It’s one o’clock on a grey-lidded Dublin afternoon and I am enjoying a fashionably old-fashioned lunch at The Winding Stair, overlooking the ancient city’s landmark River Liffey.
This book-lined restaurant’s name riffs on a line from the Anglo-Irish poet WB Yeats, but the view out the window from my stripped wood table is all James Joyce.
Ah, that’d be a skiff I see in the distance, a crumpled throwaway. And “Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey, under Loopline Bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchor chains, between the Customhouse old dock and George’s quay”.
Sounds about the right place to be researching items for an article on a deluxe new trend for deeply traditional food.
Joyce, this city’s ultimate author, died more than 80 years ago, but the menu essentials here would have been as familiar to him as the urban scene.
That hand-smoked haddock, for instance, a sweet-tasting local fish poached in milk with onions and white cheddar mash, would surely have received an approving nod.
As for the cockles and mussels, well, the dish famously features in Joyce’s Ulysses, whose literary pantry groans with cabbage, celery, wild garlic, leeks, watercress, sorrel, parsley, foraged nettles and sometimes weird-seeming meat arrangements.
All ingredients I recall from my own formative years in the Hutt Valley, seasoned as it was with the two great spices of the Irish (and Anglo-Kiwi) pantry – salt and pepper – and drowned in mutant white sauce.
What may have come as more of a surprise to the old man is the newfound wealth on the plate.
Part of the reason Joyce obsessed about eating – his most famous book’s anti-hero, Leopold Bloom, even slouches around Dublin all day while clutching a potato in his pocket – is the republic’s ravenously hungry history. (Oh, and as a means to drench his writing with sexual metaphor, but let’s not get into that over lunch.)
During the centuries, Ireland has been banjaxed by famine, poverty and, it has to be said, more than a few dud chefs. God may have been generous when it came to bestowing seasonal ingredients on the Emerald Isle but, for quite a long time, he appeared to be a bit stingy in respect of people who could work with them.
Other factors came into this. When my mother, who was born 90km southeast of here in a place called Carlow, quit this land for North America as a teenager, Ireland was an economic basket case, a land perpetually awash with grievance, somewhere to be wistfully recalled rather than joyously anticipated.
By contrast, the New Zealand she eventually arrived in figured as a land of milk and money.
Today, Ireland is the world’s third-largest economy in annual GDP terms (US$106,000 per person). Its overall national wealth is twice the size of ours.
More to the epicurean point, at least if the so-wrong-it’s-right Irish bread and butter pudding I am finishing up with at The Winding Stair is anything to go by, God has evidently had a change of heart on the chef front.
Conquest or migration
Okay, sure, strictly speaking bread and butter pudding isn’t, quote-unquote, Irish. The Brits invented it, I think, in the early 1720s or earlier, then brought it over the sea when they graciously appointed themselves to run the island’s 32 counties.
Three centuries on, does that make it any less “Irish”? Even the most famous of Irish staples, the potato, after all, started out in Peru before somebody brought it to England in god knows when, and then English statesman, writer and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh took it with him to Ireland in 1589.
As the London-based epicurean star Yotam Ottolenghi said when I interviewed him for the Listener, it’s basically only when people are hurled together by conquest or migration that “really interesting things happen” in the kitchen.
For many years in Ireland, and indeed in the countries of Great Britain and even New Zealand – all microscopic dots on the global gastronomy map in their own right – interesting has in recent times tended to mean culinary bounty brought into places by recent migrant groups. For instance, the small-plate Arab and Persian joints I had been enjoying in London the previous week, say, along with the Jerusalem-born Ottolenghi’s sixth and latest Middle Eastern-style deli and restaurant, in Hampstead Heath.
Or the rowdy but cosy new Oren restaurant in Dalston, which offers a steaming Middle East menu, all shimmering stews, sauces and light-as-air pita bread. Ireland, too, has plenty of the same, starting for me with a Dublin joint called Damascus Gate, as scrumptious as anything this side of the Levant. Not forgetting the new wave of Ukrainian eateries run by recently settled refugees.
New Zealand has gone that way, too, to some degree. In our case, the new restaurants and adopted styles of choice have tended to be mainly Southeast Asian and Japanese, at any rate until the surge of similarly superb Middle Eastern restaurants that Aucklanders have been enjoying since the 2010s.
What’s particularly striking to see in Eire in 2024, though, is the way in which today’s culinary eminences are reaching way back into their own history to navigate the epicurean present.
There’s a sense in which all Irish cooking – at least the good stuff, the real thing – is country cooking, according to food writer Colman Andrews, author of The Country Cooking of Ireland. “It is almost inevitably straightforward, homey fare, based on first-rate raw material, and shining with respect for rural traditions,” says Andrews.
But everywhere – or so it seems – chefs here are also dialling up the traditional colours, rethinking ancient arrangements, refocusing on vivid presentations that better suit the social media times.
Did I mention my fragrant bread and butter pudding?
Farm-to-tale staples
So, how and why is this all happening? Looking to learn a little more about the farm-to-table ingredients that make all this new activity possible, I went on Eveleen Coyle’s Fab Food Trails tour. Partly, this was at the behest of Tourism Ireland, but also because I liked the no-nonsense attitude of its elegant operator.
