Pictured: Mushroom crisp with goats' cheese; foie gras royale with blood orange and celery; Liscannor Bay lobster, crispy chicken wing, Granny Smith, truffled celeriac; Tipperary rabbit, Serrano ham, carrot, wild garlic; rhubarb, lemon & olive oil, pistachio and sunflower seeds; citrus soufflé, white chocolate sorbet; petits fours
David Hurley is a Zen cook. Despite a very comprehensive intellectual framework, that shows his cooking coming from a well-informed artistic palate and an artistic palette, his food is never about him. Instead, he will present a plate that will have his signature approach to ingredients – smoked duck and bone marrow macaroni, with turnip, green peppercorn and raisin, or Tipperary rabbit with Serrano ham, carrot and wild garlic – but that signature will be on the back of the canvas. What you stare at – and then hungrily demolish – is just the culinary art on the plate, with its angularity and its contrasts, its asymmetry and aesthetic, its purity. His food is a mighty, mighty effort, yet he hides all the work, and we are left with the seamlessness of the tastes and textures, impressed that the melding of both elements is magnificently achieved, especially in dishes like the rabbit with pancetta and the cannelloni, dishes where textures become awai, evanescent, through subtle technical devices such as smoking and slow-cooking.
Zen it may be, yet it's gutsy in a satisfying way thanks to the tactility of the ingredients - the bone marrow, the salsify with rib-eye beef, the varying textures of the cauliflower with Rossaveel whiting, the crunches he creates to explode in the mouth. Mr Hurley has an artist's idea of plating - the black pudding and broccoli coin with the broccoli soup, the constructivism of the wild puddings – all of which is great fun, especially the asymmetric plating, which is very novel. Each dish is conceived as a total piece of work: concept, delivery, execution, aesthetic, visual awareness, colour. This food is incredibly exciting, because it is so loveable. Some cooks foreground themselves in their cooking, but Mr Hurley disappears: the food takes over completely. As a key element of the tone-poem aesthetic of Gregan's Castle, it is hard to imagine anything more appropriate, or anything more sublime.
John McKenna
