Restaurant Reviews: Birdsong in the City and Harry's Street Tacos
- Harry’s Street Tacos
- Various locations around Cork
Over the last decade open fire cooking has become one of the hottest trends in hospitality, a sayonara to the three-star sterility of high end cooking with its lotions and potions and gadgets and gizmos to create food that has to be ‘explained’, the class of fare my 11-year-old daughter cynically dismisses as ‘powdered hake droppings and kale dust’.
In human terms, it is hardly a ‘trend’. After approximately 1.8 million years, the human abandoned open fire for gas and electric hobs and ovens, putting produce we once cooked over naked flame into pots and pans, just over a century ago.
What drives this re-embrace of fire? A deep-seated genetic reaction to the alienating extremes of technological progress? A longing for a time when life wasn’t always lived at 1,000 miles per hour to the tune of the microwave’s ping? Or perhaps it is just that delicious produce cooked simply over fire yields extraordinarily exquisite results.
Harry’s Street Tacos can be found at various farmer’s market (Mahon Point; Midleton) where young Midleton-man, Harry Mehmet, offers his take on Mexican grilled cuisine, down to authentic corn tacos cooked to order and housing excellently sourced Irish meats, served up with salsa casera, spicy tomato and red pepper sauce, and combinations of diced avocado, raw onion, pineapple, lime and coriander.
Carne Asada is Black Angus bavette steak, grilled over charcoal, tender, juicy meat then carmelised on a flat grill, smoky tones to the fore.
Sumptuous pork belly carnitas, Ballymaloe Free Range pork belly confited in pork fat for eight hours, is finished on the flat grill. Lamb Barbacoa is delicious seasonal lamb shoulder; grilled halloumi tacos every bit they’re equal.
It is classic street food, great tastes, and flavours via a simple delivery, but there is more to come; Harry is increasingly keen to focus more on his mixed Irish-Turkish heritage, looking Eastwards to one of the world’s greatest and most varied food cultures, where the open fire grill places a central role and incorporating it into his repertoire. Watch this space.
- Birdsong In The City
- Harley St, Cork (and other locations)
Birdsong in the City is part of Harley St market, by the Metropole Hotel, now pedestrianised and delightfully gussied up, one side festooned with a glorious mural. Covered benches provide shelter even as the rain begins to spit.
Eschewing the sometimes overbearing American-style BBQ which uses radiant heat and eschews subtlety of flavour for big, booming tones, Glass Curtain chef/proprietor Brian Murray specially commissioned a Basque-style grill from Roche Metalworks, in Fermoy, to emulate the infinitely more restrained and sophisticated manipulation of smoke and flame as practiced in the Basque Country, in North West Spain.
Grilled Rossmore Oysters sizzle in their own steaming liquor. The first, with miso tallow butter and black pudding crumb, is tasty; the chilli butter version is quite perfect.
We opt for the two carnivorous house milk bun sandwiches: BBQ short rib, celeriac slaw and Ballinrostig cheddar; and miso-glazed pork belly, pickles and house hot sauce. Both are excellent, beef tender yet toothsome while pork is sweet, smoky fat a perfect condiment.
Sugar snap pea salad, with spiced chickpeas and grilled lemon is bright, fresh, and crunchy while smashed potatoes with roast onions and chipotle aioli are downright dirty and delicious. Then there is dessert.
Salted caramel is a gorgeous gooey toffee-ish ice cream that skates thrillingly close to over-salting, between a ‘bourbon’ biscuit but the Bushby’s Raspberry Ripple is frozen bliss, now firmly on the menu for my death row last meal.
Creamy rich homemade vanilla ice cream shot through with the tart perfection of the finest raspberries you’ll ever taste, from Bushby’s, in Rosscarbery, sandwiched between short bread biscuit. As any connoisseur knows, you’re supposed to slowly lick you’re way around an ice cream sandwich before eventually, reluctantly, employing teeth for the wafer and what remains but I instead wolf it down in four or five mouthfuls, wondering what sentence I might get were I to be caught breaking into the Glass Curtain freezer and making off with the lot.
Birdsong is a temporary solution to Murray’s ongoing enforced closure of The Glass Curtain but I sincerely hope, when indoor dining returns, he finds a way to keep this little birdie singing for quite some time to come. In other words, keep her lit!
