Restaurant review: The Food Depot Gourmet Street Kitchen, Cork
It is elemental eating.
There are no reservations or bookings, no dolling-up dramas or dithering over dates, no last minute personal credit evaluations or taxing transport arrangements.
There is no pining for the perfect seat from perfidious exile a few degrees north of the lavatory.
There is no sweating over the lottery of menu choice.
Actually, hunger may not even be a consideration until that very moment when sights, sounds, smells of some streetside delicacy instantaneously engulf senses and demand immediate gratification.
One of the globally-recognised symbols of New York, the hot dog stand, has been joined in recent times by an explosion of food trucks and the city’s municipal authorities have even instituted ‘Green Carts’, offering fresh fruit and vegetables in areas where it is not readily available.
In most European cities, street food is no recent fad but rather longstanding tradition.
In Asia, it is part of everyday life, a dining democracy available to all, some simple snack refined through daily repetition to a state of sublime perfection; in Hong Kong, certain street food vendors are so highly rated they have been added to the Michelin Guide.
In Ireland, on the other hand, ‘street food’, has long equated to something a body might contract.
Yes, ‘contract’, as in an illness.
It is invariably the result of a rash decision, picked up from the ‘chip van’ to soak up pre-match pints, perhaps en route to a Munster final or a Lansdowne Road international: lukewarm, limp atrocities masquerading as chips; burgers made from the meat of creatures hitherto undreamt of and the regret can linger long after the bowel has healed.
Certainly, there are excellent instant dining options to be found at the farmers’ markets but it is not ‘street food’, per se, sold from a mobile unit at the side of a public road.
Irish municipal authorities don’t understand the concept and benefits while the fixed-premises, ‘bricks-and-mortar’ hospitality industry (wrongly) believes it to be unfair competition.
This year, however, certain eyebrows elevated when the McKennas’ Guides Top 100 Restaurants in Ireland (disclosure: I am an Associate Editor) included two food trucks in their 2016 Top 100 Restaurants in Ireland.
One was The Food Depot, a purpose-built trailer owned and operated by former Irish Masterchef winner Diana Dodog and her husband Mike Donovan.
Sundays sees The Food Depot in Courtmacsherry, on the shoreline side of the long, lazy road separating the beautiful little West Cork village from the sea.
A substantial queue allows plenty of time to peruse the menu, five dishes in all.
It is nearly April’s end but a bracing northerly and a mean hunger spurs a shivering retreat back into the car.
Order ready, we resume our beachside bench station to evaluate the haul. Well, I do.
No 2 Son holds no truck with dalliance and lays into a triple meat chilli bowl of Gubbeen chorizo, brisket and mince from O’Neill’s, in Clonakilty, a sweet, sumptuous heat that soon has him shedding layers.
He also manages to do some damage to the West Cork Banh-Mi, a Vietnamese-style dish, soft baguette sandwiching pork belly, crunchy fresh and pickled vegetables, all anointed in the high, sweet tang of Hoisin sauce.
He then waylays a salad box with empanadas before we beat him off with a stick.
You can’t blame him for they are delicious little parcels of crisp pastry housing sweet roasted vegetables and Macroom Buffalo feta and the salad boxes are a cornucopia of tastes and textures: fluffy pearl barley, pink pickled onions, red cabbage slaw, perky tomato salsa; all fresh, wholesome and the flavours exquisitely calibrated.
I’d have preferred local prawns in the Grilled Tiger Prawn Salad Box but economics are obviously the consideration for all dishes are keenly priced.
Still, with excellent local sourcing evident in all other dishes, I’d have no quibble with a small hike in the price or instead, any of a myriad of superb local seafoods as a substitute.
(By the way, reservations do not extend to the commendable execution of the dish.)
We finish with chocolate brownies, carrot cake and excellent coffees and, delightfully sated, sit back to marvel at the ‘décor’ in one of the most beautiful ‘restaurants’ to be found on this island.
Thursday and Friday 8.30am-2pm, West Cork Technology Park, Clonakilty. Sunday 1pm-4pm, Courtmacsherry Beach
€51 The Verdict
8/10
8/10
9/10
9/10
‘Wholesome, fresh produce, cooked with flair and imagination and all served up in one of the prettiest ‘restaurants’ in the land’.
The Food Depot Gourmet Street Kitchen, Courtmacsherry, Co Cork www.facebook.com/thefooddepot
