Evan Doyle

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Imagine being someone who spends their time waiting for everyone else to catch up. Imagine being ahead of the curve. Always.

Imagine staying ahead of the curve. Staying ahead.

It is surely lonely out there, out with “the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels” as Gram Parsons once explained it in “Return of the Grevious Angel.”

Fully twenty years ago, we wrote this: “In Evan Doyle’s lovely restaurant you can eat the tastes of the future, and boy, do they taste good."

Twenty years ago he was ahead of the curve, sourcing all of his foods from local organic suppliers and – are you ready for this – that was when The Strawberry Tree was operating in Killarney!

Killarney! Just imagine if the good burghers of Killarney had watched what the young blow-in was doing two decades ago, and copied his example. They didn’t, of course, but others did, and quickly began to name-check suppliers, and look to their hinterland for their ingredients.

It is this way that Evan Doyle’s influence, though largely unnoticed by anyone other than the truckers, kickers and cowboy angels of the food world, has been pervasive, and significant. He is one of those rare guys who writes the script – the Thomas Cranmer of the modern Irish artisan menu. Even if you don’t know who wrote the text, you do know the words.

He has spent the last decade fashioning a small world-unto-itself at Macreddin, having found a place where he and his family team could build their own world. We have written that his vision of Wicklow is to create Cockaigne, the mythical land of plenty, of luxury, of ease. But Doyle’s vision is no fairy tale: Macreddin is Cockaigne made real, made tangible, made delicious.

And, tellingly, his Cockaigne is a political place. Quietly, and largely through his chairmanship of the Taste Council, he is always educating, agitating, organising. “Educate. Agitate. Organise.” was one of those good old 1960’s mantras that was going to change the world for the better. Others might have given up on that optimism. Evan Doyle hasn’t.

Macreddin Village, Aughrim, Co Wicklow