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The Radical Hospitality of Deri Reed: How a Carmarthen Chef is Rewriting the Rules of Food

Writer: Martin Hesp
Martin Hesp
9 minutes ago
8 min read
Deri Reed at The Warren
Deri Reed at The Warren

From the outside, you could easily walk straight past The Warren. Tucked somewhere along Mansel Street in Carmarthen, its modest shopfront gives little away. Step over the threshold, however, and the building reveals itself as an intricate, sprawling labyrinth of rooms, mezzanines, and prep kitchens stretching out over floors and basements.

More extraordinary still is the man at its helm. Deri Reed is not your conventional commercial restaurateur. Earlier this year, he stood on a stage in Edinburgh to receive the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2024 Community Food Champion trophy - a heavy wooden chopping board handed to him by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Yet, to understand what Deri has built here in West Wales, you have to look beyond conventional industry accolades. What he is operating is not just an award-winning independent dining room; it is a living, breathing laboratory for how our food system, and our communities, might actually survive.

Seeds in the Mud

"It really started the moment I began cooking professionally," Deri tells me as we sit in the quiet dining room between services. "I had a farmer's market stall in Cardiff. I simply bought produce from the producers around me in the market that morning, cooked it up, and sold it for lunch. I didn't make any money—it cost about £100 and I took about £100—but just by doing that, it sent a clear message to the food community."

That stubborn refusal to compromise caught the eye of UnLtd, the foundation for social entrepreneurs. "They came up to me and said, 'You're running a social enterprise.' I told them I had no idea what that meant! They explained that by supporting local growers and doing good for the community, that's exactly what it was. They gave me £20,000 on the condition that I quit my job and focused entirely on the business."

Almost immediately, Deri loaded up his kit and headed for Glastonbury Festival, pitching up in the Greenpeace field. "I won Sustainable Green Trader of the Year, voted for by the people at Glastonbury. The difference was that everything was made from scratch on-site. Most people make food off-site, bring it in, and make a killing. I turned up with raw ingredients, made it in the morning, and sold it at lunchtime just covering my costs. It didn't make money, but it got recognition."

After a couple of dizzying years on the festival and pop-up circuit, the constant precarity began to bite. "I just got sick of the uncertainty—where, when, and how you were going to cook, and if you’d make any money at all."

The Burrow on Mansel Street

Then, an empty former café on Mansel Street in Carmarthen came onto the market.

"I walked in here thinking it was just the front room from what you could see through the window," Deri laughs. "I thought, 'Great, I can manage this on my own.' Then I walked in and went, 'Wow, this place is like a rabbit warren.' It went on and on—upstairs, downstairs, out the back. It was massive. And I just fell in love with it."

He threw caution to the wind. "I put my dream of wanting to buy a house to one side. This was a third of the price of a house anyway. I bought it with every penny I had and a small family loan. I slept up in the attic on a sleeping mat inside a sleeping bag for about six months while we were renovating."

To get the doors open, he launched a grassroots crowdfunding campaign, raising £20,000 in ten weeks from local well-wishers—along with a contribution from his culinary idol, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

From day one, The Warren carved out an uncompromising identity. "We opened with a three-day party and people just went wild for it. We were doing things organic, local, seasonal, and completely different. We weren’t buying what everyone else bought. People would ask, 'What's this Karma Cola stuff?' and we'd explain we don't sell Coca-Cola. We didn't stock Foster's, Kronenbourg, or Carling; we used Mantle Brewery and bought lovely organic wines. It was about living that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Cook on the Wild Side ethos—bartering cider for apples, swapping pork, and keeping it real."

The Toll of the Kitchen

For six or seven years, The Warren thrived as a celebrated foodie hub. But behind the pass, the unrelenting commercial grind began extracting an unbearable price.

"It just became too much," Deri admits candidly. "It was constant give, give, give, and the sums weren't adding up. I came into this as a chef, and suddenly I was spending all my time trapped in an office doing accounts, HR, cleaning, and fixing broken building fabric. That wasn't what I set out to do. I was doing stuff I hated and that I was crap at."

When the pandemic hit, Deri and his team threw themselves into feeding NHS workers and vulnerable locals. But emerging into the harsh post-lockdown climate of soaring utility bills and spiralling inflation, the spark was gone.

Crowd-funder wall at The Warren
Crowd-funder wall at The Warren
"I lost my love for this place," he says simply.
Rather than walking away from food, Deri redirected his focus directly into grassroots relief, founding Cegin Hedyn ("Seed Kitchen"), a community kitchen operating on a pay-what-you-can basis out of a local church hall.
"I put a little note on Facebook saying, 'I'm starting a new venture—does anyone want to come and help me cook?' Boom. I was bombarded. People offered to peel onions, bake cakes, clean the toilets. We asked for £5 for a meal, but you didn't have to pay. Suppliers gave us surplus food, the rent was negligible, and overheads were tiny. If nobody came to help, I knew I could cook a curry and rice for 50 people on my own. But I was never alone. A whole army of people turned up."

