Bodnant Welsh Food

I’d call this a hidden Welsh gem.
Freshly picked and local grown fruit and vegetables, traditional Welsh cheese and butter, local meat and numerous local beers, chutneys and herbs and spices. In the middle there is also a selection of chocolates to die for along with a mini bakery with freshly made Welsh cakes and bread.
With all the produce being locally sourced, you know what you’re getting. But bearing this in mind, the prices aren’t cheap.
There’s also a café, icecream parlour, wine shop and bee centre located right outside so everyone should be able to find something to suit their taste.

What a mixed experience this proved to be! Eight of us visited the Food Centre, prior to going on to Bodnant Gardens a mile along the main road.
We queued up at the Tea Room a long barn that has been tastefully restored and has comfortable seating. The staff were obviously busy, but not overworked and we joined in with their system of ordering individually & being given small wooden numbered animal signs to be placed on the table of our choice.
As there were eight of us we found a large enough table at the far end of the room and waited for our orders to arriveand waitedand waited!
We discussed our orders amongst ourselves apart from teas & coffes, the only hot food ordered was soup: most of us had gone for the sandwiches or baguettes. Eventually I went to the serving area and was met by stares and a feeling of resentment/​misunderstanding by the staff who, by then, were just standing around. I asked to see the manager who turned out to be the manageress and returned to my seat.
When she arrived she barely apologised but agreed that our 35 minute wait had been excessive. She came back with our orders and we remonstrated that their system of numbering customers had obviously NOT worked. She them admitted that there was a change in the offing & that in future all the tables would be numbered, instead of the customers. Hopefully this will work better!
As for the foodit was very good and we enjoyed it despite their having run out of baguettes! This time the manageress was more fulsome with her apology and gave me two £10 tokens to be spent in the Farm Shop: this reduced our spend from the £48 outlay and we later toasted the Food Centre in the beer we had bought there.
Good food and drink but a rotten service experience. Could & should do better.

Although the Bodnant Food Centre is only a few miles from home until today we’d never visited. It’s the sort of place you need to go out of your way to get to and in any case we’d heard mixed reviews of the place. However one quiet Saturday afternoon we needed something to pass an hour and with nowhere else to go we turned south down the Conwy Valley and headed for Furnace Farm.
The centre essentially comprises three parts for visitors the Hay Loft Restaurant, The Furnace Tea-​Room and the Furnace Farm Shop. There are however other parts of the business including a cookery school and a bee keeping centre. We didn’t try either the restaurant or tea-​rooms on our visit but instead headed for the shop. My first impression was that it was bigger than I’d expected, it’s maybe the size of an average convenience store but for some reason I’d expected a tiny little room.
There’s everything you’d expect from a shop like this including meat, veg, dairy produce, preserves, cakes, beer and all manner of cooking ingredients. Surprisingly for a Welsh food centre some of the produce wasn’t Welsh, I spotted produce from Shropshire, Gloucestershire and Yorkshire amongst others, but most of the stock is Welsh. There’s some genuinely local produce too including beer from the Great Orme Brewery which misleadingly isn’t located on the Great Orme but is in fact located about a mile to the north of Furnace Farm on the outskirts of Glan Conwy. They also stock preserves from Baravelli’s of Conwy and cakes from Swigr a Sbeis and Ty Hwnt I’r Bont, both of which are located just down the valley in Llanrwst. They also stock locally reared meat and game, some of which is reared on the Bodnant Estate and rest elsewhere in the Conwy Valley.
What isn’t surprising is that the prices are often a bit hefty, this isn’t somewhere many people will go to do the weekly shop. We bought a few items (mainly Great Orme beer!) but I think for most normal families this is somewhere to purchase couple of treats rather than do any substantial shopping. In many ways it’s more of a tourist attraction than a shop for the locals and I’m sure they’ll be looking to attract coach parties to boost their trade.
Although we will no doubt return at some point in time it’s not likely to be anytime soon. However I do hope the business succeeds. It does provide much needed employment in a rural area and also provides a place for local food produces to sell their wares so it’s not all bad.

http:/ (http://) This newly opened Food centre is truly world class. A clutch of wonderful 18^th century farm buildings on the celebrated Bodnant Estate (The National Trust Bodnant Gardens is close by) has been triumphantly restored as a centre of excellence for welsh food and eveything that goes with it. There is a tearoom, and a fabulous farm shop which includes produce from an in-​house butchers, bakers, and dairy, and much besides. The top quality food on the shelves has often travelled yards rather than miles. Add to this a stunning restaurant with views over the Carneddau range, and, from all points, great elevated views of the River Conwy, a Cookery school, the centre for welsh bees (with CCTV of the hives and all that goes on in them), and you have the makings of a great place to pause for refreshment and to shop. The food on offer in the shop is, it seems to me, very sensibly priced, there is none of the ridiculous overpricing on incidental items that often spoils smart food centres, and meat, veg and bread seem very reasonably pitched. But the real finishing touch is the quality and friendliness of the staff, who could teach many a place of hospitality a thing or two. They are plainly delighted to be working in such a stunning place, where great attention, and much investment, has been applied to the smallest detail. Bravo indeed!