Clodagh Finn: A guide to hospitality when we most need it

Artist Jennie Moran. Her book, beautifully produced and beautifully written, expands on the philosophy of hospitality. Picture: Louis Haugh

When people talk of the long, venerable tradition of Irish hospitality, the image that pops into my head is that of Gaelic noblewoman Margaret O’Carroll, dressed in gold, welcoming thousands of guests to a feast so lavish it would be remembered for centuries.

The annals tell us that she stood on the battlements of the great church at Killeigh, Co Offaly, on March 26, 1433 — we have the precise date — as her husband circled on horseback below, directing the crush of guests to the tables laid with food and drink.

There was ‘both meat... and all manner of gifts’ for the assembled chieftains, brehons (judges), bards, musicians, gamesters and the poor — no one was left out. They were all put up in a temporary ‘town’ made of wattle huts, laid out in streets with one for each profession.

It must have had something of the atmosphere of a music festival about it. Or a literary festival, or a bit of both.

There was music and feasting and the kind of special bonding that takes place when people break bread together. 

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There was another important element too. In bringing together the bards, the musicians and the poets, Margaret O’Carroll and her husband An Calbach O’Connor Faly were doing something else — they were reasserting Gaelic culture at a time when the Irish were pushing back against the Anglo-Irish.

Later that year, Margaret threw another big bash; this time at the other end of her kingdom in Rathangan in Co Kildare. It was a very welcome event in a year of food shortages and famine.

Margaret O’Carroll was a patron of the arts, a builder of roads and bridges and a woman who understood the importance of hospitality. The poets called her Margaret the Hospitable, an illustrious title that stuck thanks to the power of the pen. (Poets were so influential that a particularly potent verse could kill a person. The annals recorded three deaths caused by a poet’s ‘miracle’ in the 15th century).

Mobile hospitality service

But back to the art of living and the magic that happens when you bring people together to share food. Mention the word ‘hospitality’ now and you are most likely to hear the word ‘industry’ follow it. It is utterly refreshing, then, to hear artist Jennie Moran talk about hospitality in terms of the “gold dust of shared experience” that takes place when people meet over food.

In 2013, she bought the college canteen at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin as part of a project called Luncheonette. A ‘luncheonette’, she explains, “is a light-on-its-feet food station. It acts as a mobile hospitality service, designed to travel to sites where it is most needed, like a strange ambulance.”

Jennie Moran hoped to establish a place of refuge at the heart of the college. She was setting up a business, but one firmly rooted in an art practice. It was, she says, a “fully immersive, experiential installation” designed to provide a cosy, warm, convivial space where students could create a shared heritage.

The challenges were immense, not least because of the setting. This is her evocative description of the place she chose to set-down her strange ambulance of hospitality:

“An underground kitchen hidden deep in the bowels of a seventeenth-century whisky distillery. Thick walls, low ceilings, Newgrange quantities of natural light. Complex riddles of ancient pipes like a family tree of plumbers who knew better than the last. Glitter-bomb residue from a particularly flamboyant students’ union tenure lodged in a piece of flaking paint in the corner of the ceiling. Ten-centimetre terracotta tiles on the floor, all slightly different tones. The health inspector is not a fan of these.”

Food awards

Yet, over the course of the next eight years “beautiful, unexpected things”, as Jennie puts it, happened in this space.

In 2019, Luncheonette was awarded Best Café in Ireland at the Food and Wine Awards, a singular achievement for any establishment, not least for a college canteen in the basement of an art college.

In a sense, that was the least of it. In an NCAD strategic review, staff said the ideas they felt most proud of had come to them in Luncheonette. It became a place where lecturers and students shared tables. Families and friends were invited to lunch. Precious family recipes were put on the menu.

Jennie Moran and her team had created a space that softened the corners of the harsh, linear outside world.

Little wonder her book about her experience is called How to Soften Corners (Dropout Press, available at www.thelibraryproject.ie).

Artist Jennie Moran launching her book, How to Soften Corners, the story of Luncheonette, the unlikely (and award-winning) college canteen at the National College of Art and Design that showed how human connection through food can change a place.

“We humans endure lots of harsh landscapes in our daily lives —boundaries, borders, barriers, lines not to be crossed. But we are a non-geometric shaped species. Our bodies do not contain straight lines or 90° angles… We need breaks from straight lines. We need to touch things that are porous and might yield to us. We also need to feel minded and held by a space, adjacent to other humans.”

Between 2013 and 2021, Luncheonette fed some 600,000 people — “600,000 volts of joy,” to use Jennie Moran’s phrase because, she explains, both host and guest benefit from the power of hospitality.

“One of the most beautiful things about humans is the system we put in place for welcoming strangers. We have hospitality because we needed to understand how to welcome strangers into our villages and we needed to know that it was okay to let someone into your house.

“And even though it’s scary and you think they might hurt you, there’s an agreement, and hospitality is the agreement not to harm someone that you don’t know and it doesn’t make sense, but you do it anyway,” she says.

Her book, beautifully produced and beautifully written, expands on the philosophy of hospitality. She wrote it, she says, to see if the experience at Luncheonette could be applied elsewhere — to others in the hospitality industry, to those trying to make educational institutions feel a little softer or to readers simply interested in learning more about welcoming strangers.

How to Soften Corners, though, has a much wider reach. Its principles and ideas (not to mention recipes) are applicable to many areas of modern life. 

It is described as a playful how-to guide to hospitality — which it is certainly is — but it is also a lyrical reminder of the importance of nurturing human connection.

Another vital component of hospitality is that the guest must leave. After eight years, Jennie Moran’s mobile hospitality service moved on and now drops in to galleries, theatres, art studios to help soften the corners of those venues.

Meanwhile, her former head chef and childhood friend Siobhán Byrne is keeping the doors open at NCAD where she runs The Goodies café, which has the same philosophy and the same food.

Hospitality is best experienced in person, of course, but reading Jennie Moran’s book is a close-run second.

How to Soften Corners is a lavish, thought-provoking and important book that will help us to reclaim the true meaning of hospitality.

Margaret O’Carroll would be very pleased.