Fire and Passion: The Rise of Cai Ap Bryn - Best Game Influencer 2024

Each year the great and the good of the shooting world and beyond gather for a glittering ceremony, the Eat Game Awards.

This year the ceremony took place aboard the Dixie Queen, a replica paddle steamer that wouldn’t look out of place on the Mississippi rather than the Thames. A fitting place, then, for Cai Ap Bryn, aka Game and Flames, to accept his award as ‘Best Influencer’, given his self-confessed passion for country music and Americana. 

We caught up with Cai, whose face will be well-known to viewers of Fieldsports Channel, where his deer management outings are capped off with a cooking masterclass - to talk about his life in fieldsports and how great food can be a gateway into the wider world of game.

Cai himself is a case in point. He explains that he’s not from a ‘fieldsports family’, having grown up in North Wales, where his father worked in the nuclear industry. “When I was younger I never went rabbit shooting or deer stalking or anything else like that, my family wasn't that way inclined,” he says, adding: “but what me and my brother did love was trout fishing, just with a bobble float and worms from the garden.” 

However, like many of us who enjoy the process of preparing and eating our game as much as acquiring it in the first place, Cai’s instinct, even at that young age, was that he had a duty towards his quarry, no matter how small, saying: “I had this fascination about eating what I caught so I would kind of insist my grandmother or my mum or dad to cook these little little trout. I had this thing inside me that I felt like if I was gonna take something from the wild.”

In 1991 the Trawsfynnydd nuclear power station where Cai’s father worked closed. “A lot of people got laid off,” Cai explains. “A lot of the Welsh workers and their families moved to other places around the UK - Bradwell in Essex, Sizewell in Suffolk, Hinkley… but we went to Dungeness.”

Initially, Dungeness was a disappointment (“I thought it was in Scotland! Turns out it wasn’t!”) , but he soon found that the area’s sea fishing opportunities were a compensation for the lack of mountains. The move also opened up some other opportunities for Cai:

Working in restaurants gave Cai his first taste of the catering industry, as well as a grounding in cooking meat on live fire.

Despite this early start in the foody world, Cai followed his Dad into the nuclear industry, but the lure of kitchen was too strong to ignore, so he used his weekends to scratch that itch.

“I started a business called Wild Food Catering Company with a friend called Adam so we went to the with Ragley Hall Game Fair and we saw the food that was on display at the time: hardly any game was being served out of the food trucks so we decided to do venison and wild boar burgers,” he recalls. “We did that for about seven years and had great fun doing it, made some great friends.”

The connections and experience gained at these events led to Cai’s first forays into media, first with the Team Wild YouTube channel and latterly with Fieldsports Channel, where he is still a regular to this day.

After a six month hiatus the kitchen was still singing her siren song, and Cai decided that he needed to feel that rush again, but this time with a focus on sharing his skills and knowledge. “I missed the buzz of the catering and it was still in me so I started teaching school children and anyone else really, just little woodland workshops: skinning butchering, cooking game, cooking on fire…

It was from these shoots that Cai’s new company, Game and Flames would eventually flower. “I'd done some weddings for friends with my previous company and I decided to go back into weddings but trying to do them on fire, and do corporate events, and very quickly that really took off. There was a gap in the market for it.”

For Cai, the appeal of wild meats cooked over flame is deep-seated:

Cai was, he says, living a dream, shooting and processing his own game and putting it on his menus. “That was kind of like my USP and it still is my USP, really.  And I've been doing that now since 2016 and it's growing and growing.”

Although his award at the Eat Game Awards was in the ‘Influencer’ category, Cai reckons that it is his wedding and event catering that has the greatest impact on the wider public:

Despite employing arguably the most primal of cooking techniques - live fire - Cai attributes much of his success to his modern approach to cooking game, making it more approachable.

“Our flagship main course at the weddings is venison,” he explains. “A lot of people still think game or venison is elitist, that it is really strong and gamey. But a lot of recipes for game, especially the old recipes are, like, add juniper, add red wine, add all these overpowering ingredients into it and you know change the flavour profile of it. Well you can make some beautiful venison sausages with some really basic seasoning which are incredible.”

When Cai speaks about cooking with game he does so with the sort of passion that is infectious: this is not someone who is paying lip service to the idea of field-to-fork eating, but someone who lives and breathes it. It is hardly surprising, then, that he has become an accidental evangelist for wild food, using both his online and IRL activities to preach the gospel of game.

“It is so special to win the Best Influencer award,” he says. “I never really set out to be an ‘influencer’, but I’m passionate about sharing the pleasures of game with as wide an audience as possible, so to have that hard work recognised is very rewarding. Massive thanks to everyone who voted for me and the judging panel and to GunsOnPegs for sponsoring the category, too!”

Discover the winners for all of the categories in the 2024 Eat Game Awards