Sally's blog

Our measurement of the success of the Wild Atlantic Way, comes down to a very personal matrix: the first edition of our book, Where to Eat and Stay on the Wild Atlantic Way was a complete sell out. The success of the book brought us back to the West Coast, and the result is the 2015 edition, which, believe it or not, is fully 10% bigger than the 2014 publication. The energy that people have invested in new openings from Donegal to Kinsale is really extraordinary.

Okay, the formalities. Shamzuri is a kickass Malaysian chef, cooking from his own restaurant, The Cottage in Leitrim, he cooks Modern European cuisine, with a nod to his homeland. Kevin (that's me), well, I'm Irish, a Dub that cooks South East Asian, quite a bit of Indonesian from my place The Chameleon in Temple Bar and we are mates
We had to talk some serious bullshit to convince our wives into letting us visit Amsterdam to investigate its street food scene, or whether or not it even has one.

JP Mahon is Symposium Director for Food on the Edge, an international chef’s and food professionals symposium taking place in Galway on the 19th and 20th October 2015

Food on the Edge will bring world-renowned chefs to Galway including Albert Adriá of Spain, Daniel Patterson of the USA, Jair Tellez of Mexico, Andre Chiang of Singapore, Mark Best of Australia and Tom Aikens of the United Kingdom.

Food on the edge is a coming together of the world’s best chefs, in order to talk, listen, debate and learn from one another in order to create a better food experience worldwide.

Karl Breen is in charge. Just look at the plates he sends out from the kitchen in Locks Brasserie and you get the sense of someone who has been studying the arts of the kitchen for a very long time. A typical Breen plate exudes confidence, colour and, of course, that control, the sense that he knows what he’s got and knows what to do with it.

The Italians would have a word for Ross Lewis: lento. Slowly.
Things are proceeding slowly at Osteria Lucio – the former Pizza E Porchetta – as the new restaurant on Grand Canal Quay transitions from the old restaurant under the aegis of Mr Lewis and his partner, Luciano Tona.

For a number of years our annual staycation around Ireland was anchored by one unchangeable element - a visit to Gregans Castle hotel in Clare. The hotel was - and continues to be - a beacon of excellent hospitality and superb attention to detail, and a high point was always the amazing cooking of Mickael Viljanen. With Mickael's departure to Dublin in 2012, David Hurley took up the reins in the kitchen of Gregans, and return visits have shown his cooking to be at least the equal of Mickael's.

If you walked Sally, PJ and John McKenna into a restaurant and handed them the menu, you could lay a bet that the three things they would never order would be a chicken melt, a burger, and chicken skewers.
Yet there the three of them are, in Gill Carroll's 37 West in Galway, and they have just ordered the chicken melt with jalapeños, the caveman burger, and the chicken skewers with peppers and onions.

Whoever said you should never work with animals never got the attention of Tom Flavin.  The executive chef of Limerick's Strand Hotel, together with his white welly boot clad team, stars alongside a host of different animals in the hotel’s own movie, “Limerick Strand Our Food Story.”

For nearly 4 minutes Tom’s dulcet tones provide a relaxing voiceover to scenes shot within a 20 mile radius of Limerick city, as the group visits suppliers of ingredients that feature on the menu at the Strand Hotel.  

When you sit in certain rooms, you feel you are at the centre of the action, in the eye of the tiger.
3fe, on Grand Canal Street in Dublin, feels like that, and, as you sit there drinking your brilliant flat white and having excellent avocado and scrambled eggs with spinach on toast, you try to work out why the place is so pulsing, so in-the-moment.

We're delighted that our documentary short film Feeding The Hungry Hills has been selected for screening in the Corona Fastnet Short Film Festival. They have even given us a laurel for our film poster. So we thought we'd better design a film poster. You can see the film in the Adelphi Cinema, Village Hall, Schull on Saturday 23rd May at 10am.

It's just another excuse to go to this fabulous film festival where the whole town becomes a cinema. More details here.