Foodie Heaven

A New Year, and new resolutions!

Stephen Gregory makes a food related resolution – but it’s not the one that you’d expect…

A lot of our resolutions revolve around our eating and drinking habits. We begin a new year determined to eat more healthy, fresh and organic food – and eat less of the other things which are actually bad for us but irresistibly enjoyable… and of course to drink more water and smoothies and less of the festive spirit we enjoyed over Christmas. And quite often our brave new resolutions wobble and falter within the first fortnight of January.

My wife and I, we’ve been going to and from our little house in France over the past few years, as much as Brexit and Covid have allowed. Our nearest town is coincidentally quite similar to our home town, Caernarfon, here in Wales. Even the name is oddly alike… Called Confolens, it’s a medieval country town with an old quarter of cobbled lanes and walls and turrets. A bit smaller than Caernarfon, Confolens is a pleasant place to live and popular with tourists, with lashings of history and pretty good food.

Talking of food and drink, we’ve got used to our French friends and neighbours rather haughtily comparing their globally famous cuisine with British food. You have to get used to it. People who’ve never been nearer to the UK than Paris, or maybe Calais, have a preconceived idea that we aren’t very good at cooking… and worse, that we aren’t especially bothered because our palates are sadly undeveloped. Well, it isn’t true of my wife and I, although my formative years were spent eating beans on toast in a 1960s boarding school.

What sunny Confolens can learn from Caernarfon’s food scene...

My wife’s a terrific cook and we’ve enjoyed good food in

many different parts of the world. And in Confolens there isn’t anything like as much choice of eating-out as we have here in Caernarfon, and the food isn’t always Cordon Bleu.

I used to enjoy sloping off to our next-door neighbour’s house, to share a few aperitifs with Roger, a 95 year old rogue and reprobate with a bottomless fund of stories to tell… going right back to his childhood in the 1920s when he walked to school in his wooden clogs stuffed with straw, through his experiences as a resistance fighter during the German

occupation of France, and then his adulthood as a… well, as a rogue and reprobate with an infamous reputation throughout the county.

Drinking with him, in his living room pungent with tobacco smoke, was great fun and always uniquely informative. And sometimes I would drive him into town on a Saturday morning where he enjoyed shuffling around, still in his slippers, and

browsing the stalls of the excellent market. Because, as well as being an inveterate toper, Roger was a gourmet – a lover of rich and redolent ‘haute cuisine’.

He would savour the aromas of the meat stalls, where deer and wild boar and all kinds of game were hanging up and in different stages of being prepared for the kitchen. Mischievously, he would make sure we came to the ‘boucherie chevaline’ and watch my reaction for a glimmer of British squeamishness. And we’d drive back to our village with a bag full of oysters. Then, in the evening Roger taught me how to shuck them without gashing myself with his wicked oystershucking knife, and we’d slurp them down with pepper and lemon and glasses of Suze.

And sometimes, usually when I was in France on my own, we would eat out. In the evening we’d go into Confolens and enjoy the expertise of the cooks in our local restaurants. And this was an opportunity for me to counter Roger’s disparaging references to how we eat in Britain. Because, however charming the historic town of Confolens may be, it isn’t rich in culinary choices. There are three restaurants. I’ve been in Confolens on an evening in autumn and found them getting ready to close at 7 o’clock… the barman is stacking the chairs

Locally caught lobster – a North Wales delicacy

onto the tables, the cleaner is mopping the floor with bleach.

In the winter the town is almost completely shut down. I mean, there’s one place open. On a night in November or December you can get a beer and a pizza in the hotel – but that’s all. If you walk out of the hotel and into the square and along the historically intriguing streets, you won’t see or hear any other creature moving. Not a dog or a cat or a scurrying mouse. The town is in pitch-darkness. It’s totally silent. Confolens is a charming town, and the food is excellent… in the winter, in its one and only restaurant.

So I bend Roger’s venerable ear about life in Caernarfon, in faraway North Wales, which he likes to think is still a grim outpost of the Roman empire, a distant garrison town fossilised in the 1st Century AD.

Caernarfon, our home town in Wales… on any evening of the year, no matter if it’s the height of the summer season or deep in midwinter, we can decide on a whim to go out and eat and drink in any of 40 or more restaurants and pubs. Fancy a Chinese? Or an Indian? Thai? A kebab? Or excellent local British food, carefully prepared and presented? Or a few rowdy beers shoulder to shoulder with warmly living and breathing young people, or in a sports-bar packed with passionately partisan fans – or sitting in a corner of a quiet restaurant, tasting the tapas and paella and different swirls and twirls of pasta from Italy or Greece or Spain…

So I bend Roger’s ear, and he takes it on the chin, as it were. He’s my captive audience, as we sit in the only restaurant open in Confolens and enjoy ‘escargots’ and ‘moules marinieres’ and then maybe a main course of duck or trout. He smacks his lips, red and wet with our carafé of merlot, and we finish off with a glass of cognac. And I tell him how lucky

we are, inhabitants of Caernarfon in the north-west of Wales, to be able to eat and drink just as well on any evening of the year and as late as midnight.

And not just in Caernarfon! We’re lucky in North Wales to be deliciously spoilt for culinary choices. While I’ve got Roger’s ears pinned back and bent, as it were, I tell him about other meals we’ve enjoyed all over Gwynedd and across the island of Anglesey… Only recently, for a special birthday, locally caught lobster, flavoured with samphire picked from the clifftops

of South Stack, tasting of sea spray and salt and sunshine, so that you close your eyes and hear the kittiwakes calling, you can see the gannets and chough and even marvel at a peregrine dashing through a flock of gulls… And then locally

harvested oysters and mussels washed down with white wine from a vineyard in Penygroes, yes Penygroes, in the shadows of the slate quarries of Snowdonia.

Bonne Santé! Bon appetit! Bonne Annee! In France or in North Wales – good health, eat well and Happy New Year! n

Stephen Gregory’s first novel, The Cormorant, which he wrote in Snowdonia 35 years ago, has been published several times in both the UK and the USA, and translated into German, Polish and Italian. The new edition, which is available from Parthian Books, is its tenth publication.