By James Burns
Ever woke up after a regretful night out, with an uneasy feeling in the stomach after an equally regretful drunken foo`d selection? Then perhaps you frequented one of the many food establishments in Cathays, that do not correctly display their unfavourable food hygiene rating.
It is a legal requirement in Wales to register with the Food Standards Agency, and that the business must display their food hygiene rating at or near the entrance that customers used. Unlike in neighbouring England, presenting your hygiene rating, good or bad, is a legal necessity throughout Wales.
The Food Standards Agency gives a hygiene rating to businesses’ selling food a rating between zero and five. Since becoming a legality in Wales in 2013, businesses with a rating of five have increased by 24%. Yet a glance at the Food Standards Agency website reveals an interesting reality to the hygienic practices at play in many of our beloved Cathays food spots.
A tour of central Cathays takes us to Salisbury Road, a street lined with popular small restaurants and takeouts alike, is where this concerning problem becomes evident. Walk up and down Salisbury Road and you will see restaurants popular with students donning the familiar green sticker with their hygiene rating clearly on their entrance.
A notable food spot on Salisbury Road, and popular with students looking for a quick bite or some drunken indulgence, is Chicken Delight, which boasts a hygiene rating of just one. Yet, if you find yourself stumbling into the fried chicken restaurant, the required green sticker is absent from immediate view .
Even with an investigative eye, locating a food hygiene rating at Chicken Delight is an uncomfortably difficult , despite the Food Standards agency requiring that ‘stickers must be displayed where they can be easily read by customers before they enter the establishment when it is open for businesses’.
The Food Standards Agency states that a food hygiene of 1 means that major improvement is necessary. Ratings are provided by a local authority food safety officer and is determined by a combination of how food is hygienically handled, the physical condition of the business, and how the management maintains keeping food safe including processes and training.
The Food Standards Agency also states that when eating at businesses with a rating of 3 or above, customers can be confident that the food they are eating is safe and prepared in the correct manner.
However, the problem arises when considering those with ratings below 3, where customers are twice as likely to get ill when eating at an establishment.
The unofficial main street of Cathays, Salisbury Road, also possesses a few other restaurants with poor ratings. The Curry Hut and Volcano Express hold a rating of two, as well as one of the most notable pubs in Cathays, Foundry Social, which also possess a rating of two.
Officially, the boundaries of Cathays extend into the city centre, and Sainsbury’s on Queen Street boasts a shocking rating of zero. The supermarket even had to close for a period to address urgent hygienic issues. Peter Cole, a lead environmental health officer in food safety told the BBC that a zero rating reflects failures across the board.
“To get a zero, there would be things like cross-contamination between raw meat and ready-to-eat products, pest infestations, it really is the worst level of compliance, and they are very few and far between,” he said.
In a similar story to that of Chicken Delight, I found myself caught up in the hygiene consideration naturally, as I ate in The Food Lab on Chippy Lane, confused by the lack of a hygiene rating on that notable green sticker, only to later find out it possessed a lacklustre rating of two.
The Cardiff Pizza Company on Crwys Road, a one, Rascal Burrito and NAMESTE along the same street also a one. Even the Secret Garden Café in Bute Park can boast just a rating of one in their recent hygiene inspections.
Perhaps it is those who choose not to present their hygiene ratings where customers feel most cheated. A fixed penalty of £200 is put in place for those who do not display the green sticker, which can be reduced to £150, if paid within 14 days. A continued failure to comply with the penalty can lead to prosecution in a Magistrates Court.
In a 2017 case at Cardiff Magistrates Court, a business with a rating of two was fined £5000 for failure to display the rating sticker, with the restaurant owner proclaiming he was “trying to protect his business”.
Between 2023 and 2025 an ITV investigation showed that twenty-three premises in the Welsh capital, as well as 150 restaurants and takeaways across Wales failed to display their rating correctly.
Food hygiene ratings give students confidence to choose where they eat, but these moral and legal rights appear to be continuously damaged across Cathays and throughout Cardiff, when the sticker does not match reality, or is absent altogether