Ireland: Craft of a City (2024)

After 20 years of heading up some of the most celebrated kitchens in London, chef Chris McGowan knew exactly where to begin to find the heart and soul of modern Irish cuisine when he came home to Northern Ireland to open his own restaurant: with the flavour. For those who make the 20 minute trip down the motorway from Belfast to Wine and Brine, his award-winning restaurant in the village of Moira, they’ll find that his signature dishes – such as slow cooked beef short rib, served with its own smoked bone marrow and local onions charred over the barbecue – reflect a modern take on traditional Irish eating, “being proud of it and expressing it in a slightly more contemporary way.”

It’s giving away no great secret for McGowan to reveal that what really makes Ireland’s food scene so alive right now, for him and the other chefs getting international notice, is the same thing that’s made Irish food great from the start – great produce and great people.

“We have some of the best produce in Europe in my opinion,” he says. “In years gone by, the food heritage that we have was seen as heavy, robust winter food,” he says. “There's nothing wrong with that, but it's just about bringing some elements of that up to date and trying to make it a little bit more contemporary without losing its integrity.”

After so many years in frantic London kitchens, McGowan now finds great personal joy in the relationships that are the core of his and his wife Davina’s business. The restaurant’s vegetables are grown either on his own rooftop garden or by two semi-retired local growers in their allotments, and meat is supplied by two world-renowned master butchers in the village. Four local hunters bring him woodco*ck, pheasants, mallards and partridge, year-round.

“I wanted to get back to really good values and supporting local people as much as I can,” he says. “We wanted to be part of the community.”

Moira itself has been a settlement for some 1500 years in various forms – though it has long been a hub for farming, and still has a population of only around 4,000, it is also the site of Moira Castle, one of the country’s grandest private residences of the fifteenth century. It has always been a place where people appreciate the good life. When visitors arrive from Belfast or further afield, McGowan is keen to give them a taste of what the north has to offer, from the renowned Carlingford Oyster farm down the road at Lough Neagh to the many other adventures all within a short drive.

“In Northern Ireland, you're only ever an hour and a half away from anything,” he says, pointing out that many of his visitors like to begin at Ballintoy harbour, a key filming location for Game of Thrones. “You could be at the coast at the Giant's Causeway and the Bushmill's Distillery, and then in 90 minutes you could be in the Fermanagh Lakelands, which is absolutely breathtaking.”

In Fermanagh, it won’t just be the lakes that will take your breath away. At Finn Lough, even your night’s sleep will be unlike any other you’ve had, as you rest close to the land and under the stars in stunning woodland bubble domes after dining on fresh local produce grown within the kitchen’s own polytunnel.

McGowan’s best downtime, though, is spent over the road at Pretty Mary’s pub, named after an ancient fort whose remains can still be found just outside the town. Here, he says, a traveller is bound to get good advice not just from the locals but also from the owner, Joe, who’s taken all he’s learned in 40 years of running pubs across Northern Ireland to focus on running just one and doing it well.

“I look at people like that, where you've done so much other stuff in your career,” he says, “All you want to do is hone what you've learned and produce one thing that's really good as opposed to ten that are average.“

But a great Irish pub needs more than just a great owner, and for McGowan, Pretty Mary’s is the place to get to know the best of the people of the town. “It’s a beautiful vibe,” he says. “Everybody knows each other, but if you go in there as a traveller, you'll never sit there and find people won't have a conversation with you. They'll get to know who you are and give you the inside track on where to go and what to see.”

Some of Ireland’s most unique food destinations can be found along the spectacular coastline journey known as the Wild Atlantic Way. At Sligo, past the unmissable cliffs at Sliabh Liag, stop by the An Dúlamán distillery to sample gin made using five different local seaweed botanicals. Follow that up with one of Prannie Rhatigan’s coastal seaweed identification and foraging tours, capped off with a taste of the Atlantic at Eithna’s By the Sea.

Further down the west coast in Galway, chef Enda McEvoy’s Michelin-starred Loam restaurant and wine bar has been redefining international expectations of Irish food for more than half a decade. Here, the connection to the land that’s right there in the name goes beyond just the ingredients – the tableware is made by local potters, McEvoy says, and the table legs are made in the Galway shipyards.

When it comes to the food, Loam focusses on bringing genuinely new ideas from a deep connection to the local landscape, not just a dusty idea of heritage. “We're not recreating ancient dishes from historical documents,” McEvoy says. “We're forging our own way.”

His suppliers include local growers and a single game shooter. He’s also keen to point out the adventurous new entrepreneurs who have spotted gaps in this emerging scene, such as Ballyhoura Mushrooms, who grow and age “some of the best sh*takes I've ever seen” in the mountains between Cork and Limerick.

