Restaurant review: My Goodness Café's vegan food is both tasty and affordable
Virginia O’Gara from the My Goodness Café on Sullivans Quay, Cork city. Pictures: Noel Sweeney
Sullivan’s Quay, Cork
My Goodness Café, newly installed in the home of the former Quay Co-Op restaurant, might well be described as ‘the accidental restaurant’.
My Goodness was already running a very busy vegan food retail company. Yet, when the offer came, Virginia and Donal O’Gara and team were unable to refuse a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace the iconic Quay Co-Op restaurant which had traded there for 44 years.
In an era when most Irish restaurants can barely break even, let alone make profit, MG make it harder again by operating to their own radical agenda: Cooking vegan food; paying fair prices to local producers for premium seasonal produce; paying all employees above the set minimum wage; and selling tasty, nutritious food at prices designed to be truly affordable.
Any experienced restaurateur will tell you that’s madness; for the MG team, there is no other alternative. For diners like me and my First Niece, however, it all comes down to the food.
It is a fresh sunny day, ensuring one of the nicest hospitality rooms in the city is light, bright and effortlessly airy.
There is always a dish of the day that affords a local vegetable primacy of place but, during the Hungry Gap with the last of the local asparagus finished and upcoming beetroots and artichokes yet to arrive, we order instead from the regular menu.
Spanish omelette is one of my favourite unions of egg and the humble spud, so I order eggless potato and okara Spanish omelette (€9.50) almost out of curiosity, to see how they cope without egg. Immaculately, as it turns out. A nicely creamy mayo with an acidic nip is a smart counterpoint to oily, soft potato and on the side are crisp, fresh salad leaves, fermented cabbage, and daikon pickles.
FN’s Reuben (€11.50) is on toasted rye sourdough, housing a very flavoursome and umami-rich ‘corned beef’ seitan (made from haricot beans and vital wheat gluten), melty ‘chz’, a zingy sauerkraut, and rich, creamy thousand island dressing of kimchi mayo.
A single bite justifies My Goodness’s pride in their flagship toastie.
The My Goodness vegan nachos (€13.50) are the stuff of late-night legend amongst Irish music festival fans, a dish that has sustained many a nocturnal reveller in the market for down and dirty flavours.
Yet, paradoxically, they are also among the healthiest options available in spaces traditionally dedicated to challenging the body on every front, making them equally popular as a healing breakfast option, especially when it is only the compulsive flavours that enable you to keep eating after a hard night on the tiles.
A delicious and nutritious bedrock of rice and beans, one of the great food pairings, underpins the assemblage.
On top of that, tortilla chips are drizzled in nacho ‘cheez’, an unctuous and deeply addictive melted cheesy cream that you’d never in a million years imagine is made from potatoes and carrots.
On top of that, fresh salad leaves and crisp, crunchy ferments, including curtidos, kimchi pico, jalapeños and daikon pickles. All in all, it makes for a glorious mash-up of immediately self-absolving guilty pleasure.
Tiramisu (€6.50) is a quite excellent sweet treat. The buttercream icing, sans butter, of course, is actually based on an old Mennonite ermine buttercream recipe involving prolonged reduction of apples, and the main body of the cake is based on one of Virginia O’Gara’s adapted aqua fava chocolate puddings. The culinary science is neither here nor then once you taste this delicious, moist, and creamy confection, the absence of dairy and eggs not remotely registered.
My Goodness kombuchas and kefirs are a crucial part of their retail business and for very good reason: They are transcendent beverages, superbly brewed. Flavours (eg lavender kefir or Beet-sy Boy kombucha) are sublime, a balanced exotic intrigue that sparkles with life, and a Minted Limey Kefir (€3.50) is a fine and refreshing palate cleanser.
I often think of Virginia O’Gara as the Irish vegan equivalent of former El Bulli chef Ferran Adrià, diving deep into culinary chemistry to create dishes. However, while Adria often used manufactured chemical additives, O’Gara’s creations are derived from entirely natural ingredients.
And though I rarely seek out meat or dairy substitutes if eating vegan or vegetarian food, O’Gara’s alternatives (eg nacho ‘cheese sauce’ made from potatoes and carrots, seitan ‘meat’, ‘butter’, ‘sour cream’ etc) often result in gorgeous dishes.
She is also a fermentation queen and her cuisine is essentially a combination of those experimental replica flavours and a superb range of fermented products such as krauts, pickles, and kimchi.
I also felt the closure of the Quay Co-Op on a personal level. It was here where I wrapped up my professional cooking career, as head chef in the early 1990s, and it is very close to my heart, so it brings me absolute joy to see My Goodness take over. Here’s to another 44-year run!
- Lunch for two, €51.90, with drinks and coffee
- mygoodnessfood.com
