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Deri Reed

@ethicalchef

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⭐️BBC Food & Farming Awards Winner 2024⭐️
👨‍🍳 Community Chef making food accessible to all
🍴 Founder of @warrenmanselst @ceginhedyn

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🔥FEAST FROM THE FLAMES @ceginhedyn @ethicalchef 🔥 #Harvest2026

There’s something about cooking over fire that feels perfectly suited to harvest time — smoke in the air, embers glowing, vegetables blistering and charring until their flavours are transformed.

For our Harvest Celebration, we were delighted to collaborate with Cegin Hedyn, a local social enterprise who run a Community pay-as-you-feel canteen and allotment. The team of @ethicalchef and @ceginhedyn volunteers brought their brilliant fire cooking to the heart of the celebration. Cooking over a fire cage, they turned our seasonal harvest into something truly special - including smoky, charred aubergine and beetroot, cooked right over the flames.

It was a beautiful meeting of people, produce and place: vegetables grown from the land, cooked over fire, and shared by over 100 people metres from where it was grown.

Collaborations like this between projects with similar aims and values bring our events so much more to life!

We hope you enjoyed your food!! Let us know in the comments below how it was…

Cegin Hedyn’s approach to cooking is rooted in seasonality, local produce and the alchemy of fire - making the most of what’s available and allowing the ingredients to shine.

A celebration of the harvest in every sense. 🔥

@tnlcommunityfund
📷 @a_great_alternative taken in Llansteffan by @ethicalchef

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10

a month ago

Things are gathering pace at The Warren… 🌱

If you’ve walked down Mansel Street recently, you probably can’t have missed the enormous bright white posters covering the front of the building. It really does feel like the momentum is picking up.

And there’s a LOT happening.

🎂 Our 10th birthday party is coming together.

My friend, chef and local food hero Alex Cook will be taking over the kitchen. Alex is now Food Strategy Programme Manager for Carmarthenshire and part of the team behind @bwydsirgarfood , but our story goes back much further.

He was actually the first person ever to do a pop-up at The Warren, with his award-winning Pink Peppercorn street food business. He later cooked for the launch of Cegin Hedyn, so having him back in our kitchen for the 10th birthday feels like a very special full-circle moment.

🎶 Emily from @louiseandthefeathersofficial will be bringing live acoustic music to the evening, and @imy.zoe will be there capturing it all.

We only have a handful of birthday tickets left, and it’s a booking-only event.

🍽️ Sunday lunches are coming back!

And we’ve made our first two hires.

Harriet Baggley from @bluemarblerefill is returning to The Warren to run front of house. Harriet worked here for years, knows the place inside out and shares so many of the values behind what we’re trying to build.

And Pete Cattran from the @glasbren family will be joining me in the kitchen. Pete and I actually worked together at Green Man Festival during my @ethicalchef street food days, before The Warren even existed.

It feels really good to be bringing trusted, familiar people back together for this next chapter.

🌱 We had another brilliant Volunteer Thursday, with more people giving their time to help us tackle the never-ending list of jobs involved in bringing this building back to life.

🔥 I’ll also be at @fallow.wales in the Towy Valley Sunday, followed the next week by Glasbren’s Harvest Festival, where I’ll be cooking with the @ceginhedyn crew over an open fire for our Feast from the Flames.

Have a great weekend.

Deri

#Carmarthen taken in The Warren by @ethicalchef

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2 months ago

For those of you who’ve been following my journey since I put The Warren into hibernation, this one’s for you 💚

After a lot of thinking, reflecting and talking, I’ve come up with a plan that I feel genuinely confident and excited about. It’s something I really believe in, and I’m ready to go all in.

Please go and take a look. I can’t wait to hear what you think, read your comments and hopefully see you get as excited as I am about the potential return of The Warren! 🌱

#carmarthen #thewarren taken in Carmarthen by @ethicalchef

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2 months ago

This is what we mean when we say we want The Warren to be more than a restaurant.

Yesterday, almost a year to the day since we closed our doors, this old building was absolutely full of life again.

Together with Sophie from @ein_cegin and Amie from @aberystwyth.university we hosted a Community Inspiration Day, bringing together people doing brilliant things around community meals, growing, local food and food resilience across West Wales.

