Restaurant review: Bocelli Kitchen & Wine Bar offers old-school Italian food in Cork

A pleasant evening in Bocelli reminds Joe McNamee of Ireland's nascent love affair with Italian food in the 80s and 90s 

Bocelli Kitchen & Wine Bar, Maylor St, Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

In 2023, I could take a foreign visitor and treat them to a prolonged and far-ranging gastronomic tour of Ireland to rival any gourmet global hotspot, showcasing superb produce served up with immense culinary creativity and technical skill. It wasn’t always like that.

Way back, before X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and all their subsequent devil spawn first ‘invented’ Irish food, dining out in Ireland in dark, pre-digital years was a very different proposition indeed.