The Royalist Restaurant - Shrewsbury’s Best Kept Secret!
The concept of a hidden gem is weird. It’s been eating away at the thoughts deep inside my brain for a few days now. It’s a label that seems to hold a bit of prestige. It provides a certain level of mystique and a status that definitely drums up business. But once said business is sufficiently drummed, you’re surely not a hidden gem anymore? It’s a little like these places that advertise a ‘Secret Garden’. It drives me loco! IT’S NOT A BLOODY SECRET IF YOU HAVE A SIGN, IT’S JUST A GARDEN!
You have to have something going on to be a hidden gem. The gem part suggests something nice. But if you had a gem, and it was a gem that you were trying to make money from, why wouldn’t you be doing a Paul Weller and shouting from the roof tops? Surely you would want everyone to know about your gem? Or at least once one person finds out, they will tell so many people that your gem shall be no longer hidden?!
Maybe you think you can rely on the local jungle drums? Not a bad strategy in a relatively small place like Shrewsbury. The jungle drums are on permanent red alert and the rumour mill is churning out faster than allegations against Gregg Wallace! I mean, I can’t even sneak a Dairy Milk from the garage without my wife finding out!
I don’t know about you guys, but I have an insatiable appetite for telling people everything that happens to me as often as I possibly can. So no hidden gem will remain hidden for long if I find it. Like some sort of Hidden Gem Terminator……I mean, my big mouth is actually how my wife finds out I am scoffing Dairy Milk’s on the A5!
Surely the best marketing if you have something truly special is to let people know you have something truly special? Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate that there is a certain romance with a place no-one really knows about but has the most wonderful surprise when you find it but let’s live in the real world. Bums on seats is what a hospitality business needs! Not a level of strange mystique and uncertainty!
As with all my blogs I start with a long winded way of saying something that I could summarise in one sentence……
…..THERE’S A BLOODY HIDDEN GEM OF A RESTAURANT IN SHREWSBURY!…
…..And I am lost for words as to why or how no-one seems to be talking about it. So let’s smash that taboo right in its tabboulehs (that’s where the word comes from right?)……..
It’s tucked away in the best possible place. Right in the centre of town, right in front of all of us, hidden in plain sight…….well, not really plain sight, in the middle of a hotel that as far as I was aware was so old it was about to collapse, The Prince Rupert. All I knew of the Prince Rupert was that it was old and that they did some amazing work during Covid housing people that were struggling for places to stay. Marvellous stuff! As a reputation though, it wasn’t on my radar…..maybe a few more secret Dairy Milk’s on the road and I’ll need to know more about the local hotel scene……
From the outside, it definitely felt dated but also somewhat authentic in a sort of Tudor way! But we aren’t here to talk about the hotel, but more so to talk about what or who is lurking right in the centre cooking some absolutely magical food! The Royalist Restaurant!
You might remember the name Gareth Howarth. Local Shropshire Chef. His most recent exploits in the county have been at Fishmore Hall, Ludlow as a sort of development chef. But prior to that he has the sort of achievements that should prick the ears of just about any self-proclaiming ‘foodie’. Masterchef The Professionals Semi Finalist (I imagine he is snowed under with requests for info on Mr Wallace), Head Chef at the 1 Michelin star Gidleigh Park, a Michelin institution and an absolute badge of honour. More recently than that he got 3 AA Rosettes awarded to him at The Haughmond. I never managed to get out to the Haughmond when he was there. A big food regret and one of the reasons I try to tell everyone that if you want to eat somewhere, go. Don’t put it off, it might not last forever! I did once bump into him when we were on the same chef line up at a food festival though. And he seemed like a lovely bloke!
Anyway, his socials had been quiet, probably doing what chefs should be doing and cooking, rather than spending so much time posting things online and writing long winded blogs……..then suddenly he popped back up! His usual unbelievably neat yet generous looking fine dining food. All the perfectly sized blobs of gel type things and purees aligned beautifully across the plates. All the amazing vibrant colours and oil split sauces. All tagged as a location at ‘PRINCE RUPERT, SHREWSBURY’. Had he been to eat there? Or was this his food? Either way, surely this place that I thought was a bit dilapidated and falling apart wasn’t banging out this sort of food? Surely I would have heard something about it? I seem to have a habit of checking social media every 5-6 seconds, I wouldn’t have missed this. It prompted one of my quick switch off’s and diverts from my daily trawl of toddler meltdowns and dairy milk inquisitions into a deep dive into what on Earth was going on!
