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At Vraic, Nathan Davies Puts Guernsey’s Coast on the Plate

The former SY23 chef builds a Michelin-starred tasting menu around Guernsey's tides, dairy farms and seaside abundance.

A meal is always better eaten by the sea. On the Channel Island of Guernsey, that sentiment is taken to the extreme. The small, self-governing island, located between England and France, is home to Vraic, a one-Michelin-starred restaurant helmed by Welsh chef Nathan Davies. The restaurant is found along Guernsey’s sandy coast at Chouet Bay, where seaweed rolls in with the tides and cows stand on the overlooking green hills—the sort of picturesque sensibility so perfect it almost feels manufactured. 

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But Vraic is as authentic as it comes. And despite being located across the English Channel, the restaurant is only a short flight from London. So short, in fact, that it’s possible to fly to the small island just for lunch—something I discovered on a recent Friday in May when I caught an early flight from Gatwick to Guernsey Airport. The taxi driver described the restaurant as “as far from the airport as you can be,” which ended up being only a 20-minute drive, a distance worth venturing for the island’s most notable dining establishment. 

Vraic opened last July after an extensive renovation of the existing building. It was formerly a tea room and then a seaside bistro, but it had been empty for 18 months before Davies agreed to take it on alongside his wife, Hollie Davies, Vraic’s operations manager. When it received its Michelin star in February, Vraic became the first restaurant on the island to hold that distinction since Christophe at Fermain Valley Hotel closed in 2009. It took a huge leap of faith for Davies and his family to relocate from Wales to Guernsey, a place where the culinary scene isn’t particularly renowned. 

“At the time, there was no Michelin Guide here,” Davies tells Observer. “There was nobody else doing it. There wasn’t really a model that you could look at for reference. We just thought, ‘Well, if we did it, what would it look like? How do we do it the way we want to?’ And it could have gone really badly.”

Davies previously helmed the Michelin-starred SY23 in Aberystwyth, Wales, which closed in December 2023. He wanted to keep the team from that restaurant intact if he went elsewhere. So after a few exploratory trips to Guernsey, he convinced several former staff members, including head chef Kuba Biskup and sous chef Max Davies, to take the leap as well. 

“Without the team, this restaurant doesn’t exist,” Davies says. “I might write the menus, but without all the other incredible people who were willing to come and take a chance with us, it couldn’t have happened. We brought in a culture straight away. We didn’t have to........

© Observer