Joe McNamee: Cork on a Fork is a reminder of Leeside's culinary power in hard times
Head chef Brian Murray serves up the starters under the open kitchen heat lamps at the Examiner Eats Club in The Glass Curtain. Picture Chani Anderson.
Last Sunday evening, 45 lucky diners gathered in The Glass Curtain restaurant for another sell-out Examiner Eats Club, our dining events series, tickets exclusively available to Irish Examiner subscribers.
A wonderful evening and one of the closing events for the 2025 Cork on a Fork food festival, running over the previous five days, a certain demob giddiness was abroad in the air.Â
The restaurant’s staff, along with regular shifts, had been up to their oxters participating in MacCurtain St’s fabled Long Table dinner, with The Glass Curtain chef/proprietor Brian Murray also popping up in the Cork on a Fork demo tent, on Emmet Place, the epicentre of festival activities over the weekend.
In one corner, festival director Niamh Murphy and her team, by now running on fumes, were delighted to finally relax after their Herculean labours on the most successful iteration of the festival to date.
Yes, the programme of over 100 events included opportunities to put on the glad rags and get dolled up for some salubrious wining and dining but, equally, there was an egalitarianism to be found elsewhere, drawing in audiences from all quarters, not just the usual suspects.Â
The price of the Long Table dinner may have drawn criticism from certain quarters, perceiving €150 per ticket to be exclusionary, but there was zero profit being sought or made from the 450 diners.Â
Granted, not everyone can afford to attend, but such events capture the imagination and help to grow the festival overall, supporting the myriad free or lower-cost events, that highlighted a genuine commitment to diversity, inclusion and community.
Despite the fact eyelids were by now propped up with matchsticks after their own festival-related exertions, The Glass Curtain front of house staff delivered a fine service experience, immaculately professional yet ever courteous and friendly.Â
Murray’s kitchen, in turn, produced a quite superb five-courser which, as our wine writer, Leslie Williams, pointed out, didn’t contain a single bum note.Â
Highlights included stunning focaccia, of springy, savoury crumb and craggy, crisp crust, perfectly baked to just shy of burnt, served with tomato confit and homemade ricotta, but re-ordered repeatedly to mop up the dregs of further delicious courses.
Crudo of red mullet was exquisitely partnered with sweet, tart Bushby’s strawberries and dehydrated sea spaghetti, that crunched like pretzel on the palate.Â
The crowning achievement was a main course celebrating one of the festival’s breakout food products, Peter Twomey’s Glenbrook Farm free range pork, farmed within the city limits on the northside of Cork, and on the menu for several high-profile dining events earlier in the week.
In a restaurant driven by a cardinal commitment to the produce of Cork city and county, this meeting of a truly sublime local food product with a kitchen of great culinary precision and creativity, transported each and every diner in the room to a state of epicurean ecstasy.
All in all, it was a remarkable and extremely convivial evening of superb food, wines and company in what is now undoubtedly one of the country’s best restaurants and it is no coincidence that The Glass Curtain is at the very heart of a Cork hospitality sector that prizes a sense of community almost as much as its culinary sensibility.
For me, the most remarkable element of the aforementioned Long Table dinner was that 20 chefs from various establishments in the VQ area of the city, including The Glass Curtain, could come together and deliver a quite excellent meal to so many diners.Â
That spirit and the growing strength of the festival also bode well for the current pursuit of the World Region of Gastronomy designation for Cork and its hinterland in 2030. This would be a real game changer.
However, for all the positives celebrated above, there remains serious challenges and obstacles to successfully securing that precious designation.Â
Today, we are justly celebrating culinary Cork but I will certainly be addressing those obstacles and challenges in this space in the near future.
One of my most favourite restaurants, Kinsale’s St Francis Provisions, begin their Autumn Pop-Up series with a Mexican takeover by one of their own chefs, Erika Vargas, who will take over the kitchen (Sept 4/5/6) for a marriage of Mexican regional dishes and flavours with premium local seasonal produce, also catering for pescatarians and vegetarians with a naturally gluten-free menu.
If you’re a fan of Dublin’s Hang Dai — and you should be! — then the opening in Rathmines of Hawker, is to be much welcomed, for it is a stylish takeaway with a menu of exciting modern Chinese-inspired dishes and great cocktails, serving street food classics, dim sum, wok dishes, and more, including Hang Dai’s iconic sesame prawn sourdough toast with yuzu mayo.
Intrigued by this ‘black garlic’ that keeps popping up as a very tasty flavour addition on restaurant menus around the country?Â
You could try and do as I once did and make it, popping cloves in a rice cooker for almost 40 days until the once crisp, crunchy and astringent cloves morph into deeply savoury/sweet, black, fudge-y flavour bombs with all manner of potential uses.Â
Or you could spring for Burren Balsamics Black Garlic (€5.95), saving you all that waiting around and allowing you to get cracking right away on your own black garlic culinary creations, beginning with a delicious homemade black garlic aioli.
