When I told friends and family - both stateside and in the United Kingdom - that I was headed to Wales, the most common response was a look of confusion. Truth be told, I had little context for the small Celtic country west of England - basically Diana, rarebit, and weather that was more than once described as “quite shit” - but I could think of no better host than chef Tomos Parry. In addition to helming the kitchen at Brat in Shoreditch, Brat Climpson’s Arch in Hackney, and Mountain in Soho, the chef is arguably the city’s foremost advocate for Welsh farming and mariculture, championing small producers from his homeland across his three London restaurants.

Last month, Parry assembled a team from across his three restaurants for a two-night residency at Fforest, a lush 200-acre retreat sandwiched between the Teifi River Gorge and marshes nature reserve. Artists James Lynch and Sian Tucker purchased this unassuming farm in 2005, and together with their four sons have cultivated a bonafide community celebrating the natural beauty and bounty of West Wales. Over the past two decades the family has expanded their project into the neighboring town of Cardigan, where their operations include the Albion Alberteifi, a restored sailcloth warehouse turned riverside hotel, Castle Inn, the neighboring historic boozer, and the matter of factly named Pizzatipi.

I caught up with Parry a few days after our excursion, unpacking the inspiration behind this first-of-its-kind collaboration, why sometimes bigger is better, and an enduring love for brown food.

Jake Stavis: I understand you were originally planning this event for another location.

Tomos Parry: I always wanted to create something, which was a bit like relocation of the restaurants. I talk about my Welsh heritage a lot and not many of the team had been to Wales so I thought it’d be a good moment to put two and two together. There's an old lifeboat station by Câr-Y-Môr that I used to come visit as a child. I thought it would be a cool spot but it basically wasn't gonna happen.

JS: It sounds like a heavy production lift.

TP: Yeah, so I was going to do something much simpler. But I'm very, very close friends with the Fforest family. I spoke to Jackson [Tucker-Lynch] and it all came together. They're very proactive and really go getters, so it felt quite natural.

JS: Something I noticed throughout the week is that everything that they've done at Fforest feels very organic. There's this ethos - I’m not sure if it’s typical of Wales, but it feels very Japanese or Scandinavian. I think the subtitle of the book they wrote is, “Being, making, and doing in nature.”

TP: When I've worked in both Japan and Denmark, and of course in Wales, I feel at home in all those three places. They build with a sensitivity to the surroundings; they can blend in but also accentuate and highlight all the beauty around them but also bring some amazing human touch to it. I think it's incredibly smart, and it links very closely to the style of restaurant that I’ve built as well. Take Brat Climpson’s Arch: It’s got a simple DIY spirit with this analog way of cooking over fire. Without sounding too romantic about it, I try to bring some of the Welsh outdoors into Central London. But you know, most collaborations - you've worked on many across the world - it's rarely a two-way thing. Someone gives you a free room to cook in, you go for it but it's never really 50/50. In this case, both parties brought such energy to it. I've never done anything like that.

JS: I was pleasantly surprised to learn that in some cases this was the first time that people from your different restaurants were cooking or working each other.

TP: I'm lucky enough to have more than one restaurant, but that also means that I can't work with everybody every day. So, these events not only allow me to share time with my team but also they can learn from each other. Having more than one restaurant can have a bit of a negative connotation in the industry, but I think we have strength in our diversity of ideas and people. We bring three different mindsets - teams from Soho, Shoreditch, and Hackney - it’s subtle, but they all do bring a certain sensibility to the project. I'd like to do another collaboration of this style.

JS: There was a clear sense of camaraderie. Again there was an organic quality to it, where it felt like everyone kind of knew how to work together despite the restaurants being a little bit different. I wanted to talk a bit more about Welsh cuisine. One of the guests who came was actually from a cafe you worked at during secondary school.

TP: A lot of people there from Wales ended up there - I wasn’t expecting her to show up and that was pretty touching. I think it's funny because Wales is a bit like Denmark before noma - they certainly didn't invent Danish cuisine but they created this kind of culture around it. Places like Italy and France have huge food cultures, and of course we could pop up there. But I find it quite amazing to go to a place, which actually doesn't have a big culture of restaurants. There’s home cooking, and so many incredible natural resources, but not so much restaurant cultures. I just found that such an exciting challenge.

JS: And I think that that is maybe the crucial distinction - it’s not so much that there isn’t a food culture as much as a restaurant culture. That's lacking.

