Festival season
Excellent fresh local produce from nearby Swansea Market is an inspiration all year round for the menu at the city's Number One Wind Street restaurant, but most particularly during the third week in September.
That is when the annual Swansea Market Cockle Festival takes place. Local restaurants, top Welsh chefs and local TV personalities join forces to promote local seafood and produce.
The cockle festival menu helps to boost business at 40-seat Number One restaurant, which is situated in the heart of the oldest quarter of the city.
Head chef Kate Taylor, who owns the restaurant with her partner Peter Gillen, chooses lots of game and fish for the menu, as both are plentiful at the market. They also choose typical Welsh produce such as Glamorgan sausages and laverbread. Cockles, of course, make their appearance - this year in the form of a hearty cockle chowder. A set price menu only is available - two courses at £9.50, three courses at £11.95.
As well as being busy in the restaurant with extra customers during festival week, Taylor is also directly involved with the event itself at market. At last month's festival she demonstrated a seafood dish, incorporating cockles, mussels and prawns, and took part in Swansea's version of the BBC TV programme Ready, Steady, Cook for local television.
Taylor, who is assisted in the kitchen by Ceri Samuel, changes the menu at Number One weekly. She operates a set-lunch menu (£9.50 for two courses and £11.95 for three), as well as a more comprehensive à la carte menu, with two courses costing £15.50 and three courses at £19.
Taylor, a maths graduate and self-taught chef, describes her cooking as being a modern version of French country food, but using a more eclectic selection of ingredients.
Many dishes are traditional casseroles, such as braised wild rabbit with thyme and mustard, and maize-fed chicken braised in Riesling with fresh chanterelles.
While Welsh ingredients are sprinkled liberally throughout the menu, such such as the poached escallop of sewin (a type of sea trout caught locally in the River Towy) with marsh samphire, Taylor also makes uses of a wide range of items from further afield, like the Thai spices served with the salmon fishcakes.
Always popular on the menu is sea bass, which is a prime local fish. It sells, whatever its guise. Recent good sellers have included quenelles of sea bass with prawn sauce and crispy fried laverbread, grilled sea bass with braised fennel, and a dish of poached sea bass with laver bread sauce, lemon and shallots.
Desserts are a mix between the traditional puddings that appear on the set lunch menu, such as bread and butter pudding, and the more classic créme caramel.
Gillen compiles the wine list and runs the front-of-house, assisted by Margaret Munday, who has been with Gillen and Taylor for nearly 10 years - five years at Number One and before that at their former restaurant, the Green Dragon Bistro, also in Swansea. n
Number One Wind Street, Swansea.Tel: 01792-456996
