Self-sufficient philosophy that needs a little growth

THIS week I’m eating in a garden just off the ring road in Waterford city. This is Grow HQ, the epicentre of a movement founded by Michael Kelly with a view to encouraging people to grow their own veg and fruit. It’s a place and a philosophy that I wholeheartedly endorse.

At last, here I am with my youngest daughter, a good trencherwoman and, like all our brood, a keen gardener. So keen, indeed, that she’s considering horticulture as a career, or part of a career, after graduation next year. It seemed like an appropriate place to have lunch on one of our rare sunny days.

In the interests of filing a useful report for you, she and I decided to order far too much food, enough to feed a family.

We kicked off with the café’s attractive soup and sandwich deal (€8.50) which involves small but more than adequate bowls of the potages du jour, so to speak. On this occasion they were marrow and green garlic (which I assume to be garlic ‘scrapes’) and potato and vegetable.

With these come toasted sandwiches involving good wholegrain sourdough and, on the one hand, pulled free-range pork from Crowe’s Farm up in Dundrum, Co Tipperary, and, on the other, dry cured ham from the same source. The pork came with a pleasingly sharp gooseberry chutney; the ham with an oniony salsa verde and smoked Knockanore cheese from the other end of the county.

The sangers were the winners here. The soups were fine in their own way but a little bland, despite a turmeric element in the marrow and garlic one. This lunch deal also comes with homemade chips, just in case you might be lacking your daily carbs.

The ‘hearty lunch’ (€13.50) was a ‘confit tomato & carrot top risotto with Ardsallagh goat’s cheese, roast hazelnut and aubergine’. It was okay, again in a somewhat bland way. With salt added, it perked up a bit but, to be brutally frank, an Italian would have run a mile from this ‘risotto’: too dry, not creamy enough. As an Irish person, this didn’t bother me but I wondered about the ingredients

— the chewy tomatoes, the chunks of cheese, the sprig of carrot leaf as a garnish, the cold, unseasoned aubergine laid on top. For me, it didn’t make sense, it didn’t come together. But yes, it was ‘hearty’, I suppose.

The ‘daily salad’ (€10) was a strange affair, described thus: ‘pink fir apple potatoes, confit tigerella tomatoes, cashel blue cheese, spicy vegetable crisps and tomato gazpacho’. Yes, everything is in lower case and that does say tomato gazpacho. In a salad.

The ‘gazpacho’ was a bland — here we go again — pink creamy element in the bottom of the bowl. The vegetable crisps were lovely but not spicy. The confit tomatoes were fine, if a little over-chewy, the pink fir apples were rather too

large for comfort, certainly for elegance. And the Cashel Blue cheese looked a bit dazed and confused in this company.

Like the risotto, it felt as if stuff had been thrown in with insufficient account taken of how they would get along together.

Puddings put matters right; a subtly lavender-scented créme brulée was textbook stuff, the ‘honey’ meringues chewily delightful. And some ‘energy balls’ were wholesome and pleasing rather than penitential.

We drank Grow HQs own kombucha: a blackcurrant and lemon verbena one (in which the verbena was lost) and a surprisingly delicious cucumber and black pepper version, and two flat whites which, like virtually every flat white in Ireland, were far too big and milky — what in Italy would be considered caffé latte.

Grow HQ Café is a lovely place with exceptionally pleasant staff. The food, however, needs more thoughtful composition and, above all, more flavour, more oomph, more spice, more seasoning. The produce is first rate, so why not give it real welly?

This timid approach is, frankly, rather dull.

THE SMART MONEY

THE soup and toasted sandwich deal with homemade chips is a decent buy at €8.50.

AND ANOTHER THING...

THEY do an excellent breakfast between 9am and 12 noon.