Ever since SY23 bagged its first Michelin star and the guide’s much-coveted ‘Opening of the Year award’ in 2022, all eyes have been on the Georgian seaside town of Aberystwyth. Out on a limb on Wales’s storm-smashed west coast, the town nurtures one of the UK’s hottest food scenes, with chefs elevating produce-led Welsh cooking to the extraordinary, using locally farmed, fished, foraged and fermented ingredients.
You’ll need to book months ahead to snag a table at SY23, where chef Nathan Davies, of Great British Menu fame, cooks for a lucky few. Drinks by the fire pit on the terrace sharpen the appetite for lunch or dinner in the indigo-blue restaurant. The 10-course menu sings boldly of the seasons in dishes as deceptively simple as scallop with seaweed and burnt butter, and lamb with shallot and black garlic.
Dig deeper into Aberystwyth’s food scene and you’ll find other treasures, such as sunny Spanish deli Ultracomida, with its outstanding tapas, wine and vermouth. Wandering the town’s backstreets, you might also happen upon Jonah’s, a fishmonger serving daily specials from king prawn curry to lobster and chips.
A scenic half-hour drive north of town, two-Michelin-starred Ynyshir is where Gareth Ward walks the culinary high ground. If you’re lucky enough to score a table here, you’re in for a meat feast, with so many courses you’ll lose track. There’s no pandering to dietary requirements: it’s one menu only (under wraps until you arrive). It goes without saying that all dishes, like the aged otoro tuna with teriyaki and Welsh Wagyu fudge, are sensational.
What makes Aberystwyth such an exciting place for food?
In Aberystwyth, we’re lucky enough to have an abundance of incredibly well-produced and lovingly farmed ingredients at our disposal, which means we can make very creative dishes that really taste of the surrounding region.
How does regional produce inform your cooking?
We use grown and milled grains from Llanrhystud, just a few miles away from SY23, plus beautiful local lamb, and amazing shellfish and fish from the boats that land their catch at Aberystwyth. One of my favourite ingredients is birch syrup. We tap birch trees in a nearby 70-acre forest, harvesting it in a similar way the Canadians do with maple. The syrup has a deep, redcurrant-like flavour, which goes brilliantly with our chicken liver mousse dish.
What are your favourite dishes on the menu at the moment?
I love bringing all the guests up to the restaurant at the same time and cooking them one special dish, as you would with family or friends. This might be whole grilled turbot cooked Basque-style over the fire with Welsh cockles and broccoli, lamb on the bone or a hot cheese course where the cheese is cooked in
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While the Caribbean is home to its fair share of wildlife-filled islands—Saint Lucia, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, to name a few—one of the region’s most underrated ecotourism destinations measures in at just a mere thirteen square kilometers in area. Known as Saba, this dazzling Dutch overseas region holds a king-sized level of biodiversity in spite of its small size, packed full of fascinating fish, reptiles, and birds for visitors to marvel at—and when it comes to avian life in particular, the Saba Bird Fest is one of the island’s most unmissable events.
For generations, designers have adopted towns, villages, and other enclaves as second homes and visited them again and again, imprinting a touch of their own sensibility on their chosen place—and importing something of its essence into their own work. It’s the kind of symbiosis that Coco Chanel and Le Corbusier, who summered in neighboring homes, enjoyed with the Cote d’Azur’s Rouquebrune Cap-Martine, or Yves Saint Laurent with Marrakech and Tangier. More recently, Christian Louboutin popularized the Portuguese village of Melides, eventually opening Vermelho Hotel there earlier this year. Here, five designers on the places they go, and why they continue to be pulled back.
Ultra-cheap flights could be banned in Europe if a forthcoming proposal is approved by the EU: Officials in France want to set a price minimum on airfares across Europe to help reduce carbon emissions.
The key to seeing any celestial phenomenon is pretty obvious: You must be in the right place at the right time. While the exact location and time changes with every astronomical event, the right place is undeniably somewhere far away from any light pollution. These days, unless you make your way to a dark sky park, finding a spot on land that’s far away enough from civilization isn’t easy, so why not take to the seas? In the middle of the ocean, chances of street lights ruining your stargazing experience are very thin, that’s why cruise lines are ramping up their astronomy at sea offerings, including northern lights cruises, solar eclipse cruises, and more.
The first written evidence of beer being brewed and consumed dates back as far as 4,000BC, with the ancient Sumerians believed to have developed the earliest known methods for creating the alcoholic drink. Its history and connection to human civilisation runs deep, and a number of today’s beers have their own remarkable heritage.
For the first time, a nation is allowing travelers to cross its border with a digital passport on their smartphone instead of a physical passport. While the trial is happening in Finland, the European Union wants at least 80% of citizens in the 27-country bloc to be using a digital ID by 2030.
Some visitors to Venice will have to start paying a daily tourist fee of 5 euros ($5.36) next year. The initiative covers the introduction of a new tourist flow management system to discourage day trippers on certain dates.
Travels and Textiles in Central Asia Textiles expert Chris Aslan explores a crossroads of history where ‘fortunes were made and lost through shimmering silks, life-giving felts and gossamer cottons’. Most travellers know of the Silk Road, but older still are the Wool Road and Cotton Road, whose tightly woven stories Aslan seeks to untangle.