“If it’s not good, we don’t go there,” Coyle assured me.
Starting out near the chilly parklands of the lord mayor’s residence of Mansion House, the two-and-a-half-hour ramble takes in seven stops, including a cheesemonger and an organic market with stalls of produce from out west.
At a restaurant along the way, I tried a soda bread bruschetta, a twist on the traditional soda bread, while absentmindedly watching the maître d’ showing a couple of society women to an adjoining table before offering to hang up their heavy coats and keffiyehs.
The tour also takes in several of the city’s colourful old neighbourhoods, in particular Temple Bar. The name references a 17th-century logician, but it also works to confirm the rumour that the Irish are known to enjoy an occasional drink. I had one, a generous slug of 12-year-old whiskey, at The Swan Bar, a pub dating back to only 1661, before Coyle saved me from getting shamrocked on a second.
In the 15 years she has been operating the business here in the capital and in the city’s arch cultural rival, Cork, the changing pulse of Irish dining has fascinated my interlocutor.
It’s something Coyle has written about in her own Irish Potato Cookbook, a romp through the cultural costumes of the country’s star ingredient, whether colcannon, boxty or Dublin coddle or newer ideas such as parmesan potato cakes.
Our conversation quickly drifted to more spiritual matters. She offered a hymn of praise to the blessed St Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of the ultra-low-cost Ryanair and, as Coyle sees it, a patron saint of Ireland’s ongoing culinary revival.
Founded 40 years ago in 1994, O’Leary’s company has grown from a tiny business into the world’s largest non-American carrier. The budget airline has perhaps been the essential ingredient in allowing an Irish generation to access new food ideas abroad.
Ryanair “released us from the island, basically, by making travel to and from Ireland at unheard-of cut rates”, Coyle says. “And really, we couldn’t move fast enough.”
This new appreciation of Eire’s natural bounty was also impressed on up-and-coming young chefs, many of whom were for the first time starting to become stars in their own right as they worked with the country’s agricultural bounty. And the carrier was also bringing entirely new people back to the Emerald Isle; 1995 was the first year in a century and a half that the population grew.
“We do have really good food here for them to work with. We always have. We’re an island nation – something in our past we have sometimes tended to forget – and as an island, there once was a self-contained food culture. But in recent years, this is something we’re remembering again.”
Sounds a bit like New Zealand. The massification of international travel in the 1980s allowed young and youngish Kiwis to fan out across the world like never before, bringing their discoveries back home and prepping the local restaurant scene, as well as fast-growing food-oriented corners of the media for the explosion of imported flavours in the 1990s.
As with Ireland, the local fare – let’s all be honest now – had once spurred cultured guests to leap out of a window or else suddenly remember prior engagements.
I mean, really, could it have been any worse? “Well, yes, it could have been, actually,” Coyle replied brightly after a moment’s thought. “It was never as bad as UK food.”
Abrupt food evolution
If Irish dining has reached a fork in the road, so did I with a quick road trip out of Dublin to a place called Gorey, in Wexford, travelling to it by way of the streets of Arklow and on to the functionally named Bistro.
Bistro is immodestly celebrated for its sorcery with traditional ingredients, attentive staff and first-class grub, which changes frequently to reflect seasonality.
I went with a roast fennel and apple soup and cod fillet pan-fried in blackened spices, served with a creamy creole sauce. A dreamy Irish coffee – impossible to savour without recalling Alex Levine’s line about how the drink “provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, sugar, caffeine and fat” – rounded off the expedition.
On an earlier trip, I journeyed further down the same road, to Kilkenny, to Garrett Byrne’s rip-roaringly popular Campagne. The restaurant melds traditional French with, I suppose you’d say, Celtic peasant, which again makes perfect “traditional” sense given the Francophone invaders who poured into Ireland 800 years ago at the behest of the Pope and mixed it up with the locals.
These days, elegant Irish linen napkins are more the order of service. Black pudding is served with quail and smoked eggplant, for instance, or leek-infused poached egg, with haddock and potato mousse. The restaurant is one of the country’s 22 Michelin-star eateries.
Still, the highlight this time was back in the capital at Mister S, which specialises in traditional Irish ingredients done in Stone Age style, if you please, all sear and smoke over a naked flame.
I was joined by a friend from London, Lucy Cavendish, a former food editor at the Observer who, like me, is intrigued by the republic’s abrupt food evolution.
She started spending time in Ireland when she was in her mid-20s, back when the Troubles were still in full swing and, as she put it, “the food was pretty, um, basic. Actually, it was terrible. So, yes, we’re talking a long time ago in every respect.”
But, of course, there’s no reason Irish food ought to be terrible, not then and certainly not now, she added, “because obviously you’ve got so much great food you can source on the arable island: the vegetables, the meat and really good fish”.
Over dinner, we opted for all of the above. The spare rib was a particular hit with Lucy (I thought it was a bit salty), along with scrumptious flamed potatoes and sunset-hued carrots.
Eat your heart out, Mr Joyce.
