The Jackdaw in Conwy Wins AA Wine Award of the Year for Wales
Nick Rudge opened The Jackdaw above an old cinema on Conwy's High Street in 2021, trained for seven years at The Fat Duck, and has spent five years building a wine list that just beat every other restaurant in Wales to a national award.
That feels worth saying plainly before anything else.
On September 21, 2026, at the 29th annual AA Hospitality Awards held at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London, The Jackdaw took the AA Wine Award of the Year for Wales. Nearly 1,000 guests were at the black-tie ceremony, hosted by Fleur East. The England winner was etch. by Steven Edwards in Brighton, and Knockinaam Lodge in Portpatrick won for Scotland.
Conwy is a medieval walled town in north Wales. The Jackdaw sits on the first floor above what used to be the Palace Cinema. The name itself is a local joke: a jackdaw is what people born inside the town walls are called. Nick Rudge is, by all accounts, exactly the kind of person who would name his restaurant that.
What the Award Actually Means
The AA Hospitality Awards are not handed out for having a long wine list or stocking bottles with high Parker scores. Simon Numphud, Managing Director of AA Hotel and Hospitality Services, described the awards as existing to "recognise the passion, dedication and high standards that go into delivering exceptional hospitality." A wine award at this level is a judgement on the whole relationship between the kitchen and the cellar, and on how that gets communicated to the person sitting at the table.
Rudge's focus is on Welsh wine and local producers. He said the award was "a wonderful recognition of what we have been building at The Jackdaw over the past five years," and mentioned working with local vineyards specifically. Welsh wine is still a small industry, but it is a real one, and committing to it on a fine-dining wine list, rather than treating it as a curiosity beside the Burgundy section, is a specific choice.
It is also, I think, the more interesting choice. A restaurant in north Wales that actually champions what is growing in north Wales is doing something different from a place that happens to be located there.
Nick Rudge's Background
Before Conwy, Rudge spent seven years working with Heston Blumenthal at The Fat Duck, which holds three Michelin stars. He then appeared on Great British Menu on BBC2 in 2024. The move to open a restaurant in a Welsh market town rather than a London postcode is the kind of decision that tends to get called brave in newspaper profiles, which is usually a polite way of saying it was a risk.
Five years in, with a national wine award now added to the name above the old cinema, it looks like it paid off.
The Fifth Anniversary Menu
To mark five years, The Jackdaw is doing something slightly unusual. From October 6 to October 31, 2026, the restaurant is stepping away from its regular tasting menu format and offering a special a la carte menu instead.
If you have been curious about The Jackdaw but the tasting menu commitment put you off, this is probably your window. A la carte means you can show up with less of a plan, order what appeals, and get a sense of what Rudge is doing without the full ceremony of a set progression.
Why This Matters Beyond Wales
The honest answer to "why should someone in Birmingham or Bristol care about a wine award in Conwy" is: because it tells you something about where good wine lists are being built right now.
The assumption that you have to be in London, or at minimum in a major English city, to find serious, thoughtfully considered wine is outdated. The Jackdaw winning this award is evidence for that, not rhetoric. A restaurant above an old cinema in a walled medieval town, championing Welsh producers, beat the entire country it sits in.
That is not a small thing.
The places doing the most considered work with wine are not always the ones with the biggest profiles. They are run by people like Rudge who made a deliberate decision about where to set up and what to stand for, and then built a team and a list around that. If you are the kind of person who wants to find those places, the search is worth doing beyond your own postcode.
What to Take from This
If you are planning a trip to north Wales, The Jackdaw is on Conwy's High Street, first floor, above the old Palace Cinema. The a la carte anniversary menu runs through October 31, 2026, which gives you a specific reason to go this month rather than filing it under "sometime."
If you can't get there, the thing worth taking away is simpler: when a restaurant wins a major national wine award by building its list around local Welsh producers and a clear point of view, it suggests that the most interesting wine experiences in the UK right now are not necessarily the loudest ones.
Rudge put it directly: "We are passionate about working with local producers and showcasing the incredible quality of Welsh wine alongside the exceptional ingredients we have on our doorstep."
That's the brief. Everything else is just execution.