Suzanne Harrington: Being vegetarian was hard work in the '80s — the Quay Co-Op was the go-to place

I remember the first time going up the stairs of the Quay Co-Op, and seeing all these radical flyers on the walls. Gay rights. Women’s rights. I didn’t know Cork had any gays, or that women had any rights

Donal O’Gara, Virginia O’Gara, Arthur Leahy and Wayne Dunlea share tea around a quiet table at the Quay Co-Op restaurant on Sullivan’s Quay, Cork City, reflecting on its past as they prepare for My Goodness to reopen the space as a pop-up vegan restaurant for Christmas. Picture Chani Anderson.

As a Cork native long-term located elsewhere, a constant feature of trips back to Ireland over the decades has always been popping into the Quay Co-Op for a sit down in that high-ceiling space overlooking the river. A place to exhale.

And then I saw a headline that it was closing down. My heart sank. Was it about to be turned into luxury apartments? A steakhouse? A carpark?

I read on. Nothing of the kind, thankfully. No, it is being handed from the vegetarians to the vegans, passed from the mighty Arthur Leahy to vegan chef Virginia O’Gara and her husband Donal. It will remain in safe hands.

I was in third year at school when I first came upon the Quay Co-Op. It was 1984, the year Ronald Reagan was visiting Ballyporeen. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was organising a protest, because back then, pre-Gorbachev, we were far more worried about nuclear catastrophe than anything else.

It was the year Frankie Goes To Hollywood released Two Tribes, and two years after the release of Where The Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs’ gently coloured storybook about nuclear apocalypse. We were talking about things like fallout shelters.

Climate catastrophe was still just a hole in the o-zone, something we didn’t start hearing about until 1985, when we began talking about aerosols. Innocent times.

I remember the first time going up the stairs of the Quay Co-Op, and seeing all these radical flyers on the walls: Gay rights, women’s rights. 

I didn’t know Cork had any gay people, or that women had any rights. In the end, I never went on that coach to Ballyporeen — as a teen, I had little autonomy but I’d like to personally thank the ghost of Ronald Reagan for introducing me to the Quay Co-Op and all it stood for. And still stands for.

Not long after Reagan’s visit, I was in the market, and the sight of a man in a blood-stained white coat bent over carrying half a bisected cow on his back — like some Damien Hirst horror show — started me joining the dots between meat and murder.

The Quay Co-Op became a go-to place, where I’d queue up at the counter for stodgy bakes and brown rice and Textured Vegetable Protein-based dishes.

TVP was a sort of flavourless gravel-like substance you had to soak in water to make it edible, Quorn and Linda McCartney had not yet come to the rescue.

Back then being vegetarian was hard work, and being vegan was unthinkable. Living in Barcelona in the 1990s, there were three small vegetarian restaurants that served a city of 3m. 

One of them had a no salt, no spices, no wine-list policy — they wanted you to suffer. It was all about personal health, rather than ethics. It lacked joy. It lacked fun. It lacked yum.

Fast-forward 40 years, and you can’t get a table at London’s Michelin-starred vegan restaurant Plates until at least next March; in Soho, you have Michelin-starred French chef Alexis Gauthier offering vegan haute cuisine.

‘Michelin-starred’ and ‘vegan’ have never, until now, been found in the same sentence. And yet here we are. Vegan has come a long way from brown rice and TVP.

Bravo then to the next iteration of the Quay Co-Op, the baton passed from the visionary, pioneering Mr Leahy to the next generation. True progress.

I can’t wait for my next visit.