Chef and seaweed enthusiast Jonathan Williams hates following recipes. It's something you wouldn't expect to hear from a restaurant and pub owner who has won multiple awards for his food. But not following a recipe is how the man behind Pembrokeshire's Cafe Môr' came up with a dish that has people flocking to buy time and again: it's lobster roll, which has been a constant on his sea shack's menu for the last decade.
"I like seeing ideas and doing my own [take]," he tells me as we sit down to talk about not only his cafe and pub but his latest project- a secret sea garden in Pembrokeshire. "When I started the lobster rolls [at Cafe Môr'], I'd never actually had a [one] before in my life. But I liked the idea of them. Especially coming from Pembrokeshire - 99% of crab and lobster goes to Europe and no-one really ate it [ten years ago]. When I first started, it was elitist as well. Sticking it in a sandwich, when I first started I was only charging a tenner and probably losing money!"
That being said, Jonathan - who not only runs Cafe Môr but the 16th century pub within whose land it sits, The Old Point House, reflects: "It's been hugely popular." You can get more story updates straight to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletters here.
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With that being the case, however, he adds: "Creatively-wise, it's a bit of a bug bear," he laughs. "It's hard to change the menu at Cafe Môr because everyone wants what they know for the last nine/ten years!"
Jonathan started Cafe Môr in 2011 after a yearning for home and all its offerings - including fresh seafood - provided him with an exciting business prospect that caused him to move from Swindon, quitting his "proper job" as a sustainability adviser, and opening up a seafood stall. Recalling his first ever stall - set up at a local farm shop during the summer, Jonathan spent 14 hours prepping and cooking a variety of products - Pembrokeshire sushi, several salads, quiches, deli products and crab and lobster.
Despite being on £1.42-an-hour, he has described it as "the best day's work I had ever done". And he's not looked back.
After that, he certainly hit the ground running and became a regular at markets across west Wales before breaking into the festival scene. "It literally grew from £10 stalls and then hitting the festival circuit where you're paying several thousand pounds for pitches at Glastonbury doing hundreds and hundreds of lobster and seaweed dishes. It was crazy times!"
His food, which richly celebrates Welsh sea produce - and incorporates seaweed an awful lot - speaks for itself and at the start of his journey he won best street food vendor at the British Street Food Awards. Then, in 2012, he was cooking wraps with laverbread and cockles for the athletes at the Athletes Village at the London Olympics - two weeks before he welcomed his daughter. In 2014, he took home Best Street Food/Take Away in the UK at the BBC Food & Farming Awards. He's also had a mention in the Lonely Planet guide and so many more accolades.
That's not all: Cafe Môr has also launched a variety of condiment products - The Beach Food Company - inspired by the sea, with the ingredient of seaweed filtered through many of them - a subject about which he is passionate.
"It was mad doing these traditional recipe dishes at the London Olympics and doing different festivals around the country! It's been a whirlwind ten years, to be honest."
After years of stationing his van - which started off as a wooden beach shack built out of drift wood by Jonathan's brother, Ben, and soon became a van powered by solar - at Freshwater West beach, it is now located within the grounds of the Old Point House, an "iconic" seafaring pub, thought to have been the haunt of pirates and smugglers in Pembrokeshire, leaseholded by Jonathan.
"It's gorgeous," he says about the pub, "but it needed a load of work and I had an idea of trying to make it into a sustainable business. I ran my course; I did everything I could at Freshwater West and was getting a bit bored. This was a huge new challenge with the pub. I mean opening a pub in 2022 is probably the worst time to open a pub, ever, but I always go by gut rather than money. If I went by money, I'd be in a very different situation."
And like most places in Pembrokeshire, its debut summer was hugely successful - although the winter was a different story. "It was a nightmare. I'd never opened a food business in the winter before. It's dark by half three and the wind's blowing and it's raining and you get cancellations and no shows, you start questioning what you're doing. It's feast or famine. I'm exploring different ways of using spring and summer to finance the winter."
While Cafe Mor is renowned for its street food, The Old Point House is also, like its counterpart, focussed on seafood (things ranging from house seaweed pasta to seaweed Welsh cakes) as well as classics like burgers. It even has special events focussed around certain dishes - for example, it's previously hosted a seafood paella day and laver lovers banquet. Read all about it here.
But his new ventures don't stop there. As previously mentioned, Jonathan is a seaweed enthusiast and enjoys foraging for the stuff in his free time to put into his cooking - some of the products he makes include seaweed ketchup, dried laver seaweed, Welsh laver seaweed butter and seaweed cheese (to name a few). Now, the 43-year-old tells me about his latest project: a Secret Sea Garden where he's going from foraging to farming. Intriguing...
