The Menu: handcrafted chocolates; seasonal Irish produce; and bon retour to L'Atitude 51
Kevin Wallace, founder-grower at New Leaf Urban Farm, now offering a scheme to grow and supply veg for up to 50 families for an entire season
As the first lockdown proved, local suppliers of finest, seasonal Irish produce cannot be bettered when it comes to providing for the larder and Menu favourite, Ballymakenny Farm, growers of superb heritage variety potatoes are continuing to offer nationwide delivery of their wonderful product and The Menu highly recommends procuring a sack of same.
One of the very best ways to ensure resilience in the local food supply chain is to sign up to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scheme, whereby members commit to paying an agreed fee for the duration of a growing season and in return receive their share of the produce throughout the season while the grower receives a guaranteed living wage, ensuring the business is built on firm footings.
Kevin Wallace’s progressive New Leaf Urban Farmers, in Ballyneety, County Limerick has launched Beyond Organic, a CSA Vegetable Box Scheme, so named because the farming practice is based on ancient Korean natural farming methods, employing indigenous microorganisms and eschewing herbicides or pesticides, and will provide sufficient produce to feed up to 50 families, including Irish ginger and garlic.
NLUF has already earned a high profile for the quality of its innovative produce, immensely popular with local restaurateurs and Michelin-starred chefs and earned itself a Euro-Toques’ National Craft Award Winner in 2019. Each weekly box will also contain appropriate recipes from One Pery Square Hotel head chef Keith Piggott.
The Menu had long pictured the grand re-opening of L’Atitude 51— shuttered for more than a year after a Paddy’s Day fire in 2019 — as being a Bacchanalian affair for the ages featuring multi-jet flybys, 21-gun salutes and the entire Fossett’s circus, or something very much of that order, befitting the return of one of his most favourite of all venues to put on the bib and tucker. That party has been postponed while lockdown restrictions prevail but nonetheless, he is delighted to see Beverley Mathews and her team return once more as something more akin to a takeaway version of a Parisian cave, offering finest natural, organic and biodynamic wines, delicious soup, coffees, pastries and toasties.
Also keep an eye out for the L’Atitude-At-Home boxes, celebrating favourite wine regions/countries, the most recent Georgian box containing traditional orange wine and all the vittles necessary for creating a traditional Georgian ‘supra’, a celebratory feast involving much toasting and eating and drinking, just the ticket for these troubled times. latitude51.ie
The Bord Bia Talent Academy is inviting applicants for its 2021 post-graduate programmes which are designed to help identify and develop executive talent for Ireland’s food and drink industry.
Up to 80 participants will each receive a fully-funded masters with UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School or DCU Business School, guaranteed work experience in Ireland or abroad, plus a tax-free monthly bursary. Closing date for applications is January 29.
Much of pre-lockdown life is beginning to take on aspects of the truly fantastical for The Menu who, betimes, wonders if his recall of glorious episodes of Irish hospitality was all but a dream. And chief among them is memories of his first visit to the subsequently two Michelin-starred Aimsir restaurant, in Celbridge, Co Kildare, where chef Jordan Bailey and partner Majken Bech Bailey were truly beginning to establish the template for their wonderful culinary exploration of finest Irish produce, both cultivated, raised and foraged.
They are now offering a brand-new home dining option available to click and collect from Cliff at Lyons, an eight-course menu for two to share, containing bread, butter, snacks, starter, main, cheese, dessert and petits fours for two people, with full printed instructions for plating each dish, including a tweezers for achieving all those fiddly bits when it comes to plating up.
Though he tried in earnest, The Menu didn’t make a complete pig of himself but instead saved some of his horde of Christmas treats that he might instead make something of a pig of himself in January as well and so recently set about a selection of handcrafted chocolates from Belgian chocolatier Erik Van der Veken, now very firmly based in Dublin and fast developing an affinity for finest local ingredients allied to superb couverture from Cacao Barry.
They know a thing or two about chocolate in Belgium and the pleasures of Van der Veken’s output begin as a visual treat, exquisitely attractive creations that wouldn’t be out of place in a jeweller’s shop window. The Menu was required to make chocolates from scratch back in his college days and knows full well the intricacies involved, most especially chocolates of this order, superbly crafted and sublimely balanced in both textures and flavours.
Of special appeal were: Black Forest with Kirsch and Wildwood balsamic reduction; Irish Cream, with silky white chocolate ganache and bourbon vanilla; Marrakech, zesty mandarin caramel with Moroccan spiced ganache; and Salted Caramel, with Arcane’s signature filling of Irish butter and Tahitian vanilla. If Erik has managed to replenish his ‘shop’ after the ravaging it took under an absolute deluge of pre-Christmas orders, then a box of these fine chocs would make for a very fine Valentine’s Day gift in a few weeks time.
- The Menu is delighted to feature any small or medium-sized Irish food producer, retail or hospitality outlet temporarily pivoting their business for the duration of lockdown. Email all details to: themenu@examiner.ie
