‘It’s a bit mad isn’t it!’ laughs chef Ellis Barrie when we catch up to talk about the Marram Grass. ‘A bit mad’ is somewhat of an understatement, I think. Anyone who starts their own restaurant has to be a bit mad. Ellis and brother Liam took over the cafe at the Anglesey campsite when they were nineteen and twenty-one respectively, and have built it from an unassuming breakfast shed into a fully-fledged, nationally-acclaimed restaurant.
If that’s what Ellis calls ‘a bit mad’, I’m intrigued to think what he might think of as being ‘risky’. But it seems in his affable nature to slightly lessen the scope of his achievements in Anglesey. Born and raised in Liverpool, Ellis has that typical Scouse joviality in spades – he regularly punctuates a story with a joke, and an infectious chuckle that only the most stone-hearted of humans could not find amusing.
Most young lads growing up in Liverpool dream of a life in music or kicking a ball in a red or blue shirt, but so far as Ellis is concerned he always wanted to be a cook. ‘My grandad was a cook in the Territorial Army,’ he explains, ‘and my dad’s dad became a bit of a dab hand in the kitchen in his retirement. All the male influences in the family were cooks. My mum wasn’t a bad cook either to be fair,’ he adds, ‘but if I hadn’t started cooking we’d all still be eating potato smileys and chicken Kievs!’