Joe McNamee: I watched a TikTokker sweat, grunt, stuff his face and call it a food review
Bastion Restaurant, Kinsale. Picture Chani Anderson
In these digital days — when many restaurants appear to spend as much time online as they do in the actual kitchen — Bastion, in Kinsale (see last week’s restaurant review), is something of an outlier, extremely reticent when it comes to social media.
Neither can you blame those digitally dynamic restaurants; they are only speaking the lingua franca of our age, believing the national conversation around dining out is now primarily online.
I spend too much time on my own phone but not to read. I will always prefer the multi-sensory experience of reading ink on paper to squinting my way to semi-blindness, my scrolling hand becoming ground zero for chronic repetitive strain injury. But that is a price of progress.
I welcome progress. It is the natural order that nothing ever remains the same; frustration is the only outcome of believing otherwise. Indeed, progress and change can be exhilarating and mind-expanding, and the digital revolution has had a hugely positive impact. I was an early adopter and its immediacy of access was the starting point for many real-life relationships I now cherish across the Irish food world. In the early days, there was a very positive and proactive online Irish food community.
True, it was infinitely more static: Visual content consisted largely of still images and word count was limited. Nonetheless, you could learn much: About restaurants or Irish food products, brand new or long established; or from the informed opinions of professional chefs, growers, farmers, and specialty food producers and retailers.
That now seems like a distant memory of a fever dream. A crucial change is the faux- democratisation, every opinion now deemed equally valid — irrespective of the professional background, education, or qualifications of the holder.
Reality TV had uncovered an enormous public appetite for watching the daily mundanities of others online; online video, especially TikTok, is its logical conclusion. Anyone with a smartphone and a bit of neck could equally become an online star and the food world seemed the perfect backdrop. After all, everybody eats.
Food works well online, from the visual pop of a pretty dish to often hyper-vibrant personalities of their chef/cook creators. Instead of a new wave of digital food critics or reviewers, we instead got a cadre of self- appointed food ‘influencers’. Many now have a reach most print journalists can only dream of, often hundreds of thousands of followers.
For the most part, they stay within their comfort zones, very much aiming for the casual dining, fast-food and franchise section of the hospitality sector, and good luck to them. For starters, their relentless positivity will always trump toxic disinformation but be careful about confusing ‘opinion’ with ‘informed opinion’.
Most old school restaurant critics are journalists first; an oft maligned profession but at least there is an expectation of sound knowledge of subject matter combined with an informed and entertaining articulacy. Also, many of us have been dining out in Ireland for decades, through the last 30 or 40 years of radical evolution in Irish dining and hospitality.
Hey, says you, does it make any blind bit of difference to the taste of your dinner if Myrtle was doing the Hokey-Cokey back in 1985? No, not at all, but an experienced reviewer can put context on a dish, knowing just how good or bad it is in comparison to other versions and whether or not it is truly ‘the best jelly-goat-corndog in Ireland’, or whatever trending foodstuff is hitting the digital sweet spot this week.
I recently watched a very popular Irish TikTokker (200,000+ followers) in a famous New York deli, camera lingering for an age on his mustard- splattered face as he tried to put away a humongous Reuben.
Sweating like a baby python trying to eat its first goat, he pauses mastication, grunting from a half-full mouth: “Unreal!”
That, folks, was the entire review. I dunno, call me old- fashioned, but I don’t think old-school restaurant critics are quite done yet.
Following on from last week’s item about the re-opening of The Mountain House, outside Clonakilty, West Cork seems to be on something of a restaurant revivalist roll, as chef Mark Jennings and partner Sadie Pearce’s long-planned new venture in Leap has not only a name, Harnen (after an old Irish live fire baking utensil), but also a planned opening (June, date TBC).
Fans of fabulous food will, of course, recall that Jennings and Pearce were the dynamic duo behind the late lamented Pilgrim’s, in Rosscarbery, and, while Harnen will operate more as a daytime cafe and deli/bakery, expect a creative and original offering of exceptional fare, much of it based on produce grown by Jennings himself.
Food Culture Ireland’s Meet the Maker series, supported by Sheridans Cheesemongers, kicks off with Meet the Beekeeper (May 9), a visit to Galtee Honey farm in Co Tipperary, which I can personally recommend, and where beekeeping expert Aoife Ní Giolla Coda has taken over the reins from her father, not only producing extraordinarily good honey solely from native black Irish honeybees but also fighting the good fight to ensure their continued survival as a crucial part of our food heritage.
To this he adds fresh raw chicken, a can of chickpeas and some chopped pepper with most enjoyable results, a fine dinner, sweet, nutty, creamy and balanced, with a mildly spicy tang.
