) small and large plates but reviews in the local press are upbeat.

2023 Review: “Tiny! Difficult to get a table but worth it” – ex-Hedone-chef Lee Skeet’s 12-seater above Pontcanna’s Milkwood opened in January 2022 following the success of his 40 Days, 40 Nights pop-up, and he serves a seasonal tasting menu, majoring in fish and seafood. Limited early feedback all says the food is good, although one reporter felt “I really wanted it to be great, but thought the food was a little muted”.

“Well worth its recent star” – that’s the early intel on this May 2024 newcomer from Newport-born chef Tom Waters, which earned its stripes just eight months after it opened. Occupying a small casual space in Pontcanna, he offers a variety of fixed menus (four-courses for £60 per person, seven for £95, and ten for £125). We’ve accounted in the rating for one report that described “no wow factor”, but most accounts deem it “exceptional in all respects”.