#33: A Week in Wales
Death By Consumption
12/17/24 - 12/23/24
It’s Christmas Eve! Did you know that? But I hope you’re not even reading this for another week or so — this is not a time for EMAILS. Honestly, I think they should forcibly shut Gmail down from now until January 2nd. And yet here I am, breaking my own rule, because I know if I give myself even one week off from the content mines I’ll never return.
Justin and I spent all week exploring Wales after our friend Emily’s wedding in London, so for Christmas my gift for you is a randomly Welsh-focused email. Enjoy, or not, because, again, why are you reading an email right now? Go get drunk and start a fight with a family member! Ask your uncle how much he lost in the Hawk Tuah girl’s crypto scam! Explain the NJ drone swarms to your grandma! That is what the holidays are all about.
Welsh rib eye steak — at the Hunter’s Moon, in Llangattock Lingoed
We didn’t plan on spending 7 hours at the Hunter’s Moon, a 13th century little pub and inn in what felt like the middle of nowhere. This was, after all, the day after our wild last night in London. So it was even a miracle that we had made it to Wales at all — getting the rental car and instantly having to navigate the streets of London, all while nursing a hangover and lack of sleep, while getting used to driving on the left side of the road, before driving nearly 4 hours through western England to arrive at our Airbnb just over the border in Wales.
We spent that first night in Monmouthshire, near the town of Abergavenny, in a hand-made shepherd’s hut on an actual sheep farm. When we arrived at the end of the muddy lane, I got out of the car — following the instructions the host had sent us — and opened the gate to the field, while the sheep in the field looked at me, concerned and, in my mind, ready to attack en masse. We carried our bags across the muddy, boggy field, stepping gingerly at first over the piles of sheep shit, before realizing it was hopeless, and accepting the fact of just getting shit all over our shoes. We met the host, Alex, who had built the cottage by hand, and was in the process of building another one when we arrived. It looked like the beginnings of a small ark, a bed of curved wood.
The cottage was stunning — the lap of luxury in a sheep field, the kind of place that would send an Instagram addict into a manic hourslong photoshoot that would contribute to her eventual divorce. But since it’s Wales in December, the sun had already set even though it wasn’t 4pm, so we quickly set out to follow Alex’s instructions to the pub, the only option for food in the area. What that entailed was a 30-minute walk across muddy, sheep-shit covered fields, hopping the occasional fence, wading the occasional stream. We skirted the edges of people’s farms, which I approached with extreme nervousness, having been raised in the American culture of “trespassers will be shot”, but the locals we encountered just gave us encouragement (“If you had been here a week ago you couldn’t have crossed that stream!”) and instructions (“Just up the hill and follow the edge of the cemetery!”) By the time we arrived at The Hunter’s Moon, I was thoroughly, impossibly charmed by Wales.
As we entered the inn, one of the employees told us they didn’t open for 30 minutes but, having taken one look at us and realized he was dealing with two pitiful, wet, muddy, confused Americans, said he could pour us a pint but the kitchen wasn’t open yet. We happily accepted, and sipped Guinnesses by the fireplace in the stone-walled room, as the employees milled around us, preparing the tables and mopping the floors. Right on the dot, the minute they opened, locals filed in — farmers in muddy boots, an older woman with her sweet dog on a leash, more farmers, and we found ourselves surrounded by the community, who immediately took a curiosity in the random New Yorkers who had showed up at their pub with truly no explanation other than, “We wanted to see what Wales was like.” We were all amused by each other (“Your accents sound like Hollywood stars!” one guy said to us) and we knew pretty quickly we would not be having a short, quiet night. As it happened, we arrived at the pub before they opened, and we stayed long after they closed.
The only other group eating was a massive family having a Christmas feast in the other room, so we were told we would have to wait until they were all fed until we could order. This inspired a little bit of panic, as we were drinking on empty stomachs, but I also found it flattering — we were already being treated more like regulars than tourists. In the meantime we drank our pints, switching from Guinness to whatever the farmers were drinking, and got to know our new friends, particularly Ella, who wasn’t supposed to be working that night but was helping out for the evening in order to drink and eat for free. A 20-something who had moved to the town from a city in England — just packed up with her cats and headed to a farming town — we felt an instant kinship with her, and I loved listening to Ella’s thoughts on science and politics, of which she has many. Even way out here, the people are talking about Luigi Mangione.
