The Menu: A decade of celebrating top-class Irish food, restaurants and food producers
10 years ago, I was asked by my features editor to take over the âfood newsâ column. It was a pleasure to do so for I have a passion for Irish food and a deep-seated grĂĄ for those farmers, fishers, growers, producers, who work on both land and sea to yield some of the finest food to be had anywhere in the world.
Equally, I venerate the heroes of Irish hospitality, women and men who serve up this same superb produce with an empathetic creativity that now means you can eat world-class dishes the length and breadth of the country.
With a regular ânews and eventsâ column, it can be sometimes hard to sustain compelling copy when delivering what can often be a litany of times, dates and details so, to inject a bit of fun, I conjured up The Menu, a gregarious bon vivant (ok, possibly my alter ego) writing in a florid and gloriously overblown prose.
But what did the readers make of it?
About a year later, I was invited to a food event in West Cork. Late one evening I was approached by a woman of a certain age in the bar of The West Cork Hotel.
âAre you The Menu?â She asked, in a tone of high suspicion. I confessed I was at least acquainted with same.
âMy God,â she said, âyouâre an awful bullshitterâbut I love it!â
Iâve had many similar encounters over the years, recognising, under all the waffle, my fundamental message that Irish food is some of the very best in the world.
How the time since has flown â an entire decade seemingly passed in the clearing of a single plate. But what a decade it has been for Irish food, more eventful than most others in its long and storied history, and during which time The Menu has put away an awful lot of very fabulous food.
The very first column was published on March 26, 2012, and recreated the wonderful scene that is the Square in Dungarvan, just after dawn on the Sunday morning of the West Waterford Festival, as market stall holders set up for the grand finale of one of Irelandâs better food festivals. On that morning, The Menu cooked a breakfast of Woodside Farm free-range pork sausages and bacon and local free range eggs, in cast iron pans in Volcano pizzas mobile oven, all eaten in fresh baps from Barronâs Bakery â a quite perfect encapsulation of all that is glorious about Irish food, its producers and The Menuâs over-riding commitment to same.
The following week featured the first âTodayâs Specialâ, where The Menu features a premium food product, invariably Irish, save one or two very special exceptions and it has been an especial privilege and pleasure to bring some truly world-class food products to the attention of the wider world, many of these same producers since becoming good friends. There have been more than 500 products featured since, some now household staples, others fallen by the wayside, but The Menu has enjoyed eating every single one.
Many of these products have been sourced from Irish farmerâs markets, which The Menu believes are the universities of Irish food production, places to truly learn about and appreciate the very best of Irish food.
The very first was an orange macaroon, from Sylvia and John McCormackâs Treat Petite stall, then a stalwart of the Mahon Point Farmersâ Market. John was actually a grandson of the famous singer Count John McCormack and founded Capt Americaâs in Dublin in the 1970s. A great character and a very warm and goodhearted man, he sadly passed away too early several years later and is still fondly recalled.
Noreen and Martin Conroyâs singular approach to farming and unrelenting commitment to raising genuinely free-range rare breed pigs continues to yield what is the finest pork products in the land.
Tom and Jacinta Clancy of Ballycotton Free Range have produced some of the most splendid eggs and poultry to have graced The Menuâs table, even as the struggles and difficulties of that benighted sector of small, independent poultry producers illustrates much of what is wrong with the prevailing industrial model of Irish agriculture.
One day, The Menu spotted a young woman behind a tiny camping table just as he was leaving Mahon Market. Before her were two bowls of mushrooms: foraged chanterelles and shiitakes; she had grown the latter herself.
The woman was Lucy Deegan and she and her husband Mark Cribben have since grown Ballyhoura Mushrooms into an internationally renowned food brand, growing world-class mushrooms, which they supplement with fabulous wild mushrooms foraged by Mark, along with their range of highly innovative and national and international prize-winning mushroom products. Their superb produce became a feature of some of the very finest restaurant menus in the country, many of them Michelin star, substantially altering our perception of what constitutes contemporary Irish cuisine.
In 2016, The Menu began to dole out his own annual food awards, The Munchies, the very best of the year just passed. The categories include: Food Emporium; Cookbook/Food Book; Food Organisation; Farmerâs Market; Product; and Food Hero.
It is no coincidence that three of The Menuâs Food Heroes of the Year have been women: Myrtle Allen, Veronica Steele, creator of Milleens Cheese, and Darina Allen; and The Menu would argue that this trio have had a more profound impact on the world of Irish food than pretty much all the men put together.
The food organisation award has celebrated some superb contributors to Irish food activism, including GIY International, Bia Food Initiative (now incorporated into FoodCloud) and Talamh Beo but one holds an especially exalted place in The Menuâs affections: Real Bread Ireland, which has evolved into a 32-county organisation with well over 100 baker-members and cemented a culture of baking and consumption of real bread that has transformed the national breadbasket.
The pandemicâs brutal impact on Irish hospitality needs no further explanation today â it has been a well-trodden path on these pages â and there will be fall-out and continuing casualties for some time yet to come. During the worst months of the lockdowns, The Menu transformed into a one-stop-shop to support any lockdown endeavours â reasoning that this estimable news organ had sold a lot of papers down through the years on the back of the successes of Irish hospitality and it was now time to pay back that debt.
Truth be told, The Menu often wondered whether it was anything more than a token gesture in the face of such a tsunami of destruction and chaos but, an ever-optimistic soul, he holds fast to the belief that while there will never be a return to the old ânormalâ, the experience of surviving The Covid will make Irish food production and hospitality stronger and more enduring in the future.
Once again, The Menu was to be found in a public forum making the case that, no, Irish food did not âbeginâ in the last ten or 15 years, as so many younger generations seem to believe.
Since Myrtle Allen first opened Ballymaloe House in 1963, it has been possible to eat superb seasonal, local, fresh Irish produce cooked to a world-class standard in a style that is distinctly Irish. Granted, in the decades until the turn of the century, those establishments serving such fare around the country were very often lone culinary lighthouses surrounded by darkness.
But in the last 10 or 15 years we have finally shrugged off the guilt, famine-related and then Church-inflicted, that frowned on visible displays of pleasure, not least when it came to eating and the celebration of good food and dining is finally becoming an integral part of our national culture.
Since then, Irish hospitality has evolved at an exponential rate and 80% of visitors to these shores profess themselves to be âblown awayâ by the quality of Irish food, according to FĂĄilte Ireland research.
And while the internationally renowned Michelin Guide should never, ever be taken as a sole arbiter of the quality of a nationâs cuisine, it is a recognisable and quantifiable standard, for better or worse. In 1974, there were three stars in the country, all of them in Co Cork. In 2012, when The Menu began, there were five Michelin-starred restaurants in the country and Patrick Guilbaudâs held two stars. In 2022, there are now 21 starred restaurants in Ireland, four of them two-starred.
There will be more and both Chapter One and Aimsir hold a very real possibility of becoming Irelandâs first three-starred restaurant in the coming years.
And, in time, The Menu believes, Ireland will gain an international reputation as a dining hotspot as the world comes to finally realise what he has always believed, that it is really very hard to surpass Irish food and hospitality at its very finest.
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