TP: When I was growing up in Wales, if you wanted to be successful, you would have to open a French restaurant. If you wanted a Michelin star, it had to be sort of foreign - usually Italian or French really. That was kind of the fancy offering - the restaurant I trained in was a French restaurant called Le Gallois, which is French for The Welshman. What we were able to create at Fforest - I think and the food was very tasty and locally sourced with a level of elegance. But It felt like a Welsh restaurant should feel. We hadn't decorated with white tablecloths - it felt like it fit into the place, but we also brought a level of excellent service. It felt familiar yet exciting. We weren't bringing in completely crazy techniques. I just find that quite exciting for Wales. They should have more restaurants with that sense of place. It’s a bit of a confidence thing, like it has to be French to be special. But I was quite proud that we celebrated Wales, not only in the ingredients but the whole feeling of growing up in Wales and the natural setting.

JS: And so much of that is part of your work at large. We visited a few of the purveyors that you work with - it sounds like a lot of this stuff really came to fruition when you opened Mountain - the emphasis on really using Welsh products to the best of your abilities.

TP: Brat was successful and the Arch had taken off. I was conscious about moving into Soho. Moving into the middle of the city, there’s an expectation that things get more blingy, more fancy, more posh. I really wanted to nip that in the bud, so I doubled down on all the craftsmanship. We make our own butter, we make our own breads, we make our own cheeses. We actually get weirdly more rustic. I wanted to create a restaurant that was buzzy and a cool place to be, but with robust dishes - grilled sweetbreads, sobressada, sausages. Even our caldareta - I know it's lobster but it's a big brown soup bowl, it's not a shiny dish finished with caviar.

JS: It’s a lot of brown food.

TP: Exactly. And to do that, I had to pull from my experience from home. That food is generally quite brown - the area is mountainous with a lot of pot cooking and braised dishes. That juxtaposition of being both chic and comforting is quite cool. I suppose it was a bit like opening Chez Panisse back in the day. Unfortunately many restaurants can afford to do that, with the crazy overheads and all. It sounds funny, but with a lot of these small Welsh suppliers, if you’re going to buy from them they need reassurance that you're going to pay them. Most small farmers and growers in Wales, they’ll put all of their goods onto lorries. They take it away - mainly to the continent, especially Spain - the farmers get paid in a couple days, and that’s it.

JS: Is it the reassurance that they have demand? Are they getting a better price from these buyers?

TP: They actually fetch a worse price but it’s consistent. And I get it. If I’m a supplier and I have a family to feed, I’ll take 600 quid from a reliable purchaser. My team in London can offer 850, but they know they can get that 600 every week. I couldn't have these conversations when I opened Brat because it's 60 seats. With Mountain, I could go to the farmers and say, I’m opening this place with 120 seats and I have another two restaurants. I could confidently say that I’ve traded for five years and we've got a star and all this kind of stuff. The purveyors could commit to that and I could give them the best price, since there’s no middle man. Now they’re hopefully getting paid more money and also we take loads of product. It's the same with our flours for our breads. It’s kind of cute to say that we use these special stone milled flours, but if you've got a small restaurant, you can only take a bag of flour a week. The millers can't operate like that. Now we can take 20 bags a week and therefore they can employ two more people.

JS: It's a whole ecosystem.

TP: Yeah, it is an ecosystem. Big restaurants have a bad reputation – people think big is bad but it can be quite a beautiful thing. You can create something good with a smaller restaurant, but to create something great, you need to have some volume behind you. I would say River Cafe has had a huge effect on sourcing in the UK, but that’s because it's bloody busy.

JS: One of your other suppliers, Câr-Y-Môr, provides you with velvet crabs. What’s the local consumption of those?

TP: Zero. I can’t imagine anyone else in the UK was buying those. That's an influence from the Basque Country. But we convinced Câr-Y-Môr to sell them to us because we use like 50 kilos of these a week across our restaurants. Jackson and his family have also really helped - I might be speaking to a farmer or fisherman and they’ll doubt me, but Jackson will pop down and be like, if you sell them to Mountain then we'll also take some at Fforest - he builds that momentum.

JS: There’s this sort of Welsh sensibility woven throughout the menu, but it really comes to the fore in things like the Bara Brith and the cockles. Do you serve either of those in restaurant?

TP: The cockles are in all of our restaurants. The Bara Brith no, but we do a walnut bread which is basically inspired by it. There's not that many famous Welsh dishes, or at least that many that you’d want to serve in a restaurant. The approach I have to Welsh cuisine is a bit like my approach to Spanish cooking. We don’t really have any classic Spanish dishes on at Brat our Mountain. There’s sobressada on toast and the caldareta, but both of those are kind of niche. There’s no tortilla or paella or anything. But our menu is heavily influenced by a Spanish culinary approach. We’re not preparing Welsh dishes, but a lot of the ingredients and sensibility behind them are from Wales. These kinds of braised dishes and mountain cooking, it’s all bizarrely familiar to the Welsh palate.

JS: The cockles and laverbread was really interesting - we had a version in Y Barbican in Carmarthen that was quite different to what you served, but the key ingredients were all there. They actually listed it under their breakfast menu.

