The Menu: Feast for all at Kinsale Gourmet Festival
While it gladdens The Menu’s heart to see myriad new food festivals springing up annually celebrating our wonderful world-class produce and the talented souls who make it all possible, some of those strutting young pups would do well to look to the Kinsale Gourmet Festival (Oct 12-14) for lessons in longevity.
It was all of 36 years ago when the first KGF began in the impossibly picturesque little fishing town west of Cork, back before food was even invented and Kinsale was one of the few isolated Irish epicurean outposts.
It may have foundered a little on the fickle fads of foodie fashion betimes in recent years, but you have to ask whether anywhere else in Ireland can boast more decent restaurants per capita —with an emphasis on magnificent local seafood — including one of the busiest in Ireland, Martin Shanahan’s Fishy Fishy.
And while taste trails may be de rigeur nowadays, the Kinsale crew damned near invented the thing so The Menu will be donning obligatory wacky chapeau for the Mad Hatter’s Taste of Kinsale, to sample the wares of ten restaurants washed down with some very fine wines indeed. www.kinsalerestaurants.com
Dear readers will of course recall a previous column paying high homage to Leonie and Andrew Workman, of Dunany Farm, Co Louth, producers of stunning organic Irish flours, and will no doubt join The Menu in hotfooting it down to Ballymaloe for their upcoming talk/demo (7pm, Oct 9) on organic flour milling and heritage wheat varieties.
And if The Menu didn’t have other obligations (you, dear readers, chief amongst them!), he’d simply remain in Ballymaloe for a plethora of upcoming courses: Afternoon Tea & Cakes (Oct 10); Pizza Masterclass (Oct 12); Feel Good For Winter (Oct 13), focussing on health and healing through eating; and a fantastic One Pot Wonder course (Oct 20), promising a whole lot more flavour and a lot less Fairy washing-up liquid! www.cookingisfun.ie
The Menu, still in his infancy as a home gardener, has been deeply immersed of late in a fine publication, From The Ground Up, by Fionnuala Fallon (Collins Press), a sumptuous publication featuring some of Ireland’s finest DIY gardeners, bringing hope and green-fingered good cheer to the rest of us but if you fancy foraging around in someone else’s garden, why not skip off to the wonderful Longueville House, in Mallow, for their 11th Annual Mushroom Hunt (9.30am, Oct 7) followed by Gourmet Luncheon. www.longuevillehouse.ie
Ross McDowell’s time in South Africa yielded not only a beautiful bride but also a hankering to put an Irish twist on a local staple, biltong. Whereas The Menu would have previously fixed punctures with biltong and no more, he was extremely taken with Tong, air-dried Irish beef, producing a portable healthy protein-filled snack.
But these slivers of silverside punch far above the level of snack food, a toothsome challenge that knows just when to surrender up its sublimely spiced motherlode of tender 100% Irish beef. www.tong.ie
Contact Joe McNamee at themenu@examiner.ie
You gotta laugh when you overhear folk choose Heineken and Budweiser rather than a ‘foreign’ beer.
While you digest that, there are quite a few good beers from Poland on our shelves, the most commonly available including fresh Zywiec and Tyskie; and plush, creamy Warka.
Another worth pausing over is Zubr. Sharing a name with the European Bison — which almost became extinct but is again thriving in Poland and other countries — it has a deep, rich, gold colour to match its lovely grainy hoppiness and prodigious strength.
Blake Creedon
