The Menu: Get a taste of Cork’s café culture (and one of the best toasties of my life)
Five Points has opened at the Marina Market serving from a bright red shipping container
- Five Points, 59 MacCurtain Street, Cork, T23 F9DT
- Five Points, Marina Park, Cork, T12 YX76
- The Village Deli & Cafe, Ravenscourt Garden Centre, Kerry Pike, Cork, T23 YH92
- Wunderkaffee Farranavarra, Farran, Co Cork, P31 P210
With restaurant bookings and availability for a social seasonal catch-up rarer than a hen’s dentist, might I suggest a daytime rendezvous in a café.
Of course, they will be equally rammed but there’s no booking, you queue up, take your chances and fortune eventually favours the doughty.
My first fledgling experiences with hospitality as places for unsupervised social engagement took place in the old Roches Stores cafés, after or even during school hours, or on a Friday night. The order du jour was a ‘latté’ bearing no resemblance at all to anything similarly christened that I have consumed in the last 20 years; instead, a watery, bitter brew crowned with a ‘foam’ the consistency of marshmallow.
Did it bother us? Not a bit, for we knew no better and once three or four sachets of brown sugar finally melted through the lactic carapace, we would first spoon out foamed milk and then slowly sipp at a pace that had glaciers sprinting past us, stretching out a single coffee for what seemed like weeks to the ladies who ran the cafe.
When we ‘came of age’ and discovered such as Harlequins on Paul St, or Halpin’s on Cook St, where coffee was recognisably coffee and lingering for hours — outside of actual lunch — was almost a condition of entry, we had hit peak café culture on Leeside, black polo necks for the Viennese-style intelligentsia or battered Kerouac tomes for budding New York beat poets.
Speaking of New York, on first entering Five Points (named for a notorious 19th-century slum in Lower Manhattan) you might wonder if proprietor Ciaran Cronin had a just-add-water-to-build-your-own-coffee-shop kit shipped over directly from Brooklyn. Bare red brick walls, raw exposed timbers, wooden floors, strings of fairy lights; Five Points wouldn’t look out of place in the hippest heights of Williamsburg.
Yet it works, the buzz on a Saturday morning, entirely authentic, a heady, cosmopolitan blend of locals and tourists, including a cluster of beyond stylish (according to my 12-year-old fashion maven) young Japanese women getting their ’Gram while ordering.
Five Points’ USP is house-made bagels and these are more authentic again. La Daughter has plain with sausages and bacon while I have poppyseed with a ‘shmear’ of cream cheese. Both are quite splendid, very excellent bagels easily outshining very decent contents. Coffee is also good.
Five Points has a smart lunch menu: sandwiches (including Reubens, natch), ciabattas and flatbreads and Cronin has opened in the new Marina Park, by Páirc Uí Chaoimh, serving coffees, bagels and sweet treats from a bright red converted shipping container under the arches of that stark steel ‘cathedral’ that is the centrepiece of this fine new Leeside leisure space. A week later, during our current ‘Baltic season’ found us ‘reheating’ with another fine bagel, herbed cream cheese and crispy bacon, and more good coffee.
The trend for tacking on a café to a garden centre has yielded some decent offerings but rarely anything offering truly original fare but chef Bryan Phelan and his business/life partner Michelle Murphy are doing something quite special in the Village Deli & Café in the Ravenscourt Garden Centre, in Kerry Pike.
Phelan and Murphy have transformed it entirely: the room is cosy, stacked high with a tasty selection of well-selected speciality foodstuffs and a sharp menu manages to hit all the right touchstones for trowel-wielding seniors — scones, teas, sandwiches, etc — but Phelan’s background includes extensive barbecue experience, in Ireland and the US, so there is further variety; for example, an authentic, sticky Pork Banh Mi featuring flavoursome pork.
La Daughter and her partner in crime, Cara DeBoomDeeAy, have ham-cheese toasties and Xmas Hot Chocolates (milk chocolate, white chocolate, whipped cream, butterscotch, marshmallow) that ultimately defy the appetites of even this pair of sweet freaks.
I have a French Onion Grilled Cheese with onion marmalade, chive cream cheese, thyme, Parmesan, roasted garlic and herb butter on sourdough.
It is one of the very best toasties I have ever eaten: rich, creamy, herbaceous, with an umami punch of Parmesan, tangy, astringent garlic urging the horses right on over the cliff. All it’s short is a glass of good Beaujolais (if you can’t even make a café this Christmas, might I recommend the Village Deli grazing box, available until Christmas Eve and containing a mindblowing smorgasbord of cooked meats, salmon, charcuterie, salads, relishes, dips, crackers and bread to feed an army, for ridiculously low prices. Just have your guests bring along good wines.)
Eoin MacCarthy and partner Alex O’Callahan own and operate the best coffee shop in Cork, Filter, on George’s Quay (recently joined by a second outlet, on Paradise Place, North Main St) and their in-house bakery is based in a unit in Farran. Last year, they decided to add a café in the front, Wunderkaffee.
From outside, it presents as a rather anonymous building with a ground floor commercial unit that might be a recovering country convenience store, but step inside and the celestial choir kicks into gear (actually, the soundtrack is a chilled, laidback electronica).
The interior has been utterly transformed into a breathtakingly gorgeous space, curated with an immaculate design sensibility; fitting, really, as it is also a retail space for speciality food products and cosmetics, locally designed craft pieces, and everywhere, also for sale, a micro-rainforest of Alex’s exotic plants, succulents and ferns.
An old display fridge has been utterly reimagined as a display case by Darwin if he went to art school: leafy hostas and ferns, lampshades, animal skulls, ceramics, medical posters, and a backdrop of brooding William Morris-style wallpaper.
On a sunny day, the south-facing room is apparently flooded with balmy light. I can only imagine on this dark, cold December eve but, there and then, it instantly becomes one of my most favourite hospitality spaces in … anywhere.
Considering the Filter lineage, we aren’t surprised to enjoy cracking coffees, but though I’ve left many a good café with a takeaway of very fine cakes and pastries (made in-house), I don’t think I’ve ever also left bearing some superb Beaujolais nouveaux and a quite beautiful original lampshade made by Cork-based Mr Kite Designs, an early present to myself. Wunderkaffee indeed.
