Restaurant Review: Meb’s vegan stall at Douglas Farmer's Market makes the case for life after meat
Meadhbh Halton at her Meb's food truck in Douglas. Pics: Joe McNamee
- Meb’s
- Douglas Farmers’ Market (and various pop-ups)
- Tel. 085 819 1940
- https://www.mebs.ie/index.html
- Opening Hours: Saturday, 10am-2pm
- Tab: €32
I am a recovering vegetarian who spent almost two decades as a non-meat eater, two decades that changed entirely my approach to food, its sourcing, cooking, and consumption, even after I returned to eating meat.
But back when I was a vegetarian, vegans were very thin on the ground.
Indeed, vegans were very thin, full stop, there appearing to be something especially puritanical and joyless about their diets and consequent demeanours, undoubtedly caused by the paucity of choices then available to them in comparison to a vegetarian diet ever buttressed by exquisite Irish farmhouse cheeses, eggs, honeys, and similar sundry non-meat animal byproducts.
Those were the years in which I really learned to cook, challenged to new heights of culinary creativity once the old failsafe formula of ‘meat and two veg’ was off the table, whether cooking at home or in what proved to be the very last role of my motley and vagabond career as a professional cook, when I wound up as head chef for two years in a vegetarian restaurant.
Meadhbh Halton also wound up as head chef in a vegetarian restaurant, the infinitely more elevated Paradiso, where she cooked some exceptionally good food for several years.
These days she is to be found in her own food truck, Mebs (from a childhood nickname), every Saturday morning at my beloved Douglas Farmers’ Market.
A bánh mì is a classic sandwich from Vietnam, a culinary collision with the country’s French colonial past that employs an alternative ‘baguette’, slightly crispy of crust but with a soft, pillowy interior, less rugged and toothsome than a traditional baguette.
In a classic bánh mì, ingredients vary but it usually involves meat, particularly cha lua, a Vietnamese sausage, with pickles (carrots, daikon), cucumber, coriander, chilli, and mayonnaise.
The bánh mì has become more prevalent around these parts since Rachel McCormack, of Sonny’s Deli, first introduced them several years ago, but Halton’s is the first I’ve seen to so successfully riff on the original.
Her baguette, for starters, is truly authentic, probably because she makes them herself.
Batons of sweet pickled carrot, cucumber, fresh chilli and acres of coriander, along with piquant vegan mayo form the backdrop for two vegan options: tofu or ‘duk’. I manage to wangle a half-and-half.
‘Duk’ is Halton’s vegan take on shredded five-spice Chinese duck made with tempeh, a traditional soy-based fermented protein apparently invented in Indonesia over 1,000 years ago.
It has long been part of the vegetarian larder, especially for ‘newbies’ for whom the behavioural attachment to ‘meat’ is still deeply embedded, and is most certainly more nutritious and more natural than the modern ‘fake meats’ that the world’s biggest industrial food processors have turned into a multi-billion dollar market. Having said that, as a vegetarian, I never cared for the stuff.
I never really had a ‘fake meat stage’ and ‘worthy’ was about the most positive descriptor I could formerly have stretched to for what was invariably more grim penance than delicious sustenance.
Perhaps I simply needed to sample Halton’s ‘duk’, for it captures uncannily the textural and taste essence of the original meat version yet is far more than mere pastiche, a genuinely flavoursome creation in its own right.
The tofu is equally excellent. No surprise, as it is very fine Otofu, premium organic tofu produced by Ronan Forde and Meabh Mooney, in Ballinspittle, in West Cork, one of the finest new Irish vegetarian/vegan products of recent years, and Halton’s finishing roast is simple yet sublimely effective.
Pho chay is another Vietnamese dish, a vegetarian take on the classic pho, made with beef. This is rice noodles, cabbage, and sweet pickled, gelatinous shimeji nameko mushrooms, soused in a quite divine broth, the class of dish that puts an arm around you and says, don’t worry, it’s going to be all right in the end.
Hash browns, the American cousin of rosti, are also to be found around town in increasing abundance; few will be as good as Halton’s. Finely sliced veg (potatoes, carrots, cabbage, corn, scallions) fried to a chewy crisp, with a very more-ish flavour, and a fine spicy Asian-style dipping sauce on the side.
Chipsticks, finely julienned potatoes, deep-fried to a crisp, tossed in spices and served with rayu aioli, pickles, and fresh coriander take a single mouthful to earn space on my Death Row final meal menu, instantaneously and savagely addictive.
As I leave, I grab a couple of very becoming Spiced Apple Cream Buns.
Later that evening I am soundly castigated for only buying two and, as we plunge headlong into the great pillowy clouds of cream and savour spiced apple compote brimming with cinnamon cradled in sumptuous salty-sweet fried doughnut batter, I take to self-flagellating in agreement — they are so sinfully good, they’d wear out a church full of confession boxes.
Halton is doing something really special in what is one of the very best food truck offerings in the country, turning out food that just so happens to not include meat, the sort of fare that could convince a carnivorous epicurean that there can indeed still be life after meat.
Were she ever to go back to a bricks-and-mortar kitchen, I fancy it would be a shoo-in for the best vegan restaurant in the country.
- Food: 9
- Service: 9
- Value: 9
- Atmosphere: 1,000,000!!! (C’mon, there’s nowhere I’d rather be on a Saturday than at the small but perfectly formed Douglas Market!)