A farmer who has lived in the area for nearly 40 years, Chris, sat at the bar, and described a nearby local inn that’s reportedly haunted, and Justin — of course — knew exactly the inn, from an old episode of the show Most Haunted. As Chris revealed (and this is some insider knowledge I’m about to impart on you), the “haunted hotel” story took off when a bartender blew a 10 pound note off the bar, and it floated a bit across the room before falling, which made it look like a ghost had carried it. Next thing you know, ghost hunters and their camera crews are swarming, and still to this day buses of tourists come to see the ghosts. Chris always tells them, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen loads of stuff,” and they all get very, very excited.
Finally we were allowed to eat, and we lost our damn minds. This was, genuinely, the best food I’ve ever had in the UK. A creamy bowl of earthy, roasted mushrooms with buttered slices of toasty bread to slather it on. A sizzling plate of shrimp seasoned with garlic and zingy bits of Thai chilis. An unbelievably well-cooked steak — local Welsh grass-fed beef, and as we’d discover throughout the week, due to the particular soil chemistry all the beef can only be grass-fed, which means the meat in Wales is unreal almost wherever you go. A stunning goat curry. (“The goat farmer comes here specifically to eat his own goats in this curry.”) All of it had us practically screaming, and we couldn’t contain ourselves when the chef came out and sat at the table across from us, drinking white wine and decompressing, his job finished for the night. It was like drinking with a rock star backstage after the concert.
We ended up getting rather drunk with Ella and Chris and the chef, also named Chris — “we’re all named Chris out here” — while hearing stories from Chef Chris’s wild life, his days living on New York’s Lower East Side in the 80s, the nights he’d spent partying at CBGB’s, the apartments he’d manage to swindle his way into for $10 a month. “You’re more a New Yorker than I am!” I told him, even though he had only lived there for 4 months. He insisted we’d meet up when he comes back to the city, and I genuinely hope we do, though I’m terrified I can’t keep up with him.
Well after the pub had officially closed, we felt the exhaustion of the past few days bearing down on us, and we finally had to leave. On the way out, we were given packets of tea and fresh-ground coffee from Chris, since he had heard we didn’t have any in our cottage, and we rejected all offers to drive us home, insisting on doing the walk through the sheep fields again, for the experience. We trudged our way through the muddy fields, over the fences, across the streams, and collapsed into bed, beyond satisfied. If you’re ever in Wales, or even the UK — or, honestly, just anywhere in the northern hemisphere — get your ass on a plane and in a car and head to the Hunter’s Moon and have the best meal of your life.
The Full English Sandwich — at Angie’s, in Hay-on-Wye
Our first full day of driving in Wales started out rough — our new friends Ella and Chris had told us a beautiful route to drive, so we took it, only to find that it was a single-lane road, and barely that, with hedges and stone walls squeezing you on either side of the car through winding, cliff-edge turns. Which was all made more difficult by the fact that I was sitting on the other side of the car than I have for the past 20 years, so my spatial awareness of where the edges of the car are were flipped. With the one-lane road, anytime a car came from the opposite direction, you’d both screech to a halt, and then one of you would have to reverse back those winding, horrifyingly tight roads, avoiding the hedges or stone walls or fucking cliff edges, until you found an area with just enough width to squeeze past each other.
