Is Wales on the brink of a blueprint good food movement? Tucked down a backstreet in central Cardiff, staff at Bacareto are serving delicious house wine alongside fresh, seasonal cicchetti (Italian for tapas). There’s seaweed and chickpea tapenade, pumpkin topped with parmesan, smooshed celeriac and cod with juicy caper berries, all served on fresh bread and a very far cry from the sports bar burgers you tend to associate with Cardiff’s food scene. That’s not to say the city isn’t set up for sport – and it’s certainly front of mind as the national football team make their way home from their first World Cup in over 60 years. But they aren’t the only ones making waves. Quietly, but steadily, there is a food and farming revolution underway across the country. People still talk of Jay Rayner’s 2016 visit to the city where he claimed to have found nowhere good to eat in the centre, but things are changing (and even Rayner has since retracted). Aside from Bacareto – a Community Interest Company that also owns a skatepark and café in a deprived area of the city – there’s a growing list of other independents, including Nighthawks, serving late night sourdough cheese toasties and natural wine, sustainable and circular economy restaurant Kindle and Waterloo Tea and Wyndham Cafeteria cafes, buying from local suppliers and paying the Living Wage. But what’s happening in food in Cardiff isn’t a coincidence, or the result of just one or two well-minded business owners. It’s a result of long-term funding and hard work by a small team working at Food Sense Wales and the Sustainable Food Places scheme, Food Cardiff, where pioneering food partnerships have helped combine hyper-local interest in food with national lobbying.