 The West arms/Cennin  Some weeks ago, possibly months, I reported to you from a half-decent Nepalese restaurant in Chatham and bemoaned as I did so the paradox by which I was travelling around Britain for a new BBC2 series in praise of British food and farming, while facing every night the horrors of this island's execrable provincial restaurant scene. and I hadn't even been to Norwich yet.  ;Kent was bad enough, but Norwich and greater Norfolk, ye gods. as a restaurant spot, it made one long for the Ukraine of Stalin's murderous mid-Thirties famine campaign. It was here, after long days embedded in mustard factories and mint fields, on crab boats off Cromer and wending through wheatfields on ancient wherries, that I found pubs selling Skol and Harp and Panda Cola, where they haven't quite even got the same chains as the rest of England (it's all "Burger Kong" and "Kentucky Boiled Chicken") and where chefs squint at you villainously through thick spectacles if you ask for a menu, before revealing the names of such boil-in-the-bag fare as they would have been prepared to serve if you had been in the dining room by 7.59pm ("dining room closes at 8"), while in the background other people's dinners are dropped on carpetless floors by tiny, lame waiters from the village, employed in contravention of every child-labour law introduced since the birth of Dickens.  ;Scotland was mostly the same. Barring a great fish shop in Glasgow and a two-star Michelin job half an hour from Edinburgh (to be reviewed here eventually), it was generally nothing but mouth-murdering pucks of industrial haggis, hard little turds of overdone venison, tinned vegetables and the pervading flavour of grey, morbid things that had been cooked in the same oil as your dinner many months before.  ;The only exception to this rule of restaurant misery as I travelled round our island (and I am denigrating the restaurants of these regions, not the food they grow, or cook at home, or the people, or their way of life) was Wales.  ;God, I love Wales. and I love the Welsh. They are so much more mellow, more at peace with themselves and with the world, than the people of this United Kingdom's other smaller nations. They're not all up in your face with their tedious folklore and nationalist yearnings and the anti-Imperial truisms of long, fighty memory. They're not all wiry and shouty and drunk and thinking they invented poetry. They just chill their boots in their gorgeous country, and speak to each other in the lilting calypso of their magical language - no doubt about what terrible bastards the rest of us are - and sing their songs and eat their wonderful food and look out at the sea.  ;Even at Oswestry, not quite in Wales, just at the edge, while giving the once-over to some 250 quality store cattle at the Wednesday morning cattle market (focusing on the bare few pure Welsh Blacks still there among the Charolais and Limousin crosses), I had a pork pie for ?1.10 that was the best I have had in years. It came from the Pedigree Pantry, a brick cube of a works' canteen, no more cosy than an anderson shelter, full of farmers in boots and girls in blue pinnies: cup of tea for a pound, bacon or sausage sarnies for not much more. and for ?1.10 you get a good big pie, size of a six-footer's fist, made from their own pigs, with the meat good and pink from plenty of bacon in with the pork, and strong wet jelly, cased in a brilliant hot-water crust so full of lard that in the mouth it comes on almost flaky. Eaten under strip lights and with the sound of yet unfattened cattle lowing hungrily all around, I would rate it over any poncey plateful I have had in a restaurant lately.  ;Thence northwards into Wales, following the old cattle-droving roads backwards towards anglesey, and another, even better pie at a beautiful old drovers' inn called the West arms, in the Ceiriog Valley at the foot of the Berwyn mountains. Being less well-known than Snowdonia, Berwyn is considerably less tourist-trammelled. The downside to this is that these days places such as the West arms can really only survive by the shotgun shilling - brought by lisping, knock-kneed weeds in plus fours and giant cars (too rugged for the pansy suburbs in which they live, but not nearly tough enough for the land round here), who come to massacre slow, fat, semi-flightless birds with guns they bought yesterday using money they'll make tomorrow, when the bonuses come in.  ;These fat, idle offshoots from the evolutionary chain (can you tell if I'm talking about the pheasants or their foe?) litter the roadside round here, both dead and alive. Bred to be nothing more than aerial targets (never eaten by men, but dug into landfill or sent for dogmeat), shorn of wit and natural function, these house-trained game birds seem a self-inflicted plague. I killed six on the windscreen just going to get a newspaper, a slaughter that would have cost me hundreds had I used a gun.  ;This pie I had there was steak and kidney. Fearing the familiar ladleful from a big tin of stew with an a4 sheet of Jus-Rol on the top that I've been faced with mostly on my travels, I was overjoyed to get, instead, a deep, rich, sticky, well-seasoned braise encased in a suet basin with a lid of hot-water pastry on top, glazed like a pork pie.  ;The room we ate in was small and red and creaky, with a wonderful old confessional along one wall. a perfect piece of plain Welsh furniture. and sitting in it the next day I slurped a perfect piece of plain Welsh cooking: a cawl of six-year-old local mutton whose rich, slick, sticky fat informed every spoonful, sweetened with carrots and leeks and swedes and I don't know what. and there were local mussels, too, and good fresh fish. Just great, great Welsh cooking. Not modern gastro-ponce imposed on a pretty building, but heartfelt country-inn cooking from a chef, Grant Williams, who has been here nearly 20 years.  ;and from there, reversing the old drovers' run, we cut across to anglesey, where the Welsh Black cattle started (they used to cross the Menai Strait, swimming, in their eagerness to get to London and be killed) and stopped in pretty Beaumaris, with its views of Snowdonia and the water, for as good a steak as I will ever eat, at a restaurant called Cennin.  ;Cennin is the Welsh word for both "daffodil" and "leek", which explains an awful lot from the national symbol perspective, but luckily the chef here, aled Williams, knows the difference, not only because he is a former Gordon Ramsay scholar but because he is very local, coming as he does from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, just up the road. Yes, he r 