The first few times I had to do this, I kept scraping the left side of the car, and the mental tally of how much the rental company was going to fuck me over on damages wouldn’t stop going up. But, even more awful than the single-lane roads were the double-lane roads, which are barely wide enough to fit two cars side-by-side, but that doesn’t stop the Welsh drivers from tearing through them, so the typical experience is something like: you’re driving one way and someone’s coming at you the other way, and it really really looks like there’s no possible way two cars can comfortably fit side-by-side on this road, but there’s nowhere to swerve because you’re penned in by hedges, so you simply do breathing exercises and/or pray silently until the car races past you, flying maybe an inch or two at most to the right of where you’re sitting, and you somehow make it through without plowing head-first into each other. This happens 100 times a day when driving through Wales, so my nerves quickly short-circuited out completely, which actually helped me reach a state of anxiety so extreme it felt like nirvana.
But after an hour or so I started to get the hang of it, and we realized we were in one of the most beautiful countries on the planet. Wales! Who knew! At this time of year, the sun is only up for a few hours, so you’re mostly in perpetual magic hour, which means the rolling hills are even more stunning than they must normally be. The landscapes, from personal experience, have been known to make two gays on a road trip absolutely screech in awe around pretty much every corner.
We stopped for lunch in Hay-on-Wye, one of the more famous tourist towns in Wales. It’s a tiny town with over 20 bookstores, so I’d imagine this is the kind of place annoying TikTok book people go nuts for. But we were more focused on food, so we found ourselves in Angie’s, a little cafe run by hilariously foulmouthed women, where we tried to order two breakfast sandwiches and two sides of potatoes. As we ordered, the locals and Angie herself all reacted strangely, looking a bit shocked, so I asked, “Did we do it wrong?”
“I’ll make your sandwiches and then you let me know if you want the potatoes,” she said, so we settled into our stools as she cooked, and watched as she piled two puffy loaves of bread with heaps of English bacon, sausages, blood sausages, mushrooms, and fried eggs, creating these two enormous, heart-stopping monstrosities. As we struggled to open our mouths wide enough to eat the sandwiches, we listened to the locals gossiping and complaining about the latest news — something about wind turbines, but whether they were pro- or anti-turbine I couldn’t figure out.
“Do they still want their fucking potatoes?” Angie asked someone from behind the counter, charmingly speaking about us as if we weren’t even there, and we piped up to admit that, okay, we did possibly order too much. Once we admitted the sandwiches had defeated us, we thanked Angie and paid, who told us if we’re ever in Hay-on-Wye again, we can come back and finally try the “fucking potatoes.”
Beef and ale pie — at Hope & Anchor, in Tenby
After a day of driving along the coast, and rainy, cliff-side hikes, we spent the night in Tenby, an ancient harbor town that seems to be an unexpected surfing destination in the summer, but in the winter was wind-whipped and soggy (even more than the rest of Wales, somehow). Nearly everything was closed for the season, but we found a pub that made an unexpectedly great beef and ale pie that fulfilled the entire image I had of Wales before we got there — a delicious meat pie and a beer near a fireplace in a pub while the wind and rain batter the windows outside. I felt as if all my fantasies had been satisfied, like a foot fetishist watching a Quentin Tarantino film.
Breakfast — at Twr y Felin hotel, in St. David’s
We have to talk about the lack of fiber in the British diet. Are your colons okay over there? After 4 days of meats and carbs I could feel my intestines calcifying, so I groaned with horror, sitting down to breakfast at our hotel and seeing the only option was another full English breakfast.
Twr y Felin hotel is beautiful on the outside, an upscale spa hotel destination, one that is probably typically 5x the price we got a room for (one of the main joys of exploring Wales during a random winter week, where the entire country is empty of tourists). But on the inside, the vibe was… Holiday Inn Express. The bedrooms were very very nice, but the rest of the hotel was corporate-feeling and, of all things in this beautiful landscape, virtually windowless, so if you want to drink at the bar or enjoy your breakfast, you’re doing it in a room that feels most suited to either a business retreat or an AA meeting. Even worse, the hotel is clearly a place most frequented by couples celebrating their, say, 40th wedding anniversaries, so two young-ish gays attracted a fair amount of attention, which meant spending breakfast with all eyes on us.
