I found myself frantically trying to get more sauce into my mouth using only a fork — it made me look desperate but it was worth it
I ate at a restaurant 1 hour from Bristol and had the best-tasting dish I’ve eaten in years
Bristol is awash with superb places to eat, so you don’t really have to go further afield for an excellent meal if you don’t want to. But it’s easy to forget that just 45 minutes or so down the road is another city with a thriving food scene.
It wasn’t always this way for Cardiff, the Welsh capital a short hop down the M4. It wasn’t that long ago people were bemoaning how badly the city lacked good places to eat. But now it’s got everything from gnocchi and gyros stalls at the traditional Cardiff Market to the restaurants you go to for a special night out.
And on Friday night, I found myself in one of those restaurants for a birthday. Mesen specialises in sharing dishes cooked over charcoal. If your eyes are already glazing over at the mention of “sharing dishes”, resist the temptation to immediately stop reading this article — honestly, it’s worth it!
The weekly food menu is written in chalk on a blackboard in the simply-decorated restaurant, where you can sit on stools at the bar, the room’s focal point, or at one of the handful of tables around it. Mesen also has a good reputation for its cocktails and I’m told you might even get one mixed for you ad hoc at the bar if you ask – but the cocktail menu itself has plenty to choose from so there’s probably no need to do that. The wine list is good too. But, anyway, the food.
The menu at Mesen on a blackboard on a restaurant wall featuring a number of sharing plates
The pleasingly short menu is bang on point, with dishes like “scallops, Marmite butter, black pudding” or “buffalo carrots, ranch, pickled celery, parmesan” immediately drawing comments at the table like “oh wow, that sounds amazing”. The dishes are a fairly intuitive mix of small and large, meaty and vegetarian, so it’s not too hard to choose a good mix of between four and six dishes, with staff on hand to advise anyway.
Our hardest decision was whether to go for “pig’s head” or t-bone steak as the main dish of the night, and we deferred to our server who went for the steak (we should have thanked her for excellent choice, though I’m sure the pig’s head would have been great too).
Scallops with Marmite butter and black pudding
We also chose padron peppers with hummus (£8), the scallops with Marmite butter and black pudding (£13) and the buffalo carrots (£15). They were all superb. I eat about a wheelbarrow’s worth of hummus every week and this still stood out. The black pudding came as crunchy crumbs, awash with the scallops in the moreish Marmite butter. And the carrots were massive, the size of chip shop jumbo sausages (I thought they were sweet potatoes when they first arrived).
The t-bone steak at Mesen
The huge carrots
But the stand-out dish was the prawns in garlic and chilli butter. That description in no way comes close to doing justice to how good they tasted. The prawns had that wonderful charred flavour from being flame-cooked but the sauce was out of this world, silky smooth and amounting to way more than the sum of its parts. Long after the prawns were gone I scooped at the sauce with my fork to get as much of it into my mouth as I could (which is not that much when you’re using a fork). I considered ordering something else from the menu to scoop it up with. I think it’s been years since I’ve eaten anything that tasted as good.
Mesen is a simple-but-beautifully laid out restaurant serving fantastic food and the garlic and chilli prawns are sensational
This deliciousness doesn’t come cheap. Our bill for two (which included one chocolate cake dessert and a £45 bottle of wine) came in just short of £200. That’s hefty. But it’s the food I’ve been talking about enthusiastically ever since, not the bill.