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Wales is a land legendarily steeped in poetry and song, which is why I was initially unmoved by news of a new restaurant in Swansea. I mean, this place is down on the harbour, right next to the coal-black sea, about a mile and a half, as the black crow flies, from Dylan Thomas’s birthplace . . . and they wanted to call it The Shed? But it turns out The Shed isn’t about poetry at all.

Chef Jonathan Woolway’s CV reads like the kind of novel that no one has the genius to write any more. He took himself to London to build his cooking career. He spent 16 years alongside Fergus Henderson, one of the most influential, inspirational and best-loved chefs in the UK, a relationship more of friend and amanuensis than a simple deputy. During those 16 years, he resisted any temptation to set up by himself and, by his own admission, was homesick every single day. And now he’s come home. There’s a word for it in Welsh: hiraeth.

They say it’s untranslatable and I will not insult the land of my grandfathers by attempting it. Look it up. It’s lovely.

Woolway it was who developed the rarebit croquette at St John, Marylebone. A confection of such brilliance that I once gabbled about it through an entire review before concluding it was in fact too great to describe in words. Such was his skill that I was powerless not to follow him to Swansea the second the words “cockle croquettes” reached me on the salt breeze of hospitality gossip. They were worth a five-hour drive by themselves. Plump, oozing and washed with the scent of the foreshore.

There was pigskin too. Puffed up like an uncle’s waistcoat with a puddle of dark house-made ketchup. It was a simple enough bar snack in an unfussy presentation, but the attention to detail — the texture of the skin, the sweet astringence of the ketchup — merely foreshadowed the chunkier parts of the narrative.

The perceived wisdom on lamb is that it’s miserable when cold. The greases set and the redolence of mutton saps the soul, but Woolway has selected three lean slices, cooked to textbook rareness like an onglet, and served with a very classical celeriac remoulade. He’s inviting you to look at Welsh lamb like the best beef or fine French charcuterie, and it’s a persuasive argument.

Mangalitza blood cake dances the line between good black pudding and boudin noir, the internal texture of the sponge in a trifle, properly crunchy at the edges, but not over-spiced like a bloody Christmas cake. He’s not afraid to let the blood speak. There’s a runny fried egg to mash in, and his own brown sauce, which tastes of a nan’s pickle cupboard.

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We no longer send photographers on restaurant reviews, which is a good thing. Even the best would despair of making the main courses look other than brown. A roast Welsh pork chop, like a two-inch-thick slice from the neck of a tight head prop, sat on a mound of soured cabbage, subduing it with its glistening, oily weight, as a soaked prune whispered in its ear like Iago. Sorry. It inspires you. Sitting and eating this stuff, imagining Dylan’s ghost staring down, sternly critical, from the moral height of Cwmdonkin Drive. The juxtaposition of richly oleaginous pork against a lightly pickled brassica was assured and clever. The addition of the fruit was inspired. It was also brown.

I’ve never accepted the fresh (or more often frozen-fresh) pea. It’s a jejune legume. A proper pea has grown to maturity, become largely carbohydrate, been dried and reconstituted. Eating frozen peas is like sucking unhatched chicks from the egg. Proper peas are brown and have the consistency of good porridge. Deciding, as Woolway has, to top brown peas with a faggot, a grenade of finely minced offal, shows the kind of suicidally casual élan that leads cavalry into a hail of shot. A brown lump on a brown mound. An audacious rebuttal of the assertion that we eat with our eyes. I shut my eyes firmly anyway, in respect, as Woolway’s faggots and peas passed my lips, bringing with them a sensory overload and transcendental bliss.

I took the rarebit. How could I not? I care not whether it truly originates in caws pobi (the Welsh dish of “roasted cheese”) or as a queasy piece of low-grade Edwardian racism (supposedly an insult to those too poor to even afford rabbit). I took it as it was intended, in respectful homage to St John, and concluded with Welsh cakes and whisky. If only Proust had the good grace to be Welsh. Hot off the maen, an iron griddle, and made by your nan, these are Welsh madeleines. Thomas himself wrote of Evans the Death, the undertaker, who “sees, upon waking 50 years ago, snow lie deep on the goosefield behind the sleeping house; and he runs out into the field where his mother is making welsh-cakes in the snow, and steals a fistful of snowflakes and currants and climbs back to bed to eat them cold and sweet under the warm, white clothes while his mother dances in the snow kitchen crying out for her lost currants.”

Nobody, least of all Woolway, would deny the influence of St John on The Shed. Hell, they have a framed photo of Henderson hanging in the bar, the benign smile of “The Gaffer” blessing the whole room. But Woolway’s personality and, damn, I’m going to say it, his “journey”, endow the place with something more: an abiding spirit of integrity, and that is vanishingly rare.

Have you looked up hiraeth yet? Do you see? Had I true Welsh poetry in my soul, I could have summed up The Shed in a single word.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward, on Instagram @timhayward and email him at [email protected]

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