Gorse, Cardiff Michelin-starred restaurant review, 2025

Stop the clocks. Ring the church bells. Launch the confetti canons. Mint the limited-edition coins. Publish the commemorative blogpost.

Cardiff has its first ever Michelin-starred restaurant.

Repeat, Cardiff has its first ever Michelin-starred restaurant.

For many of you this won’t be news. After all, Pontcanna’s Gorse was awarded the accolade back in February 2025.

However, I’ve only just got around to visiting since they’ve been awarded the star. And after years of questioning if and when Cardiff would ever be recognised by the tyre people, the time has finally come.

Whilst the Michelin Guide and its brand of fayne dayning has become increasingly irrelevant to many. For certain hospitality professionals, journalists and ‘foodies’, it’s still the benchmark accolade for recognising the highest standards of hospitality.

Having followed Gorse since its initial pop-up days in 2022, I’m very glad to see it become Cardiff’s first ever Michelin-starred restaurant.

Tom Waters’ cooking feels modern, distinctly Welsh, and refined yet approachable.

If this is Cardiff’s destination restaurant then I’m sure it will leave a very good impression for visitors to the city.

So, what’s changed since our visit to Gorse in June last year?

Well, it’s a case of evolution rather than revolution with marginal gains in the standard of cooking. Desserts felt particularly strong this time around when perhaps they’ve been less memorable than the savoury dishes.

It looks like there might be another member of staff or two to share the load. It's a lot harder to bag a reservation. And there’s been an almost inevitable increase in the price of the tasting menus. The seven-course menu now costs £95 instead of £75 whilst the ten courser costs £125 instead of £100. Still, Gorse’s tasting menus compare very favourably pricewise with others in Wales.

This time around we went for the seven-course tasting menu with paired wines (£75).

It’s hard to say exactly how good value the smaller tasting pours of wine represent compared to drinking by the glass or bottle, but it was an excellent selection that matched well with each dish. The standouts were a trio of whites, a herby Thymioloulos Malagouzia and Assyrtiko blend, a crisp Loimer Gruner Veltiner, and a lemony and slightly buttery Restless River Chardonnay. The only disappointment was a White Castle 1581 port style wine that lacked the richness and punch of fruit of the style it emulated.

But first, a bowl of cold spring vegetable tonic - a palate livening cold broth full of fragrant fresh veggies with bright acidity.

Then, a trio of snacks, the standout for me a crisp cornet filled with thick and earthy preserved mushroom puree with pickled juniper.

Both a rye cracker topped with roasted yeast cream and a dollop of smoky pike perch roe...

and a buckwheat tart filled with raw trout and salty pearls of trout roe very much hit the mark too.

The evolution of a familiar dish saw meaty raw bass accompanied by a creamy, sinus tickling horseradish cream, discs of cleansing apple and herby lovage oil.

It was great to see celeriac on Gorse’s menu. One of my favourite vegetables, it only ever seems to crop up as a remoulade or the occasional soup. Here, a spoonably soft wheel of the celery-fragranced root vegetable was bathed in a creamy and lightly tangy buttermilk sauce pocked with chervil oil.

A delicately cooked, meaty piece of turbot was treated with the love it deserves. Bathed in an oregano scented buttery sauce and accompanied asparagus, it was a corker of a fish dish.

Gorse’s signature Bum Bread™ inevitably showed up at some point. With a loaf of the warm, glossy, light-crumbed and slightly sweet bread served per person, it ensured there was no fighting. This time it was accompanied by a plain cultured butter. I think it was an improvement on their seaweed butter, allowing the excellent bread to take centre stage.

Welsh mountain mutton, a protein which features far too infrequently on restaurant menus, had a superb depth of flavour, tenderness and layer of melting fat. A glossy sauce dotted with pickled mustard seeds, a clever morel mushroom stuffed with mutton sausage meat, silky wild garlic puree and asparagus completed the excellent plate.

Dessert felt like it came around too quickly. And I perhaps had a pang of regret that we hadn’t opted for ten courses.

First up was a riff on strawberries and cream. Creamy chamomile custard hid a layer of thick strawberry puree and was topped with a quenelle of strawberry sorbet. The scent of preserved rose came in somewhere but I’m doubting the details after all the booze.

The star of the sweet courses was a glossy, toasty and wobbly set oat custard with a lightly smoked raspberry jam and apple caramel. Crème caramel is one of my favourite desserts in the world, so this was right up my street.

Finally familiar treats came in the form of a squidgy brown butter cake topped with blueberry puree...

and a cube of clever carrot jelly with lemon verbena sugar.

This was another excellent meal at Gorse and it’s great to see Tom and the team win the accolade they fully deserve. In a way, the star is also a recognition of Cardiff’s hospitality scene as a whole, which has improved immeasurably over the last fourteen years that I’ve been writing this blog.