Not really a surprise, there was absolutely no information on the Prince Rupert website. In fact, I am fairly sure that the website was coded in the Tudor period. Ye Olde HTML. The millennium bug couldn’t even infiltrate it. Also no news on the their Facebook page. Very odd. A few more days of Gareth posting dishes and me drooling over my keyboard and it was clear that he was back and was banging out some incredible looking food right in the middle of Shrewsbury! But still, no-one seemed to be talking about it. Not even the Prince Rupert………
Roll on Shrewsbury Restaurant Week……the Prince Rupert signed up, offering a free dessert with every starter and main…..the perfect opportunity! You can read all about Shrewsbury Restaurant Week in my blog……
I set about sending a telegram via horse back to book a table, I didn’t want to take any chances that their fax machine wasn’t working………
When you walk in to the Rupert it is everything you imagine it would be. Very old school hospitality and very much like you’ve walked into a time warp. Someone even offered to take our coats! I genuinely can’t remember the last time that happened in a restaurant to me. They were tucked neatly in the secret cupboard behind the Victorian Duck Press. The ultimate poultry torture equipment, designed to extract every single last drop of delicious juice from it’s victims. I imagine non paying guests face a similar fate!
We were taken into a large dining room. An extremely old school dining room, with extremely dim lighting and old school tableware. It was also unfortunate that it was also extremely empty with only a handful of diners. To repeatedly say this place is old school is an understatement. What they had done very well was set up half of the room ready for breakfast, so it didn’t feel quite as empty as it looked. Should have seen it coming but the menus arrived hidden deep within a plush, thick, leather book. Looking around, the walls were adorned with armour, helmets and muskets. We started to wonder if this was some sort of old school theme bar/experience, almost Fawlty Towers esque but we also knew that if we got wind of the roundheads approaching, we would be ready! There wasn’t much chance of that happening, the Michael Buble album on loop would surely be enough to calm any disgruntled Parliamentarian.
I’m not sure whether it was the old school atmosphere but I ordered a drink that I had never ordered before in my life. A Campari and Soda……my friend just ordered it completely out the blue and I just said ‘OK, me too’. My prior experience of Campari has only ever been in Negrano format so this was new and I must say very exciting!
I joke about it and while this is the absolute oldest of the old school to a point of it almost being ridiculous, there is an authenticity in this dining room that you can never achieve without the magic ingredient of time. I would not change a single thing. For some reason, at the Rupert it works.
They also have the most amazing over head spotlights on every table which is a photographers dream. I mean you cannot get better lighting for photos! No awkward shadows when trying to take over head shots, no need to manoeuvre things around to take pictures. It’s an influencers dream!…..if only people knew about it?…….
A small, concise menu to me is a clear indication that you are in good hands. Made only better if it’s scrawled onto a black board! The mark of a confident chef, someone who knows what they want to cook, they know their style and they are going to stick with it. They aren’t trying to please everyone or attempt to please too many! It also means that you can actually concentrate on fewer things and get them absolutely right. So to see a simple 4-4-4 menu with 4 choices for each course was very exciting. There were also a couple of excellent sounding steaks on offer. Great local steaks with all the usual steak trimmings! Very enticing and very well priced!
Gareth actually came out to serve the bread, which was lovely (both him serving and the actual bread. A focaccia style bread and some truffle butter to smother it in……..I’ll just ignore my gluten consequences tonight then!……long gone are the days of chefs having to stay in the kitchen and it’s really great to meet the people feeding you. It really adds to the experience.
I love a small menu but what is even more exciting is when you then can’t choose between those dishes. What Gareth does with his food is not stray too far from well established flavour combos. In fact, what he does is centralise his food around things that everyone knows, there’s a familiarity to it all. The classics, the crowd pleasers. He smashes you right in your comfort food jugular and so every dish makes you think ‘ooo yeah, ahhh yes, wow that sounds great’ and so on and so on…….he sails you straight down the river, straight into the heart of your comfort zone and plonks you down in the comfiest of places before drowning you in your heart’s desires.
