The small Welsh restaurant hardly anyone has heard of with an amazing story and food that has Jay Rayner raving

Renowned food critic Jay Rayner is urging people to try out a very special Aberystwyth restaurant. His latest review focuses on Arabic Flavour, set up by a Syrian war refugee who arrived in Wales five years ago.

When Ghofran Hamza first arrived she was used to going without food and relying on UN food parcels. By March 2020 she planned to open Aberystwyth's first Arabic restaurant, but she'd barely had time to switch on the oven before the pandemic hit.

When she did eventually open Arabic Flavour, a year later, there were queues down the street to get through the doors. Now, Jay Rayner is urging people "really, do go".

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He does warn, however, that because Ghofran does all the cooking herself, you may have to wait for your food but does say it is worth it.

Ghofran grew up in north-east Syria on the Turkish border, living with her mum, dad and three younger siblings. It was a "poor lifestyle" in a remote village where her dad worked as a greengrocer. As war crept ever closer, the fear set in. The family fled to into Lebanon in 2012, where her mum worked cooking for wealthy Lebanese families and found a job in a catering company, learning skills that would one day help start a business in a new life on another continent.

The UN offered the family a place on the international refugee resettlement programme, and they were sent to Wales.

In an interview with WalesOnline in 2022 she said: "I didn't know what even was the UK. I went on Google to check what is England. I recognised London, because London is in everything we watched growing up."

Ghofran's Arabic Flavours was born of a dream that first took hold when she partnered with some other Syrian women to create a pop-up kitchen in Aberystwyth called the Syrian Dinner Project. You can read more about that here.

When she opened the restaurant her food - drawing on Lebanese, Syrian and Turkish influences - proved an instant hit.

And it was with critic Rayner, who wrote: "It is cooking that traces a journey, from dish to dish, from one life to another. Hamza has lived an awful lot of that life for someone still only in her mid-20s. Dish names may be familiar. There is baba ganoush, tabbouleh and falafel. But that baba ganoush has a cave depth of smokiness and with it are folds of warm flatbread dusted with the sweetest and smokiest of paprikas."

He said there is something "deeply emotional and intense about this cooking", and concludes: "Hamza deserves an easier time of things, and her delightful cooking deserves a wider audience."

He added: "Much of the food here is rich with the sweet and sour of pomegranate molasses, and the jewel-like shine of pomegranate seeds. There are dappled pools of an olive oil so virgin it has never even had an indecent thought, alongside the airiness of fresh coriander and the caramel tones of long-cooked onions. Roasted cashews are applied liberally because they make everything look cheerier. Salads come sprinkled with the raunchy purple citrus of sumac, while her hot, springy falafel puffs wafts of newly roasted cumin seed at us."