Joe McNamee: The Cork on a Fork buzz shows the city’s progress as a food destination
Cork on a Fork 2024's VQ Shared Table experience on MacCurtain Street saw 400 guests dining at a long table, showcasing local produce with sharing plates from top VQ area restaurants and drinks from local producers, all set to live music and a festive atmosphere to kick off the festival week.
Next Wednesday, the Lord Mayor of Cork will launch the fourth Cork on a Fork food festival, at Good Day Deli in the Nano Nagle Centre — which will then be followed by the Irish Examiner Business Breakfast, sponsored by Musgrave’s SuperValu, hosted by yours truly and featuring four great speakers from the food world.
The inaugural Cork on a Fork festival in 2022 was a tentative affair, hampered by a too short run-in, a tricky time slot in August, and a reluctance from many local restaurants to fully come on board.
The leaps and bounds ever since have been enormous. Last year, in 2024, the festival finally came into its own as a potential keeper in the annual culinary calendar.
So, the irony is not lost on me that the speakers will be addressing the following theme: ‘Putting a Price on Quality: Promoting specialty foods in a cost-conscious market’.
As Cork on a Fork, a celebration of the food and food culture of Cork City and its surrounding region, grows ever stronger, many of the producers being celebrated are facing a multiplicity of challenges, homegrown and “imported”, that threaten the very viability of the sector itself.
The same applies to hospitality, both local and national — and the current existential crisis is far worse than the impact of the crash of the Celtic Tiger.
I was working as a chef in Cork City in 1993 when Denis Cotter’s Paradiso (then Cafe Paradiso) and Seamus O’Connell’s Ivory Tower opened almost in tandem.
Both revolutionary restaurants in an Irish and even international context. Their impact was immediate, and many of us lesser mortals toiling away in lesser kitchens around the city had a sense we were all about to hitch a ride on a new Cork culinary wave.
In fact, the dining duo were so far ahead of the curve, it was some time in the future before their real influence was felt in Irish dining.
Both were born in a time when recession was a near-permanent state, but that’s par for the course in hospitality; some of the very best restaurants, and specialty food producers, have traditionally emerged when times were toughest and real creativity makes up for financial shortfalls.
The subsequent heady gold rush days of the Celtic Tiger, if anything, appeared to dull creativity and innovation.
Certainly, there was still great cooking to be found in and around the city but none of the genuine sense of invention of Paradiso and the Ivory Tower.
When the Celtic Tiger crashed, local restaurants battened down the hatches and retreated behind stultifying culinary conservatism and the safety of combination pizza-pasta-burger menus.
It was only when the new century was some way into its teens that a fresh radicalism re-emerged with the arrival of Takashi Miyazaki’s eponymous Japanese street food restaurant, Miyazaki — which in turn led to his Ichigo Ichie restaurant, the first to hold a Michelin star in the city since Arbutus Lodge in the 1980s — and Beverley Mathews’ L’Atitude 51’s pronounced body swerve into the world of natural wine, sublimely complemented by culinary director Simone Kelly’s local produce-driven menus.
There was a sense that culinary Cork was on the rise once more.
The pandemic, if anything, only drove Cork hospitality to greater heights and in all my time dining in Cork, I am hard pressed to recall a similar sense of excitement as prevails right now around the town.
Not only are Cork chefs delivering on the plate, they are doing so with a newfound sense of camaraderie and cooperation.
These new Young Turks regularly socialise together but they also have each others’ backs, offering support and engaging in inspiring collaborations, even as every business opens the shutters each day to yet another battle for survival.
So, blessed as we are in Cork, not only should we relish this newfound culinary creativity in the city, we should also do everything in our power to support it.
The next time you are dining out in Cork, skip past those imported franchise restaurant models and seek out a genuinely local independent restaurant, especially those serving up a real taste of Cork on the plate.
The Examiner Eats Club is an exclusive series of dining events hosted by the Irish Examiner food team and solely open to Irish Examiner subscribers who are offered the opportunity to purchase tickets on a first come, first served basis for the chance to dine at private dinners in some of Ireland’s finest restaurants.
Launched last autumn with a wonderful evening at the celebrated Goldie restaurant, subsequent and equally superb evening dinners have taken place in Good Day Deli and the Farmgate Café, in the English Market.
The next Examiner Eats Club dinner (Aug 17) — part of Cork on a Fork festival programme — sees the team and a bunch of very lucky diners heading to The Glass Curtain, on MacCurtain St.
A genuine leader of the new wave in Cork city, The Glass Curtain combines brilliant cooking with one of the best larders around, a hyper-local exploration of the finest local and seasonal produce.
Front-of-house manager/sommelier Wesley Triggs oversees a cracking wine and cocktail list, while superbly marshalling the dining experience, and chef-proprietor Brian Murray promises to pull out all the stops with a delicious five course sharing menu.
Instead of one specific food product, this week I am encouraging you to fill shopping baskets with some of the finest food in the world, and all of it from Cork.
This is no parochial ‘Real Capital’ hubris, just a statement of fact: Cork has been the breadbasket of the country for generations; the birthplace of the modern Irish specialty food producer movement; and, for many years, Cork winners at the Blás na hÉireann food awards outnumbered the entire rest of the country put together.
The best place to start is with sublime smoked fish from Sally Barnes (Woodcock Smokery) and Frank Hederman, and the best cheeseboard in the land, including Milleens, Durrus, Gubbeen, Coolea, Hegarty’s and The Lost Valley Dairy. And that’s only the starting point — I think you’re going to need a second trolley!
