Restaurant review: The Café at Grow HQ Farronshoneen, Dunmore Road, Waterford
Last October, GIY (Grow-It-Yourself) International opened Grow HQ, a €1.45m education centre, farm shop, food gardens and café on the outskirts of Waterford. It is an astonishing achievement. It is a bricks and mortar illustration of how far GIY has evolved since its early origins in 2008, beginning with founder Michael Kelly’s own back-garden growing experiments. I also happen to believe GIY International is one of the most important movements to ever hit Irish food.
While some may dismiss a return to home-growing as mere middle-class whimsy, a re-run of The Good Life, the 70s urban self-sufficiency sitcom, I profoundly disagree. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, daily routine for all those without the means to pay someone else to do it for them, often included growing and harvesting their own food. But heavy industry’s insatiable demand for labour saw food provision become a specialist endeavour left to ‘professionals’ and each subsequent generation has lessened its involvement to the point where we have largely ceded all responsibility for the sourcing of an essential daily requirement to large corporations and our collective food ignorance means we have no real oversight over quality despite all the rules and regulations purportedly there for our benefit and protection.
