The Menu: Ballyhoura mushrooms and Achill Lamb among tasty offers
Lucy Deegan and Mark Cribben of Ballyhoura Mushrooms in the Shitake mushroom growhouse. Picture: Dan Linehan
Ballyhoura Mushrooms, one of The Menu’s most favourite of all food producers and suppliers of magnificent Irish mushrooms, both cultivated and foraged from the wild, have just launched a most wonderful offer of 1kg of exquisite wild chanterelles delivered to your door anywhere in the country with post and packaging all-inclusive in the price tag of just €30 — a bargain for such a bounty. These are the very same mushrooms they also supply to some of the finest restaurants in the land including Michelin-starred Liath and Aimsir. But what really seals the deal for The Menu is the acorn of native Irish Sessile Oak included in each pack with customers encouraged to plant and nurture said acorn for two years after which Ballyhoura Mushrooms will invite the growers in autumn 2022 to come and transplant their adopted tree in a new native Irish forest development project which they currently have in tow. This is a most timely and telling rejoinder indeed to Coillte, the State’s purported national forestry management body, as it blindly pursues an ecologically destructive monoculture policy of mass-planting non-native conifers.Â
The hospitality sector has been hit especially hard in Dublin and the return of restaurant closures was an especially sickening blow. Yet there is something impossibly heartening about the refusal to lie down: many once more re-orienting their business models to cope with the new restrictions. Were The Menu resident in Dublin there would be only one meal on his mind this week and that would be the takeaway offering from Dax. Here, one of Ireland’s finest chefs, Graham Neville, has engineered a delicious offering for drive-through contactless collection with last week’s menu including a starter of Thomas Salter’s pork belly, Castleruddery potato, pommery mustard; mains of roast salt marsh duck breast, beluga lentils and organic veg; or Dublin Bay Prawn ravioli and lemongrass ginger sauce; with fig and chocolate tart or panna cotta for dessert. The three-courser also includes homemade bread, potato puree, and petits fours. The Menu highly advises adding a bottle of wine from the superb list assembled by Olivier Meisonnave.Â
Bang Restaurant & Wine Bar have Bang@Home — a five-course takeaway menu available for collection and delivery (delivery available Wed/Thurs/Fri/Sat evening in Dublin area). Menus include breads from the very splendid Bread 41 with smoked whipped butter; Coppa and smoked almonds; stracciatella with golden beetroot, nasturtium, chicory & sourdough crouton; slow-cooked lamb with gnocchi; and a Cocoa Barry Chocolate marquise; closing with Menu favourite Shepherd’s Store cheese as a final course.
Up there on The Menu’s bucket list is an eventual pilgrimage to dine and stay over at Inis Meáin Restaurant and Suites, off the West Coast of Ireland. Its comparative and very splendid isolation is ever more appealing in these fraught times. And while all suites are currently fully booked, a little birdie tells The Menu that it may well be worth adding your name to the cancellation list over the coming weeks — especially if you’re in a position to drop everything at short notice and treat yourself to one of the world’s great hospitality experiences with a four-night Island Retreat Stay (Monday to Thursday) from now until the end of October.Â
Such uncertain times lend the prospect of a Weekend Autumn
Getaway at the very lovely Longueville House, in North Cork, a comforting surety: days spent working up an appetite with a brisk stroll around the grounds or even a visit to nearby Doneraile Court & Park before whiling away the evenings in front of crackling log fires and chowing down William O’Callaghan’s fine seasonal cooking, with complimentary afternoon tea also available in the drawing-room on both days.Â
During his recent jaunt around the wonderful West of Ireland, The Menu fetched up on the majestic and elemental Achill Island. So nothing would do him but to call and pay his respects at the Calvey family’s butcher shop, in the village of Keel — and he left with some mighty fine Achill Lamb cutlets and Achill Lamb sausages.
The Menu has written before about exquisite Calvey’s lamb, reared by the family on a diet of sweet heather with a saline umami courtesy of the surrounding seas. They butcher in their own on-farm abattoir; then selling the fresh meat in their shop or online — an ideal farming business model. And the Calveys were thoroughly deserving inaugural winners of the National Farming for Nature Award in 2018.
Small local abattoirs once backboned a short local supply chain of fresh meat and were essential to the wellbeing of local farming communities, ensuring the consumer a reliable source of fresh local meat with a guarantee of provenance and providing adequate reward for the farmers' work. Most have since been replaced by large industrial processors who make out like bandits while the primary producers, the farmers, see scant profit from their strenuous labours and these days struggle to even survive.
The cutlets, cooked over a wood charcoal BBQ, were gorgeous: toothsome carmelised crust, tender, smokey, pink meat within, but The Menu was equally impressed with Achill Lamb sausages, the addition of pork fat (for a cleaner, less claggy mouthfeel than lamb fat) amplifying unique flavours, further enhanced with rosemary and black pepper. Plucked sizzling from the BBQ, they were quite delicious served with Velvet Cloud yoghurt (another fine Mayo producer), green salad leaves, sweet, sticky barbecued garlic cloves, all wrapped up in flat bread.Â
