An award-winning chef will be serving up a three-course dinner to hundreds of lucky locals who will pay just £10 a head.

This Christmas holiday JT Abergwaun Hotel will hold its third community Christmas lunch, following a successful event in Fishguard Town Hall last year.

Last year the Community and OAP lunch ran for just one day. Such was the success of the event that chef Dan Thomas-Jones and wife Lois have decided to extend the event over two days, planning to feed around 600 diners over four sittings on December 22 and 23.

Dan said he was inspired to run the event as a way of giving something back to the community.

“We had lot of older people who would come in on Christmas Day to our old restaurant, they would dine on their own,” he said. “We wanted to do something at a more affordable cost for them.”

(Image: JT Abergwaun) The event is open to everyone in the community who would benefit from it. As well as pensioners Dan and Lois want families who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to go out together for a Christmas lunch to come along too.

“Everyone is welcome,” said Dan. “We want to give back to the community and do something to bring people together.

“We want young families to come. We want it to be a community together lunch.”

Lunch will be prepared at the award-winning JT Abergwaun restaurant before being finished and displayed in the town hall. It will be a three-course affair with soup or a salad to start, a turkey and vegetarian main course option and an orange cake or panettone trifle to finish off.

(Image: JT Abergwaun) Dan is hoping to arrange some musical entertainment as well as a visit from Father Christmas.

There will also be a fully licensed bar and a raffle with wonderful prizes that will benefit Fishguard’s community theatre, Theatr Gwaun, which is currently trying to plug a £25,000 funding gap.

For most of us cooking Christmas dinner for six people is a task, but Dan says he enjoys the logistical challenge of catering for 600 diners.

“That’s what I love about it. The maths job, working out how many fridges we need, how many trays.”

Dan also says that the event will also create around 1,000 hours of paid work for his team at a time of year when the wages will most certainly come in handy.

“It’s a great time for people to make some extra money that helps before Christmas,” he said.” It’s also a good to train my staff for events. We do lots of events in the summer but in winter it is minimal.”

There are around 400 tickets left for the community Christmas lunch. To get yours, pop int JT Abergwaun Hotel before December 22.