In most towns, in fact, we attracted attention, and I was never sure if it was due to being some of the only tourists at that time of year, or because we’re loud Americans, or because we’re gay. Or maybe we’re just outrageously hot! But, regardless, as I sat in this corporate-feeling room, eating yet another plate of sausage and beans and a single tomato and a single poached egg, I had fantasies of only two things: 1) enjoying a meal without being stared at, and 2) pooping. I’ll spare you the details, but after repeated cups of coffee, I finally accomplished number two, at least.
Several pints of Snowdon Lager — at The Albion, in Conwy
After changing towns every day in South Wales, we based ourselves for two nights in the northern town of Conwy, to spend a couple days exploring the stunning area of Snowdonia, home to beautiful mountains (well, on a strictly technical level we were told Wales only has very large hills rather than official mountains, but we weren’t measuring), waterfalls, and beautiful little miniature Aspen-like towns scattered throughout the area. Conwy itself is a surprisingly tiny town, one that we realized too late couldn’t really support enough entertainment for two nights, especially when the sun sets before 4pm and you have long, long nights in which there isn’t much to do except go to the pub. We tried most of the pubs in Conwy and found them lacking for a variety of reasons, but I knew upon walking into The Albion that this was our spot.
Based in what must have just been a house at one point, the pub is spread across three different rooms, so after ordering a pint at the bar, you strolled down the hall and pick your room — we opted for the one with the fireplace, of course, where we nabbed a little table in the corner and played some cribbage, like the proper British old men we were slowly turning into.
The table next to us was a group of 6 or 7 older men, who all were happily enjoying pints and talking, until one of them burst out into song — an old folk song, from the sounds of it. He sang two songs (something about a “big lass, a bonny lass” who likes her beer), his friends chiming in on the chorus, and I thought, not for the first time, that I had found myself in Hobbiton rather than Wales. You mean to tell me that, all this time, there are still places where old men gather around a fireplace to drink ale and sing folk songs together? I’ve never once seen an old man in an American bar burst into song with his friends! All our old men do anymore is post on Facebook about immigrants :(
9 courses — at The Jackdaw, in Conwy
It bears repeating: visiting Wales in the week before Christmas means many places are closed, but the ones that are open are completely empty, which meant we could practically stroll into The Jackdaw, an award-winning and highly acclaimed restaurant in Conwy. (I told Justin they had a Michelin star but just discovered they don’t. I love spreading misinformation! But honestly, the shame is on Michelin on this one.)
The Jackdaw is the kind of place where you don’t order, you simply accept the 9-course menu and go wherever the chef wants to take you. The menu is as locally sourced as possible, even the drinks — I could have had a dozen of the house martinis, made with local gin, local vermouth, and a delicious briny rim of salt made from burnt sea lettuce — and each course is the kind of food that makes you realize the pretentious stuff the judges on Top Chef say isn’t always bullshit. This food was not only delicious but playful, and I could actually feel the chef’s deep love of Wales. I swear it wasn’t just the martini talking as I told the waiter after one course, “I feel like I just bit into the fucking earth of Wales,” which I meant as a compliment but I realize now might have sounded like I was saying the food tasted like dirt. It’s always so stupid to explain food in writing, but this menu genuinely felt like I was tasting the scenery I had been enjoying all week.
By the time we hit course #5, a beautiful piece of juniper smoked trout, which was served with a dollop of caviar and a dollop of mustard seeds that played off each other and complimented the earth-meets-sea theme, I felt like I had not only seen directly into the chef’s mind and understood his entire life’s history, but had tasted the food of some ancient god, one who lives in a mossy cave and is as feared as he is revered. Clearly, this place made me insane.
“Snowdonia driving tour: Llanberis, Conwy and Caernarfon Castle” — via the VoiceMap app
My favorite little travel app is VoiceMap, which hosts various audio walking tours you can download for locations around the world. The walks are usually hosted by someone with some level of expertise — the Roman historian-hosted one in the Forum in Rome is my favorite, but you could also enjoy an Ian McKellen-guided tour of London‘s West End, or a tour of the Upper East Side in NYC that’s randomly focused entirely on Joan Didion? — and the app gives you a map route to follow, and uses GPS to only activate the audio guide once you’re in the location where a section is relevant. So you can stroll on your own schedule, skipping what you want, or branching off from the tour and coming back to it later. I was surprised to see a driving tour of Snowdonia, so I purchased and downloaded it, and we set off.
