Mad for seafood

BACK in the day when most Irish fish restaurants served food wrapped in paper and you ate it standing up, Margaret Thatcher’s Britain gave us the Gastro Pub.

Most of the urban ones were huge, cavernous places that used space poorly and served food that had a hint of ethnicity though no culture would claim it as its own. Thrusting people with shoulder pads drank pointless white wine while Simply Red or Sade filled in the brief silences.

We adapted the idea quickly and developed a genre almost unique to these islands — The Carvery. Some were/are wonderful but the majority owe more to industrial production lines than culinary skills. They were/are pit stops for busy people whose priorities are other than the karma enjoyed by the chicken korma they were about to eat.