Hot on the trail of fabulous food
Sunday January 08 2012
City tours offering the chance to taste Ireland's growing range of culinary delights are a hit, says Hilary A White
Asked about the cuisine when he visits his ancestral homeland, the US actor and comedian Denis Leary once quipped: "Irish cuisine? You take everything edible in the house and boil it up for 15 hours 'til you can sip it though a straw." It was the early Nineties, if memory serves, and the perceived wisdom was that Ireland was loved for many things. Food wasn't one of them.
Someone really ought to sign up Leary for a tasting tour with Fabulous Food Trails. Set up five years ago, the company mantra might as well be that the days of joking about Ireland's narrow palate are well and truly over. Instead, it wants to illuminate natives and visitors alike about the breadth of culinary quality being produced and served up in Dublin and Cork. Not posh nosh, just good nosh.
Tasting trails in each city are gastro-centric on paper but the end result is something more resonant and profound than just nibbling your way around a city centre over a couple of hours. Of course, you are brought to great Irish institutions such as the English Market, Listons or Sheridans Cheesemongers, but the little gems in between are what turn out to be the meat in the sandwich. These range from endangered old-school butchers, cottage-industry market stalls and quaint cafes with big ideas.
FFT's head foodie Eveleen Coyle stepped away from 27 years in the publishing industry and soon got itchy feet, she explains.
"I wanted to do something that was entirely different and food-related, but I didn't want to cook!" During a trip to a book festival in Australia, she was seated at a dinner next to Maggie Beers and Stephanie Alexander, doyennes of Australian food. The pair were singing the praises of their national cuisine. Using knowledge garnered while working on many food-related titles, Coyle found herself "rabbiting away back at them about what was happening in Ireland with cheese and meats etc". The following day, she ran into celebrity chef and old acquaintance Maeve O'Meara. O'Meara had begun her own food tours in Sydney and suggested to Coyle that she give it a go in Ireland. Initially sceptical, she and her niece Pamela decided to go for it.
Eveleen and her other niece Alice (who leads the Cork trails) and chief guide Roisin Fallon are those kinds of people you wish you knew in every city you visited. They are the ones with the insider info and the ability to bring streets to life by not only telling you where does the best this or that, but also introducing you to the very names on the shopfronts and letting these people tell abridged versions of their own life stories.
But you'd expect this. What surprises you is how poignantly the tour reminds us about things in these cities which we may have forgotten, like how great it is to be able to see the mountains from Dublin city centre, or what a superb job they've done in turning Christchurch into Cork's new arthouse cinema and performance space. History accompanies you on these tours, particularly the Dublin leg. In Hogan's Butcher's on Wexford Street, we are shown a Twenties photo of proud staff and huge slabs of meat displayed outside the same store. Lord Ardilaun, John Betjeman and medieval cows purposefully grazed in wild garlic fields in St Mary's Abbey -- all find their way into the mix.
"It's a fine line," Coyle says. "You don't want to bore them rigid but you need to put into perspective what we're doing." How fine this line is exactly is arguable. Watching the expressions on the tours tells a different story. Cork guests are seen swelling with pride as out-of-towners frown with delight while tasting Munster fare. At a Dublin chocolatier, one gluten-intolerant US gentleman is warned that his tasting contains small amounts of the protein. "I'll risk it," he quickly insists. The oohs and ahs, the continual talk between the group about every minute aspect of food and eating; the tour leader could read Ibsen to them between stops and they'd still wear enthusiasm on their well-fed faces.
With these tasting trails and the company's popular cooking days up and running, Coyle's next mission is to research potential in other parts of Dublin. "We're looking all the time to introduce new things. It's easier now because when we started no one really knew what we were doing, but now people will come to us and say 'I'm starting something', and tell us about it before it happens."
If a final moral can be squeezed from the experience, it is that FFT is showing us the kinds of places we should be sourcing our food from. Every proprietor or assistant we are introduced to has expert knowledge of their fare. They speak in quietly passionate tones about how it was made or where it was sourced. That personal touch and level of understanding about something we are soon to ingest is an enriching thing, and ensures the customer is getting the best for both body and tastebuds. Now, all that's left is to tell Denis Leary.
For details about Fabulous Food Trails' tours and how to book, see www.fabfoodtrails.com
- Hilary A White
