If there is one food that sums up the Welsh coast, it has to be laverbread. And if there is one place that feels like the heart of that story, it is Freshwater West.
This sweeping beach on the Pembrokeshire coast is now known to many for its appearance in the Harry Potter films, but long before film crews arrived, this was a working landscape where people came to harvest the sea.
In this part of our Pembrokeshire road trip, Anthony met Jonathan, often described locally as the godfather of seaweed. He is the founder of Câr y Môr and Barti Rum, a passionate advocate for seaweed as food, and one of the warmest hosts you could hope to meet. He also still manages to surf twice a day, which somehow feels entirely fitting.
Jonathan took us back to where it all began, to a small seaweed hut on the edge of Freshwater West.
“This seaweed hut is inspirational for everything I’ve done really. If it wasn’t for this hut, I wouldn’t have started Câr y Môr.”
He explained how laver, the dark green seaweed that clings to the rocks here, has been part of life on this coast for centuries. It grows best on west facing beaches, fed by clean Atlantic water and strong tides. The women of nearby villages used to gather it by hand, dry it in huts like this one, and send it by horse and cart to the train station and on to Swansea for processing.
“There were about twenty huts here in its heyday. Each family had their own. The men would go fishing and the women would come here and pick the laver all day.”
Laverbread, as it became known, was never bread at all. It was a dark, savoury paste made by boiling the seaweed down slowly. Locals rolled it in oatmeal and fried it, often serving it with cockles and bacon. It fuelled hard work and long days, and over time it became part of Welsh identity.
“It went from something nobody was eating apart from your great granddad to something Wales should be hugely proud of.”
Jonathan described laver as “black gold”, a superfood long before the term existed. Rich in vitamins and minerals, deeply savoury, and shaped by the sea, it carries the story of place in every mouthful.
Jonathan did not set out to build a brand. He started as a cook, fascinated by what the sea could offer beyond the familiar lobster and crab. Much of that seafood was being exported, and seaweed itself was almost entirely ignored.
“Most of what we get from here was going abroad. Nobody was touching laver. And I thought, where else should you shout about it than right here.”
The farm produces a full range of sauces that move steadily up the heat scale.
He began cooking with it, folding it into everyday dishes and watching how it transformed flavour.
“Putting seaweed in food just makes everything taste better. You just need the right balance.”
That balance became central to everything he did. Too much and the flavour overwhelms. Just enough, and it lifts a dish quietly and beautifully.
That same thinking led to Barti Rum. Jonathan wanted to create a rum that carried a sense of the coast, something that felt Welsh rather than imported in style or spirit.
“I wanted seaweed in the rum. But too much just kills it. You’re always looking for that balance.”
The result is a rum with a soft sweetness and gentle coastal depth, something that works on its own and also alongside food. It is why it sits so comfortably on the Faber drinks list.
Seaweed appears again and again in Jonathan’s cooking. It finds its way into bacon sandwiches, burgers, pasta, wraps, and seafood dishes. Often people do not even realise it is there, they just notice that everything tastes better.
The journey continued inland to The Old Point House, where Jonathan welcomed us into the kitchen. The pub was closed for the night, but the hospitality was wide open.
What followed was a meal that captured everything this trip was about. Welsh mackerel, crab straight off the boat, handmade pasta with various seaweeds running through it, and a seafood wrap with laverbread that Jonathan once made twenty thousand times for the 2012 Olympics.
“It’s a surreal night. We’re locked in a pub on our own and being fed like this.”
It felt like a window into a way of living where food, people, and place remain deeply connected.
Jonathan spoke about how seaweed remains underused in the West despite its abundance.
“Seaweed contains more vitamins and minerals than any land-based vegetable.”
Anthony reflected on how strange that feels when you look at how food actually moves around the world.
“What seaweed we do get in a majority of places, we’re buying from Japan.”
He paused on the wider contradiction.
“We export most of what comes out of the sea and then buy in what we eat. It makes no sense.”
For Anthony, seeing the system working locally made the idea of sustainability feel far simpler than it often sounds. It comes down to common sense, community, and care.
Freshwater West remains the perfect backdrop for all of this. At low tide, dark ribbons of seaweed appear on the rocks, just as they have for generations. It is easy to imagine the women who gathered it, the families who relied on it, and the cooks who kept it alive.
Laverbread is not simply food. It carries the rhythm of tides, the work of hands, and the history of coastal communities. Through people like Jonathan, that story continues to be told in new ways, through rum, food, and generous hospitality.
It feels alive again, which is exactly how it should be.