Café Paradiso serves up success with cookbook

THOSE familiar with Ireland’s most innovative vegetarian restaurant will know just how good a chef Denis Cotter is. Even the most committed carnivores salivate at the fare on offer in Café Paradiso, the restaurant he and his wife, Bridget, opened in 1993.

Last week that culinary expertise received international recognition when his book, Paradiso Seasons, won the Best Vegetarian Book in the World Award, beating off stiff competition at the ninth Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Barcelona.

His previous work, the Café Paradiso Cookbook, was published in 1999 to widespread acclaim and already the first print run of Paradiso Seasons has sold out with a reprint in the making.

“It was a great honour,” said a delighted Mr Cotter yesterday. “I was a bit unsure about the whole thing beforehand but I was chuffed when it won.”

A year in the making, Denis worked in tandem with designer John Foley and the result is a book that runs to almost 300 pages.

Featuring over 140 creative recipes and prefaced by witty introductions, the book offers an inspirational approach to cooking and eating seasonal food.

Paradiso Seasons represents Mr Cotter’s personal journal through the shifting seasons, focusing on his favourite vegetables at their prime moment and creating elegant and thoughtful recipes.

“We decided to work chronologically. I was writing three or four weeks ahead of the seasons and, while it was a very stressful way of working for the designer, it was great for me.”

The Gourmand awards are considered the ‘Oscars’ for food and wine books and attract huge interest each year. More than 4,000 books from 60 countries were submitted.

“It was quite humbling to see so many extraordinary books,” said Mr Cotter.

Although passionate about vegetarian food, he is no zealot. “I don’t believe in absolutes. I like to think of seasonal eating as a guiding principle but we cannot be so isolated that we don’t eat any out of season food.”

That absence of dogma also applies to the restaurant. “Most people who eat in Café Paradiso are not vegetarian. We couldn’t survive on a vegetarian audience alone and, to be honest, we wouldn’t want to. We always wanted to be accepted in the mainstream rather than praised in a ghetto.”

Paradiso Seasons is published by Cork University Press priced at €39.