But it’s a journey packed with little surprises, little nuances that you maybe don’t expect. Things not necessarily in the order or form you expect. It’s not deconstruction because Gareth doesn’t call the dish by a different name. He doesn’t call something a cheesecake but then deliver a tiny plate packed with splodges, foams, crumbles and microwavable sponges. But it sort of is deconstruction and dare I say it, and this absolutely pains me to write, it’s deconstruction done how deconstruction should be done!…….but deconstruction also shouldn’t ever be done……..clear as mud!
Take one of the starters for instance, all the calling cards and inspiration of a chicken caesar salad but with a comforting and indulgent hug that most salads struggle to achieve. Soft chicken terrine wrapped in cured ham with braised lettuce, Caesar dressing and anchovies that just added the salty punch my comfort jugular was praying for…….perfect!
The real shining examples of how Gareth thinks and cooks came with the main courses. I’m not the biggest fan of so called ‘fine dining’. I have an issue with labels and food in general. Why does everything have to be boxed into categories with stupid labels? Every style of food, every type of eater. You can’t be free to just eat what you like, you need to pick a name for it, then make sure you tell everyone what you do or ‘what you are’.
The so called ‘fine dining’ - a term so dated in itself often can have focus on making things looking pretty, creating art on a plate, rather than performing the main reason of a meal, feeding someone. It can sometimes be a little style over substance. I find it hard to comprehend that this also seems to be people’s benchmark for good food in this country. If you’re not doing fine dining it’s almost impossible to be considered the best. Take Masterchef for instance. People are pushed into a corner of creating ‘culinary genius’ with a million different components. Why can’t you just serve an incredible risotto? I would argue that’s harder and more skilful than hiding behind a load of complicated techniques. Anyway, that was an unexpected side rant…..
What I was trying to say was that Gareth destroys all of that. If anything he has restored my faith in ‘fine dining’. His food was generous in both size and flavours and probably mostly in the form of a comforting hug. Choosing the lamb rump, serving it medium/medium well, perfectly cooked for that cut. It was textured and super lamby in flavour but also had that reminiscent feel of a roast dinner at home. He served it with kale, a crispy potato rosti/hash brown and some Jerusalem artichoke, all smothered in the most wonderful lamb sauce. Each element makes you scream ‘Yes!’ louder and louder as you work your way around the plate. I was honestly struggling not to end up producing a reenactment of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally in the middle of the medieval dining room! Summoning all the ghosts and demons that lurk within the walls………
The fish main course was the star of the show. Here comes another tangent……I don’t eat much seafood. It’s not that I don’t love it, I undoubtedly do but I’ve always been conflicted with the idea of a land locked county demanding fish out of the sea. It can’t be at its best. It’s also really hard to know what you’re eating or buying, the industry is pretty disgusting and with the whole farming thing, it just makes me feel a bit icky! Save it for the holidays by the seaside and adore it with the smell of the sea and the bitter cold wind in your hair (or my stubbled scalp). But this fish dish was something else! A beautiful, generous piece of Hake, cooked to utter perfection. The kind of flaking where it was clinging on to itself, almost urging itself to fall apart as you approach it with your cutlery. From the moment I saw it, it was giving me the side eye. It wanted to be in my mouth! That is testament to Gareth’s extremely fancy but also stripped back, approachable plating up. That brilliant balance of art vs food. He is a master in the power of restraint, knowing when to stop!
Whisper the words ‘WARM TARTARE SAUCE’ to me and watch my transformation back into Meg Ryan begin! The Hake looked as though it was having the time of it’s life sculling about in a sea of this stuff! I simply wanted to put my face in it! All of this served with loads of salty, tender samphire, the freshest of the fresh crispy batter bits and a beautifully tender, golden pan fried cauliflower steak. Absolutely everything you could ever want from a fish dish. Nothing more, nothing less. Indulgent but clean. It took me off to the chippy for a bit, but it was possibly the best chippy that ever existed. Why isn’t every chippy serving this? It was nostalgic, familiar, comforting but also felt like an adventure. Such an incredibly skilled tightrope to walk. These are the sorts of feelings you want to evoke with everything you cook and I cannot tell you how hard it is to deliver. As a chef, that’s experience! That is pure class! It was simply sensational!
This isn’t pretentious cooking in any way, shape or form. This is real and really really good! My dining partner, good friend and also chef, Tom summed up the main courses brilliantly……’they are just big plates of really good friends all having a lovely time, what more do you need?’…….
