Restaurant Review: no reason to be grumpy if you dine in East Cork
The Grumpy Bakers: a superb new addition to Midleton's food scene
- Farmgate Restaurant & Food Store
- Coolbawn, Midleton, Co. Cork.
- Tel. (t) +353 21 463 27 71
You only have to look at the Blás na hÉireann awards list each year to see the Rebel County’s continued dominance over the rest of the country as a food-producing county. Yet so often it is West Cork that seems to garner the lion’s share of the kudos. Let’s look east for a change.
There a rich tradition, centuries-old, of superlative dairy, livestock and grain farming in East Cork. And almost 15 years before Veronica Steele created Milleens Cheese, which food writer John McKenna dubbed the ‘Big Bang’ of the Irish specialty food producer movement, Myrtle Allen, in 1963, birthed modern Irish hospitality with her Ballymaloe House restaurant and a locavore menu that was a game-changer for global fine dining.
Máróg O’Brien ran with Allen’s ethos of celebrating local, seasonal food, opening a cracking little farm shop in Midleton, in 1983, and then expanding it, in 1988, into a restaurant and bakery. She eventually established a sister restaurant in the English Market with sister, Kay Harte. Today, The Farmgate name is a sterling hallmark of Irish hospitality.
- Sage Midleton & Sage2Go
- The Courtyard, 8 Main St, Midleton, Co Cork.
- Tel. 021 463 9682
Darina Allen has not only brought visitors from all over the world to her Ballymaloe Cookery School, but has played an instrumental role in founding the trailblazing Midleton Farmers’ Market around the turn of the century.
The late and greatly lamented Ballymaloe Literary Festival helmed by Darina and brother Rory O’Connell burned briefly like a glorious comet, playing an unsurpassable ambassadorial role for Ireland’s food culture, its East Cork setting serving as an Irish Garden of Eden.
Chef Kevin Aherne’s Sage Restaurant first introduced millenials (who often seem to believe ‘Irish food’ was born with their coming of age) to the huge food tradition and history of East Cork, first via his radical 12-Mile Menu of superb local produce entirely from within a 12-mile radius, and then by his vibrant reinvention of the Midleton Food Festival as FEAST. This East Cork Food & Drink Festival, truly clarified East Cork’s position in the public mind as a fitting rival to its more westerly county cousin.
With a pedigree like that, we’re not just here to procure dinner, but breakfast and lunch as well.
- The Grumpy Bakers,
- Sunnyside House, Broderick St, Midleton, Co. Cork, P25 YR58.
- Tel. 086 169 4290
The Grumpy Bakers arrived last year as a superb new addition to Midleton — an excellent bakery and coffee shop offering top class genuine sourdough loaves, infinitely superior to any of the supermarket ‘pseudoughs’. With a large menu ahead, we ‘restrict' ourselves to a simple ‘continental breakfast’: Golden Bean Coffee (roasted by Marc Kingston, in Ballymaloe) and croissants. However, after the fresh, buttery croissants we also put away a mountain of exquisite patisserie treats including Cinnamon Morning Bun (a turbocharged spiced croissant), Cinnamon Twist, Apple Turnover, Pain au Chocolat, and a chewy and divine Almond Croissant. Unsurprisingly, we need a few hours before we can contemplate lunch: Midleton Farmgate’s extraordinary Seafood Chowder.
Chowder is now a common trope in Irish hospitality, with standards varying wildly, but this sublime soup is the perfect benchmark; a smooth creamy broth wearing a lovely peppery afterburn, carries toothsome brunoise of celery, leek, onion and potato and chunks of fresh meaty cod, haddock and salmon, and we dredge through rugged hunks of wonderful GB wholemeal sourdough. Add in some good GB sausage rolls and a ‘dessert’ of sweet Danish (rhubarb and custard crumble) left over from breakfast, and our post-prandial inertia is a foregone conclusion.
Adapting to the pandemic, Kevin Aherne has rapidly accelerated his gradual pre-Covid shift away from fine dining to a more casual delivery, quickly establishing a sister business, Sage2Go, offering a range of ‘pots, pies and sides’ while the restaurant offers a Wednesday to Saturday evening takeaway option.
For dinner, No 2 Son is all over a tangy tomato and fruit (dates and raisins) Lamb Tagine, even as we’re still mopping up nutty, earthy beetroot hummus with, yes, more GB bread before moving on to a selection of excellent dumplings: pork dim sum, with cabbage and biang biang sauce, which I could eat forever; equally flavoursome Chestnut mushroom & Cabbage dumplings; and a powerful veggie dish that punches like a meat plate, Cauliflower in Miso, black sesame & rayu.
After bravely taking on ‘Terry’s Chocolate Orange’ (orange cake, chocolate mousse, Terry’s salted honeycomb) we’re pretty much done. And, do you know, that is just one small taster of how well you can eat in Midleton and East Cork.
