You can call it zeitgeist, you can call it charisma, you can call it awopbopaloombaawopbamboom. But, whatever you call it, it's what some folks have, and most folks don't. Michelle Carmody of Dublin's Cake Café has it. Big time. Whatever we might disagree to call it, we can surely agree that it is simply a different way of seeing things, of doing things, of expressing things.
It's a way of working that puts creativity and culture first, and business second. Of course, you still have to bake the cakes and make the soup and grind the beans and do the daily bread, but it is in the manner of doing these things that Darmody's café stands out.
How to explain how the Cake Café works? Well, Ms Darmody was an art student, and some of that arty way of thinking is always evident here, a way of seeing the thread in disparate things, whether it's the mis-matched crockery, or the parsnip allied to celery in a (most unusual) soup, or that good chocolate brownie. Bricolage is what the French would call it, one of those almost untranslatable terms that sort of means making art out of the things that are to hand. And that is what they do at the Cake Café: they make art out of the things that are to hand. Michelle Darmody as the Marcel Duchamp of Dublin? Why, that will do nicely.
Photo courtesy www.irishtimes.com