Southern comfort at food awards

The Menu, having saddled up the doughty Neidin and ensured his Party Hat was cocked at a particularly rakish angle, lit out for the Big Smoke earlier this week to the Irish Food Writer’s Guild Annual Food Awards, one of the highlights of the Irish culinary year when the cream of Irish food writers assemble to honour the world-class Irish food world.

This year’s winners in the Food Product category include longtime Menu favourites, Lucy Deegan and Mark Cribben, the wife and husband team behind Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms whose magnificent range of exotic mushrooms and associated products have Ireland’s top chefs in something of a tizzy.

It is also well known to all and sundry that The Menu would exchange his own progeny for fine cheese and, in his book, there are few finer on this planet than Coolea Cheese, another highly deserved winner.