This project was born out of the pandemic after his 'lobster man' was "moaning because they weren't selling any lobster, so all of his ropes were in." Complaining about the amount of seaweed he was finding in his ropes, Jonathan - who spent hours in a different part of Pembrokshire seeking the stuff and snipping it off rocks with scissors - had the idea to put more ropes out and see how much seaweed they could get as a team. But it wasn't just seaweed they found, but a plethora of seafood. "It's amazing to see how much life forms on just a piece of rope."
Explaining how the process worked, he says: "It's like a lazy gardener. Leave a rope in the sea and you've got mussels and several different species of seaweed and then on the bottom, you've got all the spider crabs coming in. It's a whole ecosystem just forming on a piece of rope. I thought it'd be great for the pub to have it's own secret sea garden and be one of the first in Wales to have [one].
"We've got a kitchen garden which we're growing at the moment but to have an actual sea garden! Sea food has had some bad press in the last few years over fish so I thought it'd be nice to turn it around and look at farming sustainably in the sea."
Making it even better for the environment, he's looking at different types of natural ropes as opposed to polyrope and the pair - Jonathan and his lobster man - are looking at doing their first sea garden harvest in the next few weeks - and after that, they'll host a 'banquet'. With shellfish being grown on the ropes too, he's hoping to provide a truly local source for seafood in his kitchen at The Old Point House.
"I've been out there a few times and its amazing how within five months, the seaweed is already two metres long and you've got loads of different species on there," he says of the Secret Sea Garden project.
And his creativity and passion doesn't just stop there. Jonathan explains another project of his is happening in Milford Haven where he's set 12 ropes in the sea with marine biologists going out each month to monitor just how much life is forming on them. He adds how, bringing his love of renewable energy together with his love of seaweed - and his secret sea garden - he is hoping to set up a series of offshore wind turbines (where there isn't much life).
With a strong emphasis on seaweed, I ask Jonathan - who has written a recipe book on laverbread and all the wonderful things you can do with seaweed that's coming out later this year - why does he love it so much?
He explains, with glee in his voice: "It is the ultimate food underdog. And I love the fact that seaweed is probably the least appetising thing that you could really try and convince someone to eat. It is a huge challenge because when you say seaweed, people think slimy, smelly stuff on the beach... you throw at each other when you're kids and never touch it with a fork in a million years.
"I love the idea of changing that perspective. When you look at seaweed itself, it has more vitamins and minerals than any landbased vegetable, so there's a huge nutritional benefit there. Also, creatively-wise, down the shoreline there's 800 species of seaweed and we're only scratching the surface with what we can do. Obviously, laverbread is classically a very Welsh seaweed dish but there are hundreds of other seaweeds you can use. The world is literally your oyster." Especially with it not requiring land or fresh water, it can be farmed at a mass scale (because it's at sea).
He adds how he loves "converting the old[er generation], who wouldn't touch it with a bargepole and sneaking it in there." He does this by adding it to ketchup, salt, butter, batter and laverbread in with the burgers - and his customers keep on returning, so he's obviously doing something right. He says: "It's nice to celebrate something different, individual and something you can't find anywhere else - and take people out of their comfort zone."
And to get more people cooking it themselves, Jonathan's written a book called The Little Book of Laverbread.
He says: "We've always been shy about laverbread because it looks really disgusting. There's an old quote I read about it: an old French chef said that if it was an ingredient in France it would be celebrated like truffle, iconic food and wine. So I thought I'd write a book about laverbread to show the world how amazing it is." - he adds how it should be at the forefront of Welsh cooking.
As for when he's not cooking in the shack, the pub's kitchen or at home, like anybody who hails from Pembrokeshire or has simply moved there to enjoy the slow pace and beauty of life there, the father-of-two's spare time is taken up with surfing, fishing, making beer and rum - and spending time with his young family.
As a keen traveller - he's lived in San Sebastien in Spain, the Alps, Australia - he adds how he always makes a point of going away in January with his wife, who's a sea glass jewellery maker, and kids. But not just because it's a holiday. There's an ulterior motive: "I tend to start too many projects in the winter and it always bites me in the bum in the summer! Now I'm literally drowning in [projects]." Although in the most delicious way.
The first harvest from the Secret Sea Garden will be celebrated later in the summer with the Secret Sea Garden Feast at The Old Point House.
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July 02, 2023 at 10:37PM
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Wales' freshest pub seafood farmed in secret underwater garden - Wales Online
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