10-15 years ago if you asked me what my favourite course was, it was pudding. I once went to a fancy one star restaurant that let you pick 7 courses from an extensive menu. I chose 6 desserts. I feel like I have matured in my old age and this isn’t so true anymore but regardless, my favourite type of pudding is a free one! All hail Shrewsbury Restaurant Week!……
When it came to pudding Gareth just shovelled a load more coal into the comfort food steam engine. Struggling to decide between all 4 puddings, the cheese board or both pudding and cheese, we decided to go for the Baked Alaska and the Spiced Pumpkin Latte……
Baked Alaska, come on! You can never go wrong with that on the menu. One thing people should definitely be doing is following Gareth’s idea and combining a sticky toffee pudding sponge with some toffee apple things and tying it all together with a beurre noisette parfait! Another list of just lovely things, this time crammed under an Italian meringue shell! I am a firm believer that brown butter makes everything better. For me, sticky toffee puddings, toffee, apples and all that jazz are pretty close to perfection. I am now demanding they all come with brown butter. Gareth has proved me right….thank you!
I am becoming a little lost for words with this and if I am honest, I kind of want to go and eat there again right now!
The spiced pumpkin latte was probably the most complex thing we ate. A beautiful little chocolate tart, with wonderful chocolate pastry (it’s a bloody pain to make well, trust me) and this semi frozen spiced latte liquid filled sort of rectangular prism with blobs of beautiful pumpkin gel all around. He some how took a pumpkin spiced latte apart and reformed it into something a million times better.
I can’t remember the last ‘fine dining’ meal I left so fulfilled in so many ways…….I can, it was at Arzak in San Sebastián on my honeymoon but I have to file this away as a different experience to eating out, it’s not fair on any other restaurant or my own cooking and if that became my expectations, I would be very sad!……
The other thing to note is the value for money. Another sticky issue with me and fine dining food! It’s costly to make, so if it doesn’t hit the mark with the customers experience, you can feel really really underwhelmed. Starters and desserts were around £10-12 each and the mains were £26. Don’t underestimate, this is a generous meal. Made with real skill and real love. The attention to detail is magnificent and I wouldn’t begrudge paying an even higher price tag for it. We have to remember where we are in the world with the price of food these days.
The cost of living crisis has well and truly kicked all of us in the goolys! This is now on the cheaper side of meals of this quality and there are pubs in town doing half as good of a job and charging the same sort of prices. The wine list is also all from Tanners and so also carries some great value for money!
It is hard to believe that Gareth had been there as long as 6 months when we ate (November time) and still, almost nothing in the way of promotion! If it was me and I had this standard of food under my roof, I would be shining lights into the skies over Shrewsbury, even if it meant turning Batman away every night when he turned up. I would be setting off fireworks. I wouldn’t be far off hoisting up a huge Chairman Mao esque picture of Gareth all over the front of the hotel but still, even to this day, almost nothing in the way of promotion? Some social media posts have started to creep out which is great and it looks as though the whole hotel is under some renovation which is really exciting so maybe they are just really snowed under with all that stuff. They seem to be aware that this is a long term project and all seem to have a long term focus and maybe they are just taking it all one step at a time. Maybe I am old school but my first step would usually be to get some bums on seats before anything else! Or maybe they are just trying to build some sort of Hidden Gem and maintain hidden gem status for as long as possible.
I worry about this sort of radio silence purely out of love for our town and what an asset Gareth and this restaurant is to Shrewsbury. The service needs a bit of a boost and an update to bring it up to the level of the food but the juxtaposed combination of this dated but totally authentic and unique dining room with some of the most exciting and modern looking food you will find in Shrewsbury gives me the absolute feels. I pray that they dont touch that dining room! Too many places go for this sleek, out of the catalogue restaurant look and lose all authenticity and atmosphere. Leave it as it is, use it as your selling point. I don’t know why I love it so much but the clash of those 2 worlds is endearing.
For me, this has all the potential to become Shrewsbury’s only true destination food place. Somewhere people will bring people to our town. Not just as somewhere people stay when they want to come to Shrewsbury but as a reason for them to come to Shrewsbury! We all know once you’ve made it to our town, you’ll fall in love with the place!