TP: A lot of the most famous Welsh dishes are - I can’t think of a better word, but like, peasant or rural cooking?

JS: Well it’s like you were saying with Chez Panisse - you start with the land. It’s rustic.

TP: They're often one pot dishes. And economically, Wales has never been an extremely rich country. They’ve lived off the land. So an extremely high protein breakfast before going out to work would be seaweeds - which are cheap - cockles, and pork - bacon bits or lardons, really. The actor Richard Burton - Old Hollywood royalty - I think he called laverbread Welshman’s caviar. There's actually an amazing clip of him talking on a US panel show a TV show back in the 60s - and it's unbelievable how it talks about Wales. It's so poetic it's worth seeking out. But yes, it’s a famous breakfast that kind of fell out of fashion. The seaweed especially can be quite intense.

JS: Seaweed pops up in a lot of cultures around the world and has been on the rise as a trendy climate friendly ingredient. You served it on the vegetable platter. You served it with the cockles. Are you using it a lot in your restaurants?

TP: We use it in so many ways. Songsoo [Kim], our head of sourcing and innovation, she’s of Korean heritage, and she's also traveled across the world observing how different cultures use seaweed. She’s brought some great ideas to our kitchen. We use kelp from Câr-Y-Môr to cure sea bass before cutting and serving it raw. We use lighter ones like sugar kelp in butter that goes into our spider crab omelet. We also create a laverbread pulp to season our pilpil sauce and garnish our oysters. We use it to make kimchi. And we dry all of our offcuts to season dishes and stocks. But we don’t really highlight that on the menu, it’s kind of in the background. They’re incredibly healthy and unbelievably abundant. Everyone should probably eat more of it, but we don’t want to be those people who are like “you need to be eating more seaweed.”

JS: For such an ingredient driven restaurant, it doesn't feel preachy. We talked about this restaurant ecosystem. You don't want to just force these trend ingredients to be overfished or overgrown. Instead you want to embrace the diversity and the species that are living side by side. It's not just the lobsters but the velvet crabs.

TP: I just want to encourage people to understand what's around them. Our food, our dishes, they’re not world-beating, but the produce is. We should have a few more restaurants that have that kind of ethos in Wales. I think Ffforest does it quite well, but I’m hoping others are inspired by them so that in a few years there could be more places that really reflect the Welsh countryside.

JS: Do you want to expand in Wales? Is there a vision of opening a restaurant there?

TP: I mean I did go on RightMove.com as soon as I got home. But I would certainly like to do this again. We'd like to be slightly more ambitious next time as well. Something like MAD Symposium - I wouldn’t mind turning into a bit of a food conference but in the way that we do things. Having a bit of space for conversation would be good, but not boring, bringing like minded people together for something interactive with locals. I've got faith in the way we do things that it wouldn't be too preachy. But I just don't know what word you'd use for it.

JS: What's the Welsh word that you guys used in the promo?

TP: Hiraeth. There are certain words in every language that have no direct translation. I came across this book at a store in Japan that had quirky words from different parts of the world, words that have no translation. And there's a Welsh flag on one page and Hiraeth was one of those words. It basically means longing for Wales, or longing for the homeland. I think a lot of the team are struggling with that at the moment. I don’t know if it’s a come down from the event or Hiraeth but let’s call it Hiraeth. But It was really special to have all those different types of people in Wales, and It's only when you go with other people that you see your country through a different lens. People's Instagram pictures were very funny.

JS: I posted the train schedule at Carmarthen.

TP: When I saw it, I didn't realize that was Welsh in some ways. I was looking at it and thought, that looks mental.

JS: I studied a bunch of languages in college, and when I first saw it I was like, it’s so wild that these people live right beside the homeland of my native tongue. And then there were other moments - I was looking at the sign in the window of the pub with the hours, and the days of the week look exactly like Catalan. It's not uncanny, but it's like, there are moments where it can look, so unfamiliar and so recognizable at the same time.

TP: Yeah, it's wild actually between Catalonia, Basque Country, and Wales, they are so connected. I'm taking the team to Majorca again next week and they always get blown away by the similarities. They're like I could see the connections are so it's quite amazing.

JS: When I was first seeing the pictures of Câr-Y-Môr, I was like, that looks like Maine. I was like, I don't want to say it sounds like New England, but we have no other name for that terrain.

TP: Pennsylvania has the biggest Welsh population in America because of the mining community, but that's not really next to Maine is it? (Pulling up Google Maps) Oh that’s very interesting, I just looked at Maine, the capital is called Bangor – that's from North Wales. And it's called Jones Port and Jonesboro… that’s definitely from the Welsh coming over there.

JS: You've seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, right? You do have a bit of the dad quality.

TP: Yeah. If you lose a link, yeah.