The Menu: Part 1 of Joe McNamee's Munchie food awards for 2023
Some of the award-winners of this year's prestigious Munchies.
The delightfully liveried Blasta Books series continues seeking out alternative food voices in the Irish culinary sphere, and another four spritely titles duly emerged, The Menu was especially partial to by Blanca Valencia, Dee Laffan and Mei Chin, and by Anna Cabrera and Vanessa Murphy.
Nine Bean Rows had another superb year: compiled by Gather & Gather, is a sublime panoply of Irish food personages, with all funds going to the Peter McVerry Trust; while by Paul Flynn, confirmed Flynn is not only a superb chef with a preternatural gift for ‘translating’ his professional craft into immensely achievable domestic dishes for the home cook, but is also a delightful writer.
Oisin Davis’ is a diamond, ‘translating’ the mixologist’s art into ridiculously easily achieved and yet utterly divine home cocktails.
Chef Sunil Ghai finally made it into print, with (Penguin/Sandycove), and, having done so much to introduce authenticity to Indian restaurant cooking in Ireland, here does likewise for the domestic chef with a cracking cookbook.
Denis Cotter’s , is as much manifesto as it is magnificent cookbook, an exquisite production beautifully photographed by Ruth Calder-Potts, and is The Menu’s Irish Food Book of the Year.
Given Niki Segnit’s is one of The Menu’s most treasured food books, it is no surprise he was almost equally enamoured with (Bloomsbury), another fine outing, and if either your domestic or serious professional mixologist is still hungry for more reading material, then (Phaidon) is another superb publication from 2023, a collection of 200 cocktail recipes from around the world, each recipe, introduced with a potted history that is as entertaining as it is informative before presenting a definitive take on the cocktail in question, and the whole production cleaves once more to the premium Phaidon production values, for a gorgeous looking tome. But The Menu’s Food Book of the Year 2023 is Aaron Ayscough’s (Artisan/New York), a passionate yet clear-eyed and thoroughly comprehensive introduction to the very wonderful world of natural wine, both wines and makers, and if it seems overly weighted towards France above anywhere else, that’s almost inevitable as is befitting the birthplace of the modern natural wine movement.
As a young chef in Cork back in the ’90s, The Menu’s daily shopping regimen took him into a then rather flagging English Market to Marie Jaumaud and Martin Guillemot’s pioneering stall, to purchase their splendid crumbly raw milk ricotta, until they were subsequently prohibited from selling their raw-milk cheeses in the Market by the blissfully ill-informed health and safety mob.
But a young French woman, Isabelle Sheridan, who had been helping her compatriots, gradually expanded her own range of specialty French products, eventually opening her own business, On The Pig’s Back, which now offers one of the finest selection of Irish and French specialty foods, in particular cheeses and charcuterie. Now a fully adopted Corkonian, Sheridan’s stall has moved and expanded to become one of the cornerstones of the now utterly revitalised English Market.
Having added a production unit-cum-café in Douglas Village, Sheridan’s mighty food range near buckles under the weight of myriad awards, national and international, won down through the years, including the highly prestigious Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite, presented by the French Ambassador to Ireland in 2017 recognising her enormous contribution to both French and Irish food, and for helping to establish strong cultural and trading links between the two countries. On The Pig’s Back is The Menu’s Food Emporium of the Year 2023.
Last summer, The Menu attended a thoroughly enjoyable event in Max Jones’ Booley food space, just outside Leap in West Cork, presided over by David Asher, legendary Canadian raw milk cheesemaking nomad and author ( ) and amongst the many wonderful tastes on offer was an especially sublime batch of what has been one of The Menu’s favourite food discoveries of recent times, The Lost Valley Dairy’s Sobhriste cheese which, on the night, swirled around the palate like a Stravinsky symphony on acid — in other words, quite brilliantly mind-blowing.
It wasn’t the first time The Menu had delighted in same but it was the night when he realised that though raw milk cheeses were at the heart of the Irish Farmhouse Cheese revolution, that Darcie Mayland’s (below) and Mike Parle’s Lost Valley Dairy are now the only cheesemakers in the country using their own natural starter made from their own milk, which goes some way to explaining the uniqueness of this superb cheese.
Sobhriste (Irish for easily broken, fragile) carries notes of fermented country butter and a sweet, lactic tang with a pleasing, comforting mustiness to the rind that combines for a creamy, nutty mouthful, best eaten unaccompanied or with some of their Lost Valley Dairy honey. Sobhriste is The Menu’s Irish Food Product of the Year.