We quickly figured out why the app is almost exclusively walking tours rather than driving tours, as trying to listen to the history of the area while also following the woman’s instructions on where to drive caused immediate chaos on the roads. Our guide would quickly tell me to “take the slipway on the right” and, while I’m asking Justin, “what the fuck is a slipway?” she’d have moved on to a lengthy explanation of how to pronounce Welsh city names, while I’m swerving across lanes of traffic and calling this woman a word that is considerably less rude to say in the UK. “Remember to drive safely!” she told us, before once again speeding past the instructions on where to turn, so that she could inform us on the history of slate mining in Wales. If this woman was your friend in the passenger seat who had offered to give you directions, you’d have not only relinquished her navigation privileges, you’d kick her out of your car.
But once I remembered that we didn’t have to explicitly follow her route and could just keep her activated in the background as we drove around the ridiculous beauty of Snowdonia, everything got lovely. Suddenly it was like having a pleasant Welsh woman in the back seat, who would pipe up to tell you about the history of an inn you were driving by, or to give you a head’s-up about a beautiful photo opportunity coming up. I’ll probably stick to the walking tours in the future, though, because I do love history, but not enough to die in a fiery car crash for it.
A 10-course dinner and a 5-course breakfast — at Tyddyn Llan
For our last night in Wales, I booked us a fancy evening at Tyddyn Llan, a gorgeous old inn in North Wales with a restaurant run by a Michelin-starred chef. But by the time we arrived, I knew what to expect: we’d be the only people under the age of 70, and they’d all stare at us all meal. Even worse, I was sure there was no way this meal could live up to either the homey, spectacular food cooked by Chris our first night, or the delicious and playful food at the Jackdaw a few nights earlier. And, unfortunately, I was right!
With each course that came out at dinner, as we sliced into our tiny dishes while whispering to each other in the stifling, stuffy dining room, I grew more and more full of regret. “Am I sick?” Justin whispered while eating his tiny sliver of steak, “This doesn’t taste like anything?” The food was mediocre at best, tasteless at worse, fancy for fancy’s sake. There were a couple great dishes, like a “pre-dessert” dessert, a cake-like thing that somehow tasted exactly like a gin & tonic, which only made the other pointless and flavorless courses more confusing. I was again reminded of Top Chef, but in a negative way — it was as if there were 10 chefs back there, each responsible for a single dish, and we were in one of the episodes that would end with Tom and Padma shaming the entire cast for being so bad.
Breakfast was even worse. We were dreading it, because we just wanted to get on the road, but we had paid for it so we were going to eat it, damnit. A 5-course tasting menu at breakfast might sound glamorous, but in reality it was a nightmare. The dining room was even more silent than the night before, and the last thing I want to do right after waking up is sit across from uptight Welsh and English people, silently slicing into a sausage, praying that the coffee will be strong enough to let me use the bathroom. The servers we had loved the night before clearly had seniority and didn’t have to do breakfast service, as we were stuck with the B-team, who dragged things out to an absurd, almost comical level — at one point I counted a 22 minute wait between courses, which is even more maddening when the course before was a slice of toast and the next course is a little plate with 6 slices of salami on it. “Just bring it all out at once!!!” we were both hissing through our teeth, watching our last day in Wales slowly tick away from us. “We paid a couple hundred dollars to torture ourselves,” I thought, and the instant breakfast was over we gathered our suitcases and got the fuck out.
It’s somewhat a shame that this was our last meal in Wales, but rather than giving us a bad final taste, it helped color in the rest of the week for me in contrast — Wales had been an incredible surprise, a genuinely stunning country with some of the nicest and most interesting people I had met, and with a few of the most delicious restaurants I’ve encountered. The UK has officially beaten the “has bad food” allegations, as long as you don’t think about breakfast.