“It's the small producers that are driving the change for us,” he says, pointing to the various suppliers setting up in rural areas all along the west coast, from the boglands to the mountains, supplying the flavours that are at the heart of the Loam identity, such as elderflowers, wild garlic seeds, and dillisk, a seaweed that tastes surprisingly like truffles. “When we opened up we spent a lot of time gathering our own wild herbs, but now there are people that have the wherewithal to go further afield and gather stuff like seabuckthorn berries and herbs that are grown up on the frostline.”

From Galway, McEvoy might point a visitor to the mountains of Connemara National Park, where a walk to the peaks will take you up high enough to truly comprehend the wildness and variety of landscapes both in the park itself, across glacial lakes and fjords or out to the Aran Islands. “From up there you can decide on all the rest of the places you want to go,” he says. Out there on the islands, and others such as Achill and Inishbofin, he’ll point you to friendly communities where forward-thinking fishermen are bringing the traditional techniques that have kept their communities self-sufficient for centuries up to date with new sustainable fishing practices that, McEvoy says, do wonders for the flavour.

Off the coast, there’s also scuba diving, something McEvoy himself only tried out for the first time a few years ago with the local organisation Scubadive West, who organise excursions to wrecks along the coasts and in the bays and fjords. “It was a real eye opener,” he says. “There's a whole world down there.”

He is also excited by the many small towns along the west coast where younger people are coming home from the big cities to start artisanal businesses built on their heritage and the great local supply. In towns such as nearby Ennistimmon in County Clare, a new wave of bars, cheese shops and bakeries popping up bring a cool “vim and vigour” that is, so far, mostly a local secret. For McEvoy, after years living in Spain, Germany and Australia, he can’t imagine a better life than the one he currently lives in Galway and its surrounds.

“We basically live in a little forest beside a lake,” he says. “I drive in to work and it takes me twelve minutes. I can go kayaking in the morning and then go to work in a city.”

One of the towns McEvoy points out that's begun to hop is tiny Ballydehob in West Cork, an ancient coastal settlement with a history running back to the bronze age. Nearby is the 15th-century Kilcoe Castle, a fortress rescued and restored by its current owner, Jeremy Irons. But fame is now coming to Ballydehob for other reasons, including Michelin star Restaurant Chestnut, an intimate 18-seater in a 100-year-old building. Here, chef Rob Krawczyk turned his humble and relaxed approach into a Michelin star in only his first full year in business, as an unprecedented three restaurants in Cork received the coveted star last year. He credits the sudden interest in the area’s dining with both the fresh produce and the energy brought by a younger generation exploring both their heritage and the relaxed lifestyle of the south coast.

In this family business, the stories that come from long chats over tea with those suppliers are a big part of the experience of Krawcyz’s restaurant. The chef, who learned the art of charcuterie and smoking from his father who helps out to this day fostering relationships with the local suppliers and foragers, always starts with the story.

“Those stories develop throughout your food, and you talk to your guests about it, and people love stories,” he says. “You have the producers who are very passionate and have been here for a very long time, foraging and picking seaweed and all that side of things, but there haven’t really been too many chefs around to cook it until recently. Now there's an outlet for it.”

Restaurant Chestnut sits across the road from Levis Corner House, a century-old, family-run pub and grocery store whose latest proprietor used to be in a band and has turned it into an unlikely and somewhat informal stop for touring musicians. At Levis, those in the know can find great crowds that take having a good time seriously, even as the bands themselves play from behind the grocery counter and patrons stand on chairs to grab a view. “They put some fantastic bands on,” says Krawczyk, pointing to the energy his neighbour brings to Ballydehob. “Everything helps everybody, it's great that people can come here and go and listen to some really fantastic music.”

From Ballydehob, he likes to point visitors not quite all the way out to the edge of Europe - Ireland’s most southerly point at Mizen Head, but to the slightly closer unspoiled sandy shores of Barley Cove, and the nearby co*ckle Beach, where you can rake your own co*ckles.

“It’s a lovely thing to do when the tide is half out and you get the really nice sized ones,” he says. “I like to do that in the summer just for ourselves.”

It’s not just Michelin-level eating that the south coast has to offer. There’s a different pace of life down here. Krawcyzk says he could happily sit all day with a pint in hand at O’Sullivan’s in Crookhaven, dangling his legs off the pier while eating an open-faced crab sandwich or a pot of shrimp. Meanwhile, on the nearby Dingle peninsula in County Kerry, you can push that relaxed seaside life even further as you sample the artisanal ice cream of Murphy’s, and a different spin on Irish spirits at the Dingle Distillery where the taste of the Atlantic makes its way into small batch whisky and a gin, which has a label painted with the distillery’s own stunning view across the harbour.

There’s no better way to top off a day exploring the coast at Dingle than to pull up a stool and a pint at the legendary J. Curran’s shop bar. Whatever night of the week, just as it has been for the 150 years it’s been in the family, the locals and the town’s ever-present musicians happily keep space for visitors to share and join in the tradition.

“Ireland is a small island, and it’s all quite local,” Krawczyk says. “There's amazing produce throughout the whole country and we're very fortunate with that. We're developing our own food identity and it's only going to get stronger.”

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