Vraic: The Michelin-starred restaurant putting Guernsey on the map
At Vraic, Nathan Davies has created a restaurant worth flying to – and back from – in a single day, writes Carys Sharkey
Flying anywhere for lunch is pretty decadent. Flying back the same day is borderline obscene. But Vraic, which opened on Guernsey a year ago, is a restaurant that has muscled its way into the fine-dining spotlight. It was awarded a Michelin star (the island’s first in over 10 years) within months and debuted with a top 50 place on the National Restaurant Awards. A lot then in a year, and suddenly the journey doesn’t feel so long.
Guernsey, the little rocky Channel Island slipping towards France, slouching towards England, entirely of itself, has a fog problem. On arrival, all I heard about was fog. It is quite hard to have a conversation without low-lying cloud coming up, sometimes quite literally. The Guernésiais have their own version of weather-based obsession. Not so different after all. The threat of delayed and cancelled flights might put off a restaurateur, but it definitely adds an element of anticipation. As we hurtled across the island on roads and sometimes pavements, I felt the kind of unique excitement that comes for ‘destination’ restaurants. And chef Nathan Davies’ Vraic is some destination.
The restaurant is perched on the north of the island and facing England’s south-west coast, where the wind whips up around the coast, sweeping salty air onto its black, glassy exterior. Inside is Scandi-light, with a wide open plan kitchen and fires flickering away in the corner. Sheepskins hang off the back of chairs, cutlery is made from antlers. It reminds me a little of Ynyshir, the highly acclaimed double Michelin star restaurant in Mid-Wales where Davies was head chef before going on to set up another critically acclaimed restaurant with SY23 in Aberystwyth in 2019. SY23 garnered a cult following and quickly became one of the best restaurants in Wales, but just four years later was forced to close due to “unprecedented” financial challenges. But Vraic is less angular, less dark than Ynyshir. The thrilling jaggedness of one restaurant has here been smoothed out by the genius of another. Softened and sanded down by island life like sea glass.
And island identity is everything to Vraic. For Nathan and his wife Hollie, who is the restaurant’s operations manager, the move had to feel right. Their kids’ first language is Welsh and they had grown up on the craggy coast of Wales. London was not calling. But when approached to set up on Guernsey, and after visiting the island and the location, it all clicked into place. Here was a rugged wildness that echoed what had come before. And more importantly, here was a shit-ton of seaweed.
“Moving to Guernsey, we were very conscious not to lose our food philosophy and identity, and to continue what myself and the team had built in Wales,” Davies tells me. “But moving to an island, where we wanted to celebrate the food from here, meant we kept a lot of our cooking style and techniques, but swapped out ingredients to use local produce.”
The star of Davies’s larder is undoubtedly seaweed. The restaurant is named after it (‘vraic’ is seaweed in Guernésiais), the walls are adorned with paintings of it, the menu is made of it. And the best meal starts with it, in the form of a seaweed martini.
Before arriving at the restaurant we pit-stopped at a beach to learn about seaweed from Ben and Naomi Tustin, who set up Guernsey Seaweed and sell everything from seasoning blends to anti-chafing cream. As we nibbled on sea-plumped leaves and capillary-dense blooms, we learnt that the only thing seaweed can’t do is get you high. But maybe they haven’t tried hard enough. Otherwise, the opportunities are limitless. In Davies’s kitchen, that doesn’t feel like hyperbole.
The seaweed crops up as a verdant, vegetal dusting in an opening dish of crab and hazelnuts. It’s sprinkled like saline confetti on a lobster tail in a sanbaizu (‘three bowls of vinegar’) sauce made unctuous with yellow Guernsey butter. The course is served with a lobster bun – somewhere between prawn toast and Singaporean fried mantou – that is crowned with sesame seeds ideal for mopping the bowl dry. One of my favourite dishes was a perfect piece of turbot, cooked whole on the bone over fire before being sliced into shoebox rectangles. The fish is served with a burnt butter sauce split with chive oil, sprinkled with plankton and topped with a bouquet of seaweeds which change with the seasons and tides. On my turbot were four varieties with totally different textures and flavours. Davies’ cooking is often delicate, so the undercurrents of concentrated flavour take you by surprise, like a riptide.
Nowhere is that more comprehensively on show than the seaweed broth. Davies gently pushes back when I suggest it has become a bit of a signature dish at the restaurant. Vraic has just turned one year old, he points out, it’s a little premature to be talking signatures. But he does concede the broth has “left a mark” on guests.
“It’s an ever-changing dish, so it can be on the menu all year round, giving us lots of time to perfect it as we grow and develop. But it’s a heavy hitter already, and I’m looking forward to continuing to make it better and better,” Davies says.
It’s a deceptively unassuming dish that crops up at the beginning of the tasting menu. An intensely umami dashi-style soup served with a tangle of pickled and raw seaweeds and a gel made from kelp. Bright green chive oil scatters the surface. It looks and eats like a rockpool after rain. Davies might resist the term signature dish, but his cooking and the restaurant’s Sarnian identity are so creatively intertwined in this broth. I doubt it can ever leave the menu.
On the way back to the airport we stopped for a couple of pints at Happy Landings, the pub located about 30 seconds from the airport – which is lucky, because by the time we left the pub our flight was boarding. Or should be boarding. Instead, with the flight delayed for hours by fog, we drink more beer, play a game vaguely resembling gin rummy and grumble about the weather. It feels like an apt end to an almost whistle-stop tour in Guernsey. And with a restaurant as good as Vraic, hopefully one of many.