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This time two waiters appeared. One placed a cocktail in front of each of us, while the other set down on the table an array of appetizers, traditional fare from the fabled bar upstairs – ’21’ Club mini-burgers, crispy chicken wings, jumbo shrimp cocktail, and a large charcuterie.
“Nobody’s mentioned the mob,” Mike said, dredging a shrimp in the sauce and moving it to his mouth without a single drip.  Continue reading »

One-offs, oddities and suchlike is the loose theme for this the second blog post from the 2017 Killarney Beer Festival.
A new beer from Kinnegar always gets my attention, and this was their first time at the festival, having picked up the grand prize in the beer competition last year. Making its début this time was Great Arch, which is a blonde beer broadly in the Cologne style but dry-hopped. There’s a quite a bitter aroma, acidic and sickish, but that’s the only bum note.  Continue reading »

Ballymaloe Cookery School & Gardens. Coffee Break turns into A Day Trip

The cock crows. He always does when I arrive at Ballymaloe Cookery School. Good to be back!  Continue reading »

The Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI) has again made calls for emergency measures to be implemented to solve the crisis shortage of chefs in Ireland.  Continue reading »

I’ve been a professional chef for over thirty years and being a chef means that you have the opportunities to cook and eat some amazing food! I will eat anything (except prawns, crab and lobster, which I suddenly became allergic to, six years ago, after a lifetime of eating them without any problem). I still cook them by smell and memory, but I miss eating crab claws – terribly!We have two kids and they certainly don’t eat everything that I’d like them to.  Continue reading »

Lingenfelder Dornfelder 2011, Grosskarlbacher Osterberg Pfalz, 12.5%, €18.95 O’Brien’s

The Dornfelder grape is a modern (1955) crossing which is well suited to the cool climate of Germany (and getting popular in England too). It is packed with red berry fruit and soft round tannins and this delicious example is reminiscent of good Pinot Noir.  Continue reading »

As in previous years, twenty Irish breweries took stands at the Killarney Beer Festival. This year, unfortunately for my ticking predilection, the line-up veered a little away from the local breweries – no West Kerry, no Eight Degrees, no Black’s of Kinsale – and in favour of breweries I meet all the time in Dublin: Wicklow Wolf, Boyne Brewhouse and The Porterhouse were among the first-timers for 2017.
Anyway, there was still enough to keep me occupied for the weekend.  Continue reading »

Taste of the Week
Cascade by Cotton Ball Brewing

Cascade-ing at Cork Summer ShowA lovely pint from Brian.

Cascade is a relatively new addition to the Cotton Ball Brewing Company’s  portfolio and I made its acquaintance at the Cork Summer Show at the weekend. It’s a beauty and our Taste of the Week.

It is a well balanced celebration of the hops of the same name, a single hop beer with terrific flavour, slightly spicy too but with flavour galore and the ABV is just 3.8%.  Continue reading »

For the uninitiated amongst you, a lepidopterist is a butterfly expert. I wouldn’t know a Painted Lady if she landed on my face and a Comma would only give me pause, as it were. I do a pretty passable job of butterflying a leg of lamb but that doesn’t makes me a butterfly expert. As I was feeling fairly lazy when shopping, I bought my leg of lamb butterflied. So, I spent my time thinking about a marinade.  Continue reading »

The Cork Summer Show 2017
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Town and Country Get-together in the sun.  Continue reading »

Night of the Long Table
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Four Hundred Dine Out on Cork’s South Mall

Phil (standing) wishes Happy Birthday to fiancée Veronica; they get married today.  Continue reading »

The 2017 Killarney Beerfest kicked off on a sunny Friday at the end of May. As per, I headed down on the train and used the spare couple of hours to catch up on a few bottles that had been sitting in my fridge a little too long.
First up, as we pulled out of Heuston, was White Gypsy’s Toasted Special. No style is specified, only that it’s dark and leans heavily on its Munich malt. And so it proved. It’s rather muddy in the glass and smells rich and wholesome.  Continue reading »

The convoy set out across the Blasket Sound and on their arrival the wedding feast began in earnest… Nine barrels of Bandon Rattler, brewed by Allmans in west Cork, were consumed at this feast, according to Méiní, and the fact that in Maurice Keane’s memory it was eight barrels plus a gallon of whiskey confirms that it was certainly an occasion when thirsty souls were amply refreshed… and no doubt the island musicians did their share.  Continue reading »

The beer that held the record (until today) of languishing longest in my drafts folder without a proper write-up is Stone Imperial Saison. That picture there was date stamped 12th March last, taken in The Tap House in the aftermath of their White Hag event. I feel terribly guilty about not getting to it sooner because it definitely deserves a recommendation. Normally I’d run a mile from saison at 9.4% ABV but it was the end of the night and my guard was down: you know how that works.  Continue reading »

A City by the Sea. Exhibition at St Peter’s

Is this the oldest outdoor advert in Cork?  Continue reading »

Italian Wines From Recent Tastings. 
A Short List Of Favourites!

With a little help from the recently published The Modern History of Italian Wine, we have been tasting our way through quite a few wines from the peninsula and its islands. Such a range of terroirs, such a range of wines from the cool foothills of the Alps to the heat of Puglia out to the hot islands with their cooling breezes.  Continue reading »

It's hard to believe that Taste of Dublin has been in existence since 2006, where it started in the grounds of Dublin Castle before moving to the Iveagh Gardens, entertaining and feeding people for the past 11 years.  The 2017 Festival kicks off tomorrow at midday and I'm here to give you a sneak preview of what to expect once you've bought your ticket.

Read more ».  Continue reading »

Today’s beers were picked at random from an off licence shelf in Utrecht. It wasn’t until I got them home that I noticed they’re from Austria. The branding is very different from my pre-conceptions of sturdy traditional Austrian brewing, but then I suppose it must have an awesomely epic craft beer scene these days, same as everywhere else. Both are by Bevog brewery, founded in 2013 in the far south east of the country, hard by the border with Slovenia.  Continue reading »

A good friend in the food industry left me thinking when he described lemon chicken as being “very nice, but it doesn’t taste of lemon”. The irony of the statement was not lost on me. So I set about getting some lemon chicken cooked. This time though, it tastes of lemon, for sure. It tastes of chicken too. So, lemon chicken it is.
As with so many of my recipes, this depends upon top quality meat and a small number of quality ingredients.  Continue reading »

Taste of the Week
Arbutus Bread 

Sourdough Bread has fed humanity for 4000 years. That’s an opening statement on the Arbutus Bread website. The company itself doesn’t go back that far!

Declan Ryan founded Arbutus Bread in 1999, after selling his previous business [Arbutus Lodge Hotel]. “I knew that retirement would not suit me, and that I had to be active . So I converted a small two car garage in front of my house into a tiny bakery.  Continue reading »