And it felt like exactly what this building should be doing when we’re not open as a restaurant.

We’re now open to the public Friday and Saturday evenings and for Sunday lunch. But that leaves a lot of hours when we’ve got a kitchen, tables, coffee machine, meeting space and a building right in the middle of Carmarthen sitting here.

We don’t want it sitting empty.

We want community meals. Workshops. Talks. Training. Volunteer days. Cookery sessions. Supper clubs. Skill sharing. Growers and producers. Collaborations. And people with good ideas that maybe don’t have a home yet.

Yesterday was a pretty lovely example of what that can look like.

Someone described all these different community projects as pebbles being dropped into water. Each creates its own ripple, but eventually those ripples start meeting.

We’d quite like The Warren to be one of the places where those ripples meet.

Tag someone we should be talking to. Or message us if you’ve got something you’d like to explore together.

We’re still working out what this next version of The Warren looks like.

Maybe you can help us work it out.

The restaurant might only be open three days a week. The building doesn’t have to be.

#carmarthen by @ethicalchef

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a month ago

Yesterday I sat around a table in Carmarthen with some incredible people talking about food, poverty, farming, education and community.

And I came away feeling pretty emotional about it.

I told the story of the moment that eventually led to Cegin Hedyn. After Covid, I bumped into a friend who apologised for not coming to The Warren anymore.

“I just can’t afford it anymore.”

That really hit me.

Because I never opened The Warren believing that good, local, organic food should only be available to people who can afford it.

So I started asking: how do we do this differently?

That question eventually became Cegin Hedyn.

The original idea was that I’d turn up and cook a curry. If nobody helped, I knew I could probably feed 50 people myself.

But there was never a day when nobody helped.

One person came. Then another. And eventually a tiny idea became this huge community of people cooking, growing, volunteering, eating and looking after each other.

Yesterday, Jen from Cegin y Bobl talked about getting children properly cooking and understanding where their food comes from.

Mary Sherwood talked powerfully about poverty, dignity and why telling someone to simply “eat better” ignores the reality of living on a low income.

And Owen from LocalMotion pointed out something I haven’t stopped thinking about:

Right there in the word agriculture is culture.

Food IS culture.

It’s our farms, children, high streets, community centres, allotments, what we grow, what we cook and who we sit beside to eat it.

And Carmarthen has SO MUCH of this already happening.

Which brings me back to reopening The Warren.

I don’t just want to reopen a restaurant.

Yes, I want bloody delicious food, brilliant local produce, great wine and the place buzzing again.

But I also want us to keep asking:

What can a restaurant give back to the place it belongs to?

I don’t know the full answer yet.

But Cegin Hedyn taught me that you don’t always need to know what the finished thing looks like.

Sometimes you just need to plant the seed and trust your community to help you grow it. 🌱

I bloody love this town.

And I’m incredibly excited about what we could build here together.

#carmarthen taken in Carmarthen by @ethicalchef

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12

a month ago

Had a brilliant conversation with Lisa Fern at the Fallow event about food, resilience, community, and what it actually takes to keep values-led food businesses going.

Between us, there are a lot of years of cooking, teaching, growing, adapting, making mistakes, starting again and trying to work out how food can stay both good and accessible.

We talked about the reality behind hospitality, rising costs, fragile food systems, supporting local growers, teaching children to cook, perennial vegetables, community kitchens and the role that trust plays in projects like Cegin Hedyn.

One thing kept coming back:

Food resilience is not just about growing more food.

It is about skills.
It is about relationships.
It is about local producers.
It is about communities knowing and supporting one another.
And sometimes it is about trying something before you know whether it is going to work.

That is very much where I am with The Warren right now too.

This next chapter is an experiment in whether a place built around local, seasonal food can become something held more widely by the community around it.

A lot to figure out. But plenty worth fighting for.

Thanks Lisa for sharing the stage, the stories and the waffle. taken in Nantgaredig, Carmarthenshire, United Kingdom by @ethicalchef

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2 months ago

👨‍🍳 THREE VOICES. ONE IMPORTANT QUESTION.

