Dermot Gannon

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We have known Dermot Gannon for many's a year, and have watched and admired his Pilgrim's Progress through the world of food. Unlike John Bunyan's character, however, Gannon was in search of the good things of the culture of food. He was looking for the very things that would sway us with temptation, he was not afraid of the sensual and the sybaritic, and he did not want to turn away from this world. Instead, he wanted to turn in to, and turn on to, the pleasures of cooking and eating and creativity, but he had first to find his own language, the way in which he could express his God. This took time. He learnt well under his mentor back in Clifden, the great Paddy Foyle, who nurtured the youngster, likely finding something of himself in Gannon’s restlessness, his dissatisfaction with the way things are, with the compromises of the quotidian. Gannon went traveling, to eastern Europe, to the United States. When he had returned, and opened The Old Convent in Clogheen, a sweet little hamlet in County Tipperary, it was clear that he had found what he was looking for, and had likely found it in himself. The Pilgrimage was over, the Pilgrim was home.

His food is all his own, and it's likely that no one else demands so much from his audience: there is an 8-course tasting menu, and nothing else. In this regard, dinner in The Old Convent is a ritual, and rituals cannot be short-circuited, otherwise they don't work, the message doesn't get through, the transcendence doesn't arrive. He works with the foods of his area, and he works humbly, alive to their potency and power, their talismanic strength. He has met with both success and acclaim, yet it seems to matter little to him. He is a servant to his calling, his dedication monastic and pious. Perhaps he hasn't stopped searching, and maybe that quest is why every forkful seems imbued with energy, with what might be discovered, and treasured.
 

The Old Convent, Clogheen, County Tipperary
052 616 5565
www.theoldconvent.ie