29th May 2026
Hopping from London City airport to Guernsey, Izzy Schaw Miller sits fireside with Nathan Davies, who has put Guernsey restaurants on the Michelin map. An experience at Vraic (pronounced “Vrack”) is a performance like no other – waiters waltz between tables to pulsating Bicep beats, serving some of the most intensely salty-sweet dishes we’ve tried. Here, he tells SPHERE why Guernsey, why seaweed and how some restaurants today are missing a human trick.
There was loads that brought us here actually. The biggest reasons were both the ingredients and the lifestyle for my family. But also, there was a gap, because there was nobody else doing anything quite like this, meaning we’re not competing against anybody directly.
I also wanted to know whether we can do it: can we bring what we were doing before and transplant it somewhere that doesn't have anything like this?
That it's a vegetable first and foremost. So if you treat it like a vegetable, which is what we do here in the restaurant, it's the most sustainable food source on the planet.
It's incredibly good for you. It's incredibly tasty. It's super diverse in textures, flavours and all of the other good bits. So it can be used in so many ways across all different cultures all over the world. We don’t pen ourselves to just say, Asian or European cuisine, we try and take the best from everywhere and then add it in.
I think the hardest one for us to get right was probably the most simple one for you to eat, which is the seaweed broth. When we first put that together, that took quite a lot of research and experimenting and getting the balance correct.
I wanted to do something early on in the menu that was going to be challenging, to be able to get everybody to really dive into seaweed and to eat lots of different varieties in a single dish. And it's one of our favourite.
The first thing we want them to feel is relaxed. The welcome here is super important, especially as often people have travelled a long way to get here. If guests are here on holiday or if they're here from the island, we just want them to check out a bit for a couple of hours. It's not just about the food, it's not just about the service, it's not just about the location, but in fact, it's all three of them together, and we're lucky that we just do a set menu so we're able to curate the whole experience.
We also want guests to enjoy the three different areas of the restaurant. Outside, there's no music, there’s the fire pits. Upstairs, there's a sun terrace with beautiful views. And then inside, we're quite playful, quite heavy music, really big atmosphere. So we just want people to enjoy the experience.
I think sometimes restaurants forget they're cooking for people. Sometimes a restaurant has technically outstanding chefs, and as restaurants operate to the highest level, but at the end of the day, it's about the people that are eating the food. So the human element in some restaurants feels a little bit lost. Not taking anything away from any other work, it just could be a bit more personable.
Biggest challenges were probably logistics. Actually getting everything to the island was just a whole new challenge entirely. We were very, very lucky with the amazing staff we brought with us from the last restaurant.
But here you are on an island, it won’t appeal to everybody. There's a work life balance that needs to be struck, and there is a certain person that wants to come and live on an island, to put their whole heart into a restaurant. Sometimes you just have to take the island mentality and kind of allow things to happen a little bit more naturally.
It'll be okay. Probably at times when things weren't quite panning out, or in the early stage of career you’re kind of killing yourself to be that bit better, do that bit more. But actually, it ends here at the moment, which is an ace little place.
To be honest, I would have loved a green star because we are very conscious of our surroundings and how we source our ingredients.
I'm sure it's not the end of that path entirely for the Michelin guide but I think something like that is incredibly challenging to police, as it's hard to have a complete insight into how people are sourcing things and what they're doing. But I think that being conscious on what we're doing as restaurants is important, so I hope it continues in a different light.
There’s a few that I really, really love. We've got a fairly new lobster dish which comes in a few different parts, utilising the whole of the lobster. It’s fun and playful as well as being dead tasty. That’s very much the same as the turbot, which we cook Basque style and then serve it with a Guernsey burnt butter sauce. That’s the reason we serve everybody at the same time, so we can cook those.
