Loam

Given that food lovers use terms such as “rooted” and primordial” to describe Enda McEvoy’s cooking in Loam, the chef-patron simply couldn’t have chosen a better name for his outpost of West Coast avant garde cookery. Loam cookery isn’t like anything else you can eat in Ireland, and it’s served in a large, hangar-like room quite different from any other Irish dining room. Using only ingredients from the West of Ireland forces McEvoy to max out his capacious techniques in dishes such as potato and egg, or scallops with celeriac but, to be honest, at times it seems that there is nothing this guy can’t do, and his dishes achieve an ethereality no other cook can match. That’s the paradox of Loam: this deeply-rooted cooking breaks free of the earth, and floats up to the stars.