Episode Two of my advice for young cooks series is here! 🎬

This time, Deri Reed @ethicalchef Rhian Cadwaladr @casa_cadwaladr and Nerys Howell @nerys_howell answer:

“What’s one piece of advice you would give to a child who wants to start cooking—or already loves being in the kitchen?”

A huge thank you to all three for sharing their experience, encouragement and brilliant advice with the next generation of young cooks. ❤️🍳

Who will feature in Episode Three? Stay tuned… 👀

#CeginMrHenry #YoungCooks #FoodEducation #CookingSkills #NextGeneration by @ethicalchef

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2 months ago

Ten years ago, we were building The Warren.

Back then, it was an unfinished space, a big idea and a belief that Carmarthen deserved something special.

But The Warren was never built by us alone.

It was built by the staff who gave it everything.
 By the growers and suppliers who believed in what we were doing.
 By everyone who backed us, encouraged us and walked through our doors.

Since then, these walls have held thousands of meals, parties, weddings, celebrations, difficult days and unforgettable nights.

Now The Warren is ready for its next chapter and we’re asking Carmarthen to help us build it again.

Swipe through a little of our history, then follow the link in our bio to discover what comes next and how you can be part of it.

Were you part of The Warren’s story?

Tell us your favourite memory below and share this with someone who was there.

Deri x

#carmarthen taken in The Warren by @ethicalchef

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2 months ago

Last night we had the privilege of cooking for the incredible volunteers from Achub y Tywi at Cegin Hedyn. 💚

It couldn’t have come at a more important time.

Like so many of you, we’ve been shocked by the recent drone footage revealing the condition of parts of the River Tywi. It’s difficult to watch, but it also reminds us how important it is to support the people working tirelessly to protect it.

Achub y Tywi is powered by local volunteers and they’re looking for more people to get involved, particularly with water quality testing across the Tywi catchment. You don’t need to be a scientist. Just someone who cares about our rivers and wants to help make a difference.

If you’ve been wondering what you can do after seeing the recent footage, this is a great place to start. Head over to their Facebook page, get in touch, and see how you can help.

A huge thank you to everyone in the group for everything you’re doing. It was an honour to cook for you all.

Big love,

Deri & the Cegin Hedyn team 🌱💚

#AchubYTywi #SaveOurRivers #CitizenScience #CommunityAction #Carmarthen taken in Cegin Hedyn CIC by @ethicalchef

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3 months ago

Nearly 200 people came through the doors last night for The People’s Emergency Briefing and our little Cegin Hedyn team somehow decided the best way to cater for it was with freshly picked herbal tea and savoury flapjacks with no sugar in them. 😂

The herbs came straight from one of our volunteer’s gardens just before service and the kitchen smelled absolutely incredible. Meanwhile I was cycling through Carmarthen carrying giant bags of herbs and catering kit like some sort of exhausted medieval tea merchant.

We still served coffee and “boring tea” (formerly known as normal tea), but it was genuinely funny watching people become unexpectedly emotional over caffeine-free herbal tea and savoury flapjacks.

Turns out when you feed people real ingredients, made with care, they notice.

But honestly, underneath the humour, the evening felt really important. The film carried some powerful messages about the climate and ecological crisis, but what stayed with me most was seeing so many people gathering together, listening, caring and wanting to take action.

In a world that can feel increasingly disconnected, there was something very moving about that.

Very proud of our little town. ❤️ #carmarthen taken in Carmarthen by @ethicalchef

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5 months ago

Our health starts beneath our feet 🌱

Healthy soil grows healthier food. Healthier food fuels healthier people. Yet most of us are now more disconnected from the soil than ever before.

One of the simplest and most powerful things we can do is return goodness back to the land naturally, building resilience into our food systems from the ground up.

Compost isn’t waste. It’s future food, future health and future fertility.

The more time I spend growing food, the more I believe that caring for the soil is caring for ourselves too.

Look after your soil, folks. It really does look after us in return.

Give this post some ❤️ if you agree and let me know in the comments if you grow, compost or dream of doing more of it someday.

Big love,
Deri x taken in Carmarthen by @ethicalchef

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5 months ago

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Food should nourish communities, not just corporate profits!

Time to get your votes in for the change you want to see!

#Wales #plaidcymru #cymru taken in Carmarthen by @ethicalchef

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5 months ago