Cegin Hedyn quickly became a registered Community Interest Company (CIC), secured a National Lottery grant, and hired a permanent chef. Deri then turned his attention to establishing a community allotment down the road. "We started off with a tent and a small fire on the bare ground in the pouring rain. People showed up through the winter every single week. Now we've got three plots, polytunnels, and an orchard, all off the backs of the people of Carmarthen."

Hibernation and Rebirth

Yet while his community projects flourished, the physical building on Mansel Street remained a heavy ghost on his shoulders. By July of last year, exhaustion finally caught up with him.

"I had a total burnout. I just couldn't run the restaurant, the kitchen, and the allotment all at once. I decided to shut The Warren. We organised a farewell party, 150 customers packed into the room, and standing there I thought, 'I'm not closing permanently. I'm having a break.' So I changed it from a closing party to a 'hibernation' party."

Financially, it was brutal. "It was costing well over a thousand pounds a month just sitting empty, because I couldn't cancel the gas, electricity, or broadband contracts if we ever wanted to reopen. I was depressed for six months. My relationship broke down. I didn't know who I was without this place."

The turnaround came unexpectedly through a frank conversation with his brother in Ireland. "I initially told him, 'Just help me sell it so I can get on with my life.' But as we started talking and working through it, the spark came back. I said, 'To hell with selling it—let's reopen it. But only if we change the entire structure.'"

The Warren reopened its doors just over a month ago, radically restructured from the ground up.

"I wanted it to be run cooperatively," Deri explains. "We now have three directors: a finance person, a marketing person, and me running the restaurant floor and kitchen. I don't have to do the administrative paperwork that was killing me—it's being done by someone who genuinely loves dealing with numbers. Now I'm present. I can support the staff, talk to customers, and work directly with our growers."

Flat Pay, No Tips, and Real Resilience

Under this new cooperative framework, The Warren trades strictly across three services a week: Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday lunch.

More crucially, the restaurant has dismantled the traditional restaurant wage hierarchy. "Everyone gets paid the same flat rate. The pot-washer gets paid the same as me, and the head chef gets paid the same as me," Deri says.

Conventional customer tipping has also been discarded. "We don't accept tips for staff. Instead, when customers want to leave a gratuity, it goes directly into our Community Pot. The moment someone puts £5, £10, or £20 in, it rings straight onto the till and logs onto our website ledger."

That fund feeds directly into local food security. "People tell me all the time, 'I can't afford to buy organic food like you do.' So we built an online portal linked to our suppliers. Local people can log in and join the Warren Food Collective to buy wholesale staples—like a 25kg sack of organic flour—at our commercial wholesale cost price, without the typical 40 to 60 per cent retail mark-up. It's about helping ordinary folk become genuinely food resilient."

On Thursdays, the restaurant swings its doors open for free community volunteer days. "Tomorrow, we’ve got a whole wild fallow deer coming in from a nearby estate," Deri says with obvious relish. "We’ll be butchering the carcass right here alongside volunteers who have never butchered an animal in their lives. We pack the meat into the freezers, which gives us ethical, sustainable venison for the menu for the month ahead, and people learn a vital food skill."

Honest Plates

Despite the sweeping philosophy, Deri hasn't lost sight of what makes a dining room sing. The menu at The Warren remains compact, seasonal, and fiercely regional.

Dinner revolves around sharing grazing boards and fresh "focaccia pizzas"—pillowy, olive-oil-rich sourdough bases topped with local ingredients and flash-caramelised in the oven. The Heritage pizza features local free-range pork, regional Welsh cheeses, seasonal greens, and apples foraged from Deri's own smallholding, alongside produce sourced directly from the Banc y Car community farm project. Fish appears only when the local inshore fisherman calls in with fresh grey mullet, sold strictly by pre-order to eliminate kitchen waste.

Sunday lunch remains their legendary calling card: overnight slow-cooked local venison from five miles down the road, Welsh organic beef, free-range pork, and roasted squash, served with all the trimmings.
"When you see a restaurant with an enormous, sprawling menu, they're cutting corners somewhere," Deri shrugs. "They're either buying in frozen bases or using processed shortcuts. A small menu is the only honest way to cook from scratch."

The Craving for Authenticity

As we finish our chat, I put it to Deri that in an increasingly artificial, screen-dominated world, places like The Warren are becoming vital sanctuaries.

"You simply can't replicate this online," he agrees. "AI and technology have their place—we have a robot vacuum here that mops the restaurant floor every morning, which is brilliant because it saves a human three hours of dull drudgery. But a robot is never going to grow an organic cabbage, butcher a carcass, talk to a farmer, or cook a wholesome plate of food for a neighbour."

He leans forward across the table. "Our towns have been hollowed out by supermarkets and corporate multinationals extracting wealth from our communities. My job is to say: wake up, look outside, speak to each other. We are creating a model here that proves hospitality can be fair, ethical, and deeply rooted in the ground beneath our feet. If we don't look after each other and feed our communities properly, who will?"

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