The Pig and Swill, Victoria Park, Cardiff, pub review

It's a strange time to open a pub. Across the UK, boozers are shutting at a rate of almost two a day, around a dozen locals lost every single week, according to the British Beer and Pub Association, which counted 161 closures across England, Scotland and Wales in the first three months of 2026 alone. That's a 26% jump on last year, more than 2,400 jobs gone, and the country on course to lose another 500 pubs before the year is out. Zoom out further and the picture is starker still: Britain has lost more than 16,000 pubs since the year 2000, over a third of its entire stock. Every one of those closures is a small bereavement for a street, a village, a corner of a city. So when somebody not only opens a brand new pub but opens a good one, it deserves to be shouted about.

Enter the Pig and Swill, which arrived this spring on the corner of Victoria Park, an area of Cardiff that has been quietly crying out for somewhere decent to drink for years.

Why pubs matter

Pub was never really about the beer. It's the great British third place: not home, not work, but the room in between where you can turn up alone and leave having spoken to someone. Darts teams, wakes, first dates, quiz nights, retirement dos, the quiet pint that stops a bad week becoming a worse one. When a pub closes, a community loses its living room. That's why the closure statistics sting, and why a confident new opening feels like an act of optimism.

The Hiraeth connection

The Pig and Swill comes from Andy Aston and Lewis Dwyer, the pair behind Hiraeth, their Michelin Guide-listed restaurant just over the road. The name of the mothership is fitting. Hiraeth is that famously untranslatable Welsh word, a longing for a home you can't return to, or perhaps one that never quite existed. A deep ache for belonging.

You could argue the entire British pub crisis is a story of hiraeth: millions of people mourning locals that have been turned into flats and Tesco Expresses. What Aston and Dwyer have done, rather cleverly, is answer that longing with something real. Rather than compete with their restaurant, the pub complements it, a proper neighbourhood boozer with the food chops you'd expect from their kitchen pedigree. By all accounts the locals have responded in kind, with regulars racking up multiple visits within the first fortnight of opening.

The room and the drink

It's a modern pub rather than a mocked-up Victorian one: a smallish, walk-ins-only space of scrubbed wooden chairs, teal walls and chalkboard menus, where drinkers can still prop up the bar. Craft beer flows from eleven taps, and the wine board roams from Austrian Grüner Veltliner and Vinho Verde to Mendoza Malbec, Dell Vineyard in Monmouthshire. Nobody is left out.

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  Food at the Pig and Swill in Victoria park, Cardiff

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  Food at the Pig and Swill in Victoria park, Cardiff

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  Food at the Pig and Swill in Victoria park, Cardiff

The food: small plates, big ideas

The menu is where the Hiraeth DNA really shows. It's chalked up on the wall, a short board of nibbles and small plates, pitched well above standard pub grub without ever tipping into fussiness. You can start simple: Gordal olives, smoked almonds, or Pettigrew sourdough with tapenade and garlic aioli.

The plates read like summer itself. Parma ham with grilled peach and goats curd. A proper Caprese. Courgettes with hummus and romesco, and charred tenderstem with cucumber and teriyaki for the greens. There's crispy whitebait with tartare and lemon, cod brandade with croutons, and, in a lovely nod to the home nation, cockles with bacon and laverbread, a plate of pure Welsh coastline for £9. A confit duck leg with rocket and apricot had already sold out when I visited, which tells you everything about how quickly the neighbourhood has taken to the place.

And then there are the chips: garlic butter, parmesan and a malt vinegar crumb, all the chip-shop nostalgia of vinegar without the sog, for £7. Golden, properly crisp, built to soak up the beer. Some of the best I've eaten in Cardiff, and exactly the reassurance you need that, for all the elevated cooking, this is still, at heart, a pub.

Verdict

The Pig and Swill is proof that the pub isn't dying, it's evolving. In a country losing a dozen locals a week, Victoria Park has just gained one, and a cracking one at that. If hiraeth is a longing for home, consider this corner of Cardiff a little less homesick.

The Pig and Swill, 1 Victoria Park Road West, Cardiff CF5 1EZ. Walk-ins only.

Dog friendly

Covered garden