The menu: Slow food Ireland

As well as being a wonderful restaurateur, running two fine Dublin-based establishments, Cake Café and Slice, The Menu’s weekly colleague Michelle Darmody has always operated above and beyond the base requirements of the industry.

Her latest project is a further example of same, a Pop-Up Café in conjunction with Slowfood Ireland, in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre (April 5&6), to highlight the awful situation vis-a-vis food in Ireland’s direct provision centres.

Residents, many of them there for years, are not allowed to cook for themselves, subsisting only on the fare provided and, in The Menu’s eyes, it is a surefire method for rapidly dehumanising a human being, removing control over one of mankind’s most fundamental needs and most especially the ability to seek comfort by cooking the food that reminds one of home.