Restaurant: ffresh, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay | John Lanchester

One of the great heroes of modern British cooking is behind the menu at one of Wales's foremost public spacesOne of the themes you notice in this job is how often new restaurants outside the south-east are attached to projects involving public money. There's no mystery: as the economy has gone into retreat, there's less new private money going into ventures outside the capital. With ever bigger crunches in public spending now starting to kick in, such enterprises face an uncertain future, but many have spaces built specifically to be restaurants, and it's hard to imagine what else could go in them.Example: ffresh at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff. Let it be said that the name and orthography are annoying. Both English and Welsh speakers in modern Wales already spend significant amounts of time squinting at words wondering which language they're reading ? tacsi? ? so a word that doesn't look quite as if it's in either language is the last thing anyone needs. No doubt they gave it a non-word name to avoid the issue of picking a language, but really.ffresh is round the back of the shiny-scaled Millennium Centre, known locally as the Armadillo. The restaurant has a view towards the bay and, on a bright, cold, winter day, is a lovely place to be ? modern, very light and with only the faintest hint of that canteen air you tend to get in theatre or museum restaurants.The chef is Kurt Fleming, aided by one of the great heroes of modern British cooking, Shaun Hill, consulting on the menu. Hill first soared across the firmament at Gidleigh Park, the zillion-star country-house hotel in Chagford, just off Dartmoor. (Ted Hughes, a local, wrote a poem that rhymed "tiddly" with "Gidleigh", and praised Hill's coriander with scallops. I don't recall what rhymed with scallops. Dollops?) From there, he went to the Merchant House in Ludlow, and helped turn the Shropshire town into the culinary epicentre of the UK; now he runs the Walnut Tree near Abergavenny. His cooking has always had an unusual quality of calm: it's original, thoughtful, precise, balanced and never showy or over-worked.Translated through the necessary constraints of the location ? that is, doing a lot of pre-theatre covers pretty fast ? Hill's presence is felt in a menu that has an emphasis on the local and seasonal. You feel the need for speed in the starters, which are the least interesting part of  the meal. Halloumi had that weird, super-rubbery texture it sometimes has, and its pepper and aubergine dressing was over-tweaked with capers. Confit of duck leg arrived as three room-temperature discs of uncharismatic, dry terrine with a smear of apple pur�e on the side. The salad with it, however, was a brilliant assembly of pea shoots, cubes of apple and black pudding. It had an extraordinary earthiness. I don't mean that metaphorically ? it did genuinely taste of earth, as well as of greenery: a remarkable couple of mouthfuls.With mains, the meal lifted off. Anthony Bourdain once said that it's impossible to avoid the word "unctuous" when discussing pork belly. I surrender: the belly was unctuous, all fat rendered and the meat dense but soft. The accompanying cabbage was spiked with something, maybe allspice, that gave it a subtle, elusive sweet note to complement the pork. Fillet of bream, cooked with perfect technique, came on a bed of herb and anchovy risotto made with one of those softer, non-arborio rices, with a dollop of salsa verde adding a note of freshness and acidity to a beautifully balanced and flavourful plate.Bread-and-butter pudding featured Brecon gin marmalade and came with a shot glass of lemon cream on the side, and the overall effect was masterly, sweet but sharp. On the subject of Welsh alcohol, we drank a Monmouth chardonnay, Ancre Hill. I know I'm going out on a limb here, but my hunch is that viticulture will not turn out to prove as central to the Welsh economy as coalmining once was. Lunch was �15.50 for two courses ? cracking value.? ffresh Wales Millennium Centre, Bute Place, Cardiff Bay, 029-2063 6465. Open Tues-Sat noon-2.30pm, 5-9.30pm; Sun noon-4pm. Meal with drinks and service, around �40 a head � la carte. Set lunch, �15.50 for two courses, �18.50 for three. Set dinner, �18.50-�22.50.RestaurantsCardiffUnited KingdomWalesFood & drinkJohn Lanchesterguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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