If you’re looking for a special meal in Cardiff, then you won’t go wrong with a visit to Gorse.

The Details:

Address - Gorse, 186-188 Kings Rd, Cardiff, CF11 9DF
Web - https://www.gorserestaurant.co.uk/
Telephone - 02920 372055

Sonder, Pontcanna, Cardiff restaurant review

Sonder unquestionably takes the prize for Cardiff’s most esoteric restaurant name.

Coined as an English word by American author John Koenig in 2012, it means “the profound feeling of realising that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, have a life as complex as one's own.”

It’s clearly the name of a restaurant that belongs to a chef who thinks about what their diners want to eat rather than just what they want to cook.

The elevated yet crowd-pleasing dishes scattered across Sonder’s menu most definitely proves this point.

Cooking top drawer food with mass appeal is a skill that Sonder’s co-owner Jake Lewis most likely honed during his time as executive chef at the acclaimed Pasture, a group of steakhouses that remain eternally popular and with good reason.

Located in Pontcanna’s Laundry Quarter in the former home of Outpost, Sonder is Lewis’s debut restaurant, a collaboration with Nick Saunders of Depot-fame.

With its exposed brickwork, pumping beats, whopping bar, and meat ageing fridge, it’s certainly of a Pasture-ilk.

Sonder’s menu of bistro cooking, however, uses a much broader brush. Divided into sections like ocean, mountains, birds, pigs and veggies, equal emphasis is given to all types of animal and vegetable.

On the mineral front, a pair of cocktails were both summer quenchers – a tropical fruit packed East 8 Hold Up (£11) was balanced by the bitterness of Aperol whilst a citrusy and fragrant Picante (£11) combined an unusual mix of tequila, tomato, cucumber, lime and hot honey.

Wines by the glass had varying degrees of success. Ruinart Champagne (£14) and a strawberry scented Lago Vinho Verde rose (£7) both hit the mark. However, we weren’t blown away by either a Deusa Nai Albarino (£11) or a Corte Ottone Brindisi (£9).

From the snack section, ham and cheese bites (£5) were a close relative of the croqueta family. The crisp crumbed morsels were filled with pokey molten cheese sauce flecked with nuggets of salty ham and sweet leek. With five balls for a fiver, they kicked off the theme of generous and big flavoured cooking.

Cornish crab French toast (£10) was also billed as a snack, but Mrs G ordered it as a starter. It most certainly fitted the bill in terms of size. A slab of light and soft golden toast was topped with a mountain of sweet white crab meat seasoned with mixed green herbs and the occasional zippy caper.

A pork belly starter (£11) was a smartly plated take on a Chinese takeaway classic. I was fully on board with it. Shatteringly crisp crackling capped pieces of pork belly and charred pineapple were bathed in a sticky sweet, zingy and sour sauce.

With the owner's steak cooking credentials, it would have been rude not to put a bit of beef through its paces. A sirloin was a very fine piece of beef indeed and a bargain at £23 including fries and sauce. Apparently, it’s normally a flat iron on the menu, but we got lucky the night we visited. Cooked a precise medium rare, the steak had a good crust and beefiness whilst the bronzed peppercorn sauce was pleasingly meaty and sinus-tickling.

It was accompanied by a whopping bowl of crisp fries whose seasoning was high but fine for us sodium addicts. However, we noticed that the adjacent table sent theirs back.

Arguably the star of the meal was an aubergine parm (£17). A proper bit of Italian American comfort food, a panko-crumbed meaty aubergine half was topped with a fruity chilli and garlic twanged tomato sauce, a molten ooze of mozzarella, and vibrant green pesto. A well-dressed endive and rocket salad went some way towards balancing out the dish’s richness.

Finally, char-licked tender Wye valley asparagus spears (£9) were drenched with aromatic and creamy wild garlic pesto.

Desserts were all indulgent crowd pleasers.

A chalice of tiramisu (£9) ticked all the right boxes, balancing dark chocolate, coffee and creamy whipped mascarpone.

A super Basque cheesecake (£8) had a molten middle and toasty edges. Sticky, sweet and raisiny PX caramel sauce was excellent too. But I'm not sure it was the best accompaniment as it brought richness rather than welcome lightness to the dish.

With its big-flavoured, crowd-pleasing and well-priced cooking, Sonder is another coup for Pontcanna and its wealth of top restaurants. I just wish one of Cardiff’s best chefs would have their own moment of sonder and consider opening a restaurant on my side of town.

The Details:

Address - Sonder, 72 Llandaff Road, Pontcanna, Cardiff

Web - https://sonder.restaurant/