The Menu: Old favourite The Tannery returns to peak of its glory days
The Tannery harks back to the restaurant's glory days thanks in no small part to the sterling cooking of head chef Damien Derwin
The Menu hugely enjoyed a recent visit to an old favourite, The Tannery restaurant, in Dungarvan, where it was a true pleasure to see Paul and Máire Flynn’s magnificent establishment returned to the levels of peak performance that hark back to the west Waterford restaurant’s glory days — thanks in no small part to the sterling cooking of head chef Damien Derwin, under the watchful eye of the redoubtable Mr Flynn.
Of particular note was some very fine fish cooking, fabulous flavours delivered with much precision and great empathy for the produce, all served up in one of the country’s nicest dining rooms.
But to truly experience that Tannery magic, The Menu advises booking into the nearby and very gorgeous Tannery Townhouse, with cracking packages on offer for overnight stay, breakfast and dinner.
But the ultimate Tannery experience is to also include one of Paul’s very entertaining and highly informative cookery classes in The Tannery Cookery School, which always culminates in a most delicious lunch. Next class up is Easy Entertaining (March 9, morning demo).
When all were heralding the brave new dawn of the Irish craft beer boom 3.0 that took off in the noughties, The Menu was ever conscious that we were merely repeating a cycle of just over a century ago, when Ireland similarly had over 100 small independent breweries, only for them to be gradually subsumed by larger entities.
That was until the 1970s when just four conglomerates remained, so it gives him great joy to learn that Eight Degrees Brewing, taken over several years ago by Irish Distillers, has been bought back by original founders Scott Baigent and Cam Wallace, with a new beer in the pipeline to celebrate.
There are many, many places, people and food-related enterprises that The Menu loves in Waterford, not least among them the very wonderful GIY and also the truly gorgeous Curraghmore Estate, in Portlaw, where the Menu gets to stage his Grub Circus every August as part of the most fabulous All Together Now music festival.
Therefore, to learn of a new partnership between the two is most delightful news indeed as the multi-award-winning social enterprise GIY has signed a lease with Curraghmore Estate to create the GIY Market Garden, a mixed-use organic smallholding with traditional breed poultry, pigs, and field-scale veg and fruit following regenerative agriculture principles, based within the estate’s 19th-century 12-acre walled garden.
In other words, creating a highly significant regenerative food education campus that will be a model of a genuinely sustainable food system with a mixture of food production, education, enterprise, and tourism — The Menu will be watching this with special interest.
The Menu would never spurn the opportunity to don bib and tucker at the Michelin-starred Lady Helen at Mount Juliet Estate, but if executive chef John Kelly’s sumptuous fare isn’t sufficient to tempt you then perhaps a whole host of tempting multi-themed spring break packages (including romantic breaks, wellbeing offers and golf) will seal the deal, though The Menu is most tempted by the prospect of Kelly’s new seasonal spring eight-course tasting menu, all capped off with some deeply indolent lounging around doing little or nothing at all.
During recent negotiations with La Daughter Menu for a Friday school sweet treat that did not entail adding a personal dentist to her retinue, The Menu suggested a compromise of freshly baked croissant with “a nice jam”.
LD paused, attention snagged. “Not one of your fancy jams with added badger hair or whatever. Just a normal strawberry or raspberry jam.”
Returning from his larder with the booty, The Menu partially concealed the label on the jar of Folláin’s raspberry jam, covering up the part that read “and pink gin” and dispatched LD to school, jam-filled croissants and all.
Later that day, she positively raved about the “best raspberry jam” she’d ever eaten and The Menu must admit that the addition of pink gin is no gimmick, the spry botanical bite arresting the flavour of raspberries from any slide into the potential torpor of sugary excess, where so many jams fall down, instead throwing it into sharp and delightful relief, with a hint of bubblegum riding shotgun.
So compelling was said jam that The Menu finished off the jar that day as the crowning glory of a meringue and cream dessert for the ages.
