Restaurant review: West Cork's Harnen delights after passing of Pilgrim’s

My next trip to Harnen will happen very soon and we plan on popping open a bottle and letting lunch linger right through until closing time.

Busy scene at Harnen, West View, Kilmacabea, Leap, Co Cork. Picture: Larry Cummins

Harnen

West View, Kilmacabea, Leap, Co. Cork

Our rating: 9/10

Maybe I’m being over-dramatic, but I am someone who plunges into deep mourning at the passing of a favourite restaurant. But when Pilgrim’s in Rosscarbery closed, in April 2023 as the country was truly beginning to escape the clutches of covid, I went full-blown sackcloth and ashes and for a lot longer than 40 days.

In the eight years since chef Mark Jennings and his partner, Sadie Pearce, first opened Pilgrim’s, it had become one of a troika of superb West Cork restaurants, all conducting their own deep dives into the superlative produce of their hinterland. While the other two, Dede at the Customs House, in Baltimore, and Restaurant Chestnut, in Ballydehob, were and still are Michelin-starred, Pilgrim’s cleaved to a different path.

All three shared a deep-rooted empathy for West Cork produce, but while Dede and Chestnut delivered on the plate with technical precision and finesse so beloved by the Michelin inspector, Jennings took a looser, more rustic approach, impossibly generous dishes changing daily, depending on what produce, in particular, fish and seafood, arrived on the doorstep each morning. He also sought out and incorporated the more outré produce grown in West Cork’s Singing Frog Gardens, specialising in unusual Asian and South American produce.

A traditional harnen, a hardening stand, which lends its name to thenew Leap cafe-deli. Picture: Larry Cummins

Meanwhile, Pearce ran a simple yet elegant dining room with supreme efficiency tempered by a pronounced mothering instinct. After the arrival of their first child, family took priority and Jennings was also keen to pursue his increasing interests in bread baking and growing his own produce. They left behind a whole lot of fabulous food memories and a bucketful of tears from this writer alone. I received news last year of their impending new hospitality venture with all the disbelieving joy of Lazarus’ mum having to set another place at the post-funeral dinner.

On a recent and glorious midweek morning, The Gambler and I spun down to the village of Leap to check out Jennings’ and Pearce’s new hospitality enterprise, a cafe-deli named Harnen, after a traditional Irish fireside hardening (hence, ‘harnen’) stand used to finish oat cakes. Sited on the Cork side of Leap, as you enter the village, they have entirely re-worked a formerly bland and shabby commercial unit, turning it into a light-filled and airy space with wooden beams and beautiful locally handmade ash tables and chairs.

In the centre of the room is a deli ‘stall’ retailing Jennings own market garden produce, along with a selection of other Irish food products. In the basement, below, is a state-of-the-art bakery where Jennings turns out a stunning array of sourdough breads and highly imaginative baked confections.

We call for a serving of that excellent bread, served with Gloun Cross butter, to mop up the juices of our first course, Harnen Garden tomatoes, Macroom mozzarella, gazpacho, olive tapenade and kale chips (€6.50). The heritage tomatoes are exquisite, meaty flesh, with sweet fruity acidity, to counter the creamy fat of the cheese, gazpacho humming in harmony in the background.

Fresh buns at Harnen. Picture: Larry Cummins

Next up is masala buttered crab, shredded crabmeat served on brown bread so laden with a molasses-adjacent sweetness as to nearly qualify as cake. It swims proudly in a pool of rich, glistening yoke-yellow ghee, a cluster of mixed leaves on top. Pops of anise from shaved fennel, acidic nips of apple, and sorrel’s bitter bite, are little lifebelts of contrast. It too is an extraordinarily good dish.

Crab and crackers at Harnen. Picture: Larry Cummins

Lamb koftas (€21.50) are big, bould, and rugged, pink and juicy within. They marry sublimely with roast peppers, beetroot yogurt, and wilted chard. Sinfully delicious oak-smoked potatoes are refried to a crunchy crisp and served with genuine aioli, stinging with garlic. We mop up the lot with the pillows of soft flatbread. The Gambler and I are now deeply regretting that we have to drive back and can’t wash it all down with a fine natural wine from a very compact list.

Bursting at the seams, we share a ‘Swiss roll’ of courgette, raspberries and cream, washed down with excellent West Cork Coffee. (Heartbreakingly, a lemon verbena cream boule, filled with blackcurrant curd, goes awol before I get home; and a custard bun, with fig leaf and Jennings’ own West Cork peaches is snaffled by a now freshly disinherited child when I do get home.)

It is such a pleasure to welcome Jennings and Pearce back to the Irish hospitality fold and I suspect the only meal with any prospect of topping this one between now and the end of the year will be the next time I return to Harnen. That will happen very soon and we plan on popping open a bottle and letting lunch linger right through until closing time.

• Lunch for two with coffee, €74.25 
• Instagram: harnen.of.leap