US food bloggers hot on the trail of our culinary fare

GET your spatulas at the ready, put the special sauce on show and, whatever you do, hide the pop-tarts.

Two senior contributors to America’s favourite food website have arrived to highlight the delights of traditional Irish cuisine, and they want to hear from (and, in all likelihood, be fed by) you.

In a move likely to further copperfasten this country’s place among the food world’s finest, bloggers from the 450,000-reader-strong foodspotting.com website are descending on locations throughout Ireland to taste our culinary delights.

The website, which began in January 2010 and is also available at the iPhone App Store, acts as a de facto search engine for foods and restaurants across the world.

It works by allowing users to post captioned images of their meals while tagging them onto an online map which can then be accessed by other users around the globe.

While this country already had hundreds of users, Fáilte Ireland brought two of the website’s senior members — Chris Connolly and Amy Cao — across the Atlantic as part of a taxpayer-funded trip.

During the week-long visit, which started at the weekend, the pair will eat out in Dublin, Galway, Waterford, Kilkenny and Cork — including the second city’s English Market.

Explaining the value of the visit, the cost of which has not been disclosed, Fáilte Ireland’s director of marketing, John Concannon, said it would give this country’s food sector a further foothold in the world market.

“Foodspotting.com is the perfect platform to promote the food of Ireland and this country as an important destination for the best dishes and beverages.

“Ireland has some of the best-quality ingredients as well as its own unique cuisine and this partnership allows us to get that message across to the people who count in the US.

“In this day and age, if you are not online, you are nowhere and opportunities such as this are vital,” he said.

* Further information on the major food blog, named as one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, can be seen at foodspotting.com.