Insider View - on Eating

Lucy Madden wonders at the theatrical experience that eating at the World’s Best Restaurant offers – and puts in a plea for more simple, authentic food for visitors to rural Ireland, based on ingredients grown in the local area.

Overheard on a London street: “What is your national dish?” The answer came immediately. “Tomato tart with a garlic sauce”. Which country was in discussion I have never identified but reading a little publication “Favourite traditional Irish dishes” I wondered why I have never come across ‘Cockle soup’ or ‘Urney Pudding’ or ‘Balnamoon Skink’ in my travels around the country.

Of course we do have our traditional dishes and very good, if not very numerous, they are too. Irish stew, Dublin Coddle, Barm Brack, Champ and Colcannon, they can’t be rivalled.

As is often, but perhaps not often enough, pointed out we do too have the most wonderful ingredients. Some years ago a food writer friend told me she had been asked to produce a food map for the country but had had to refuse because she couldn’t find enough to put on it.

There has been a sea change over the last couple of decades, no doubt, but will we be able to resist the rise of the theatrical chef with his state-of-the-art foamers, dry ice chambers and ionisers? Do we want that kind of cooking and, as important, do we want it done badly?

Recently I had the great good fortune to eat at Noma in Copenhagen, voted for the third year running the World’s Best Restaurant. Here the word theatre springs to mind with 22 courses presented and explained by different waiters over a four hour period.

At roughly course number 12 my attention to the detail started to evaporate and it was an experience that one might contemplate repeating only after a lengthy interval, nevertheless what is remarkable about chef Rene Redzep’s exceptional cooking is the focus on foraged food, much of which the eater is being introduced to for the first time. Unless, of course, reindeer moss seasoned with cep, juniper essence and pine shoots are part of your daily diet.

At Noma presentation is dramatic; at one stage a live shrimp jumped out of a jar of ice and this we were bidden to eat; pickled and smoked quail’s eggs were presented in what looked like a biscuit tin.

Looking back, a little bewildered, my favourite course was crispy pork skin which appeared to be clamped to an intensely flavoured blackcurrant jelly. Later we saw sheets of this blackcurrant preparation being ‘air dried’ when, after dinner we were shown around the kitchens by an enthusiastic young man, one of the 45 workers at the restaurant, who intends to return to his native Dublin and open his own restaurant. Will it be run on the lines of Noma, I asked? The answer was a firm no.

It’s hard to imagine the sustainability of a restaurant run with this intensity and level of staffing and Noma may go the way of El Bulli, five times World’s best restaurant, which closed due to big losses accrued by the number of staff needed to produce chef proprietor Ferran Adria’s masterly dishes.

Nevertheless, these award-winning restaurants, while they last, have the power to attract numerous visitors to an area; I doubt we should have visited Copenhagen had we not had the booking at Noma, and this would have been a shame since it is a city of great charm and interest.

Noma’s influence has inspired a whole food culture based around foraging so it was at another restaurant, Restaurationen, that we were introduced to the delights of goutweed which, as was explained, is a ferocious weed and one that is rampant around my garden, I’m now glad to say. ‘Goutweed’ turns out to be ground elder, a leaf with a flavour a little reminiscent of aniseed that I now consume in various guises with the added advantage of weeding the flower beds at the same time.

All this begs the question; what is the best food? Good ingredients, for a start, but also service and value for money. I would argue that eating out isn’t just about the food, it’s also about ambience and fun and not being made to feel you are being looked down upon by an arrogant waiter. Chefs working outside their capability zone can produce horrid food too, complicated blobs of this and that and mysterious offerings in mini Kilner jars.

Some of the best food I have eaten has been at market stalls, or at beachside cafés, or in the houses of friends. It is sad that as you drive around rural Ireland today so much of the food on offer comes from the Far East. We all love a good ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’ but how many towns offer visitors what is authentic and what is found growing in the area?

We have marvellous ingredients growing on our doorsteps, some of the best meat and fish in the world and we don’t even need to tinker around with them too much. Even a little offering of goutweed wouldn’t go amiss.