Just had a really lovely weekend in Machynlleth, Wales, lots of cider, dancing, sleeping, walking and eating. Pretty much all of my favorite things all in one weekend infact. Yay! While we were there we went to a very nice restaurant that deserves a mention, in the Wynnstay Hotel. It was Sunday night so the place was pretty quiet, in fact the restaurant is kind of divided into small dining rooms, and we had one of the rooms to ourselves. It’s really cosy, a bit like being in someone’s house (if they were incredibly minted and had a huge house with several posh dining rooms), and the staff were all very friendly, didn’t rush you, or take too long blah blah blah. Oh and also they have a huge wine list, which they have won several awards for.

While the place is probably better suited to meat eaters, (they have a pretty impressive range of local lamb and beef, and do quite a few different game/fish things too), there were a few veggi options, so we were ok. I’m gonna moan now though, why do most places think the only thing veggis want to eat is cheese, and specifically goats cheese? There were two starter options, one was goat’s cheese, and two mains options, one was goats cheese. And there was cheese for dessert. Cheese cheese cheese. I like cheese, but I do eat other things. Pah! Ok rant over. Well kind of… We both decided to have the soup for starter, butternut squash soup. To be honest it was pretty uninspiring, it only got 6 out of 10 from both of us (this is going to get better I promise…). Then for the main course I had the standard goats cheese something or other, nuff said… but then for dessert I had this amazing poached pair, with some locally made icecream. Never had a poached pear before. The idea of them has always seemed very strange to me for some reason, but that night I thought I’d give it a go and was pretty impressed. It came looking all fancy on a huge black plate dusted with icing sugar. Usually this is where I would put the photo, but I’m not quite in the swing of this taking photos of my food thing yet, and neither of us had though to take a camera. Oops. Didn’t even have our phones on us either. Silly people. Anyway, you’ll just have to believe me, it looked and tasted, as I said, amazing.

Andy’s dessert was very good too. A huge cheese board, OK so I’ve just been moaning about cheese, but cheese in dessert menus is always allowed, in fact should be complusary. There were 6 different types of Welsh cheese, which arrived on a huge board, the waiter explained a bit about each of them, and then you could choose to have which ever you wanted. Andy wanted all of them (surprise ) . A couple of smoked cheeses, a welsh brie, cheddar, ewe’s cheese and a stilton. Mmm.

So that was that. Overall very good. The last course kind of made up for the rest of it, would deffo go again. Oh yeah, there was a ghost too. Just as we were finishing our meal we both suddenly felt quite strange, I’d not said anything then Andy asked me if I thought there was ’something there’, which I did. Scary. We left pretty quick after that. The waiter said the older house staff said there was something going on there. Wooooooo.