"If a restaurant, has built its reputation on using premium produce, especially from local food producers, they can’t use an inferior substitute."

"If it has rained through June and July, August bears promise of redemption; if June and July have honoured their seasonal solar contract, and are then followed by a fine August, then it is gloriously excessive — after all, who ever spurned sunshine?"

"As Cork on a Fork, a celebration of the food and food culture of Cork City and its surrounding region, grows ever stronger, many of the producers being celebrated are facing a multiplicity of challenges, homegrown and “imported”, that threaten the very viability of the sector itself."

The new executive head chef will relocate from Singapore

'There is one question that gauges the real viability of Irish hospitality like no other: as a waiter/server, will I qualify for a mortgage? The answer is almost inevitably, no'

"A good ice cream, with the ideal combination of fats, sugars and flavouring, is a singular and unique eating experience, all down to the alchemy triggered by temperature, as the coldness of ‘ice’ encounters the ‘cream’."

"GIY’s Grow at School programme — establishing school gardens, providing resources and linking garden activities to the curriculum — is a quite brilliant initiative, now flourishing in 700 Irish primary schools, reaching 100,000 children."

It was a life-changing experience

"The vaulting epicurean ambition afoot in Mara is very apparent. It is also remarkable. To paraphrase Churchill, never has so much been cooked by so few for so many."

"Our grandparents were so familiar with the inside of a butcher’s shop — or multiple butchers’ shops, when ‘shopping around’ was de rigueur — they could probably reassemble an entire carcass from the constituent cuts laid out at the counter, most of us now buy our meat in the supermarket; the supermarkets, in turn, mostly buy it in already shrink-wrapped from the processor."