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.
Furthermore, while most of us will probably never grow anything remotely sufficient to meet our needs, the earth connection is every bit as important as harvest quantity. As any gardener will tell you, getting hands mucky in the soil is a fine way to heal the soul. We come from earth, we return to earth; to pass a life without the slightest engagement with that earth is at least a sadly missed opportunity.
Grow HQ is a modernist, attractive affair, particularly the cafe where extensive glazing provides cosy passive heat on a brilliantly blue yet bitterly cold day. A day for soup and No. 2 Son relishes astringent inflections of rosemary in a Carrot soup while I revel in Potato with Chunky Veg. Both are served with superb toasted sourdough from one of Ireland’s very finest craft bakers, Sarah Richards’ Seagull Bakery, from nearby Tramore. Turmeric butter is a shade from the outré end of the crayon box, Kerrygold with a fake tan, but demure spicing knows its place on the palate, a humble servant to lactic host.
A Mezze plate features Chickpea Hummus, grainy, garlicky and good but only trotting after earthy, succulent and sweet rainbow beetroot, divinely roasted. Braised fennel, though, badly needs further braising to allow teeth meet in the middle. An emissary from the kitchen insists it is cooked thusly to offer textural contrast to the beetroot but I agree with another staff member who cheerfully admits you’d need a pitbull’s jaws to bite through it.
Family friend Chairman M orders the Grow HQ Hero, a featured vegetable, served five ways; today, Rooster potato. Airy Horseradish Farl is fine dipping fodder for aforementioned Chunky Potato Soup; excellent Sweet Paprika Crisps crunch as only home-cooked renditions can while gorgeous Smoked Cheese Dauphinoise has us seeking the inner bacon. Wholegrain mustard potato salad is fine but there’s no way distinctly un-pink skin is that of a Rooster. CM is sound to the core of his shamrock green soul on the ‘National Tuber’ question and again we query the kitchen. A Queen, is the response, though total lack of flouriness and skin entirely un-punctured during cooking leaves us still wondering. Overly fussy? Perhaps, but we ask in genuine spirit of enquiry and a kitchen responding in kind is always reassuring.
My Heart’s Delight finds Veg Lasagne with homemade spelt pasta a tad ‘agricultural’, a humungous serving with quantity outweighing coherency of flavour but it is impossible to dislike, rude healthiness harking back to wholefood vegetarian restaurants of yore.
La Daughter’s Spicy Black Bean and Quinoa Burger may sound like another throwback but is buoyant and tasty, further enervated by bright carrotand coriander hummus. Chocolate beetroot brownie is a velvety sophistication offering far more than the traditional straight-up sugar hit yet still meets youthful approval.
Overall, it is a truly pleasurable meal and the menu can only improve once accomplished chef JB Dubois gets his hands on the fruits of a full year’s harvest from the still-infant garden outside. We may not have harvested today’s wonderful lunch ourselves but there is something very special in knowing just how local that lunch was.
Phone: 051-584422
www.giyinternational.org/grow-hq/the-cafe.html
Opening hours: 9am to 5pm, seven days a week
The Tab
€71.35 (including coffee and Kombucha, excluding tip)
7.5/10
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