The Menu: The best of Polish wines at Cobh's Polska-Éire festival
Head to the Commodore Hotel for a Polish wine tasting, courtesy of Dublin-based PolishWineFest.
As one of the largest ethnic groupings in the country, it is unsurprising that The Menu has encountered many Polish chefs and hospitality workers around the country operating to a very high level, though he still eagerly awaits a deeper injection of Polish food culture into the national culinary melting pot.
Which is why he is delighted to bring news of a Polish wine tasting as part of the Polska-Eire Festival this weekend (1pm-6pm, June 2), in Cobh.
True, The Menu did receive the details rather late in the day, but he highly recommends heading to the Commodore Hotel for a Polish wine tasting, courtesy of Dublin-based PolishWineFest, where you can grab a glass and taste over 30 different Polish wines, including a few natural wines, and cheesy nibbles.
A fine way of introducing yourself to an emerging new wine region.
The Homegrown at Maxol initiative returns with a call-out for small to medium-sized local Irish food and beverage producers to apply to this support programme, which will see the four winning products/applicants featured on the shelves of 73 Maxol stores around the country.
Applications are open until June 9. Last year’s overall winner was Galway’s All About Kombucha, a fine product previously featured in this column and a great friend to The Menu’s belly.
Tasting Forbidden Foods (June 13, and throughout summer) was one of the more outré and outrageously enjoyable dining experiences of The Menu’s 2023, in The Booley, Leap, in West Cork.
The dining space of Max Jones’s Up There The Last, here the traditional food conservationist serves up an unconventional menu of rare cheeses and charcuterie with natural wine pairings from Brian O’Connor of Brian’s Wines.
Solstice at The River Club features another stunning display by the very talented Sharon Fox, of Fox Flowers, on the hotel’s riverside terrace which, in partnership with Peroni, offers a brand new summer drinks menu and a series of brunch events throughout the season (beginning June 8) with classic dishes, cocktails, ice cream and live music.
Each year, The Menu anticipates the arrival of new season potatoes with all the exhilaration of a child coming up to Christmas, always one of his most treasured of all dining experiences.
This year, however, the annual ritual was suffused with a rather unwelcome dose of reality, specifically around climate change, as extraordinary and extreme weather conditions meant many of this year’s potato crops, if they were planted at all, were instead left to rot in the ground as it was simply too wet to plant or harvest.
Recently visiting his beloved Menloe Stores in Blackrock, where proprietor John Kelly moonlights as something of a ‘spud sommelier’ always featuring a range of premium poppies from East Cork, he was deeply saddened to be greeted by a basket full of French potatoes.
However, normal service has resumed somewhat with the arrival at Menloe Stores of the first of this year’s new potatoes, Homeguards, from Castletownroche.
Grown in a polytunnel, they may not have quite the depth of flavour of outdoor spuds, but nonetheless they were welcomed in Chez Menu as if it were the return of the prodigal son himself.
They were washed, steamed and then served up in a bowl with black pepper, flat leaf parsley and a ridiculous amount of butter, and for a spell all was very much perfect in The Menu’s world.
