New Irish cuisine

The country known for hearty stew, beer and potatoes has levelled up, writes

Some weeks ago, during a particularly graceful lull of an early Dublin summer morning, a visiting Kiwi with food on his mind dropped into the James Joyce Centre.

The impressive mini-museum, a renovated 1784 Georgian townhouse in downtown Dublin, has served tourists for the past 22 years. Joyce is a byword for the beautiful Irish capital, as well as being one of the past century’s towering literary figures — and something of a foodie in his own right.

The centre celebrates Joyce on many fronts, with artefacts from his life, magnificently hung portraits, dazzling quotations strewn around the walls, and a nonstop documentary about his most famous work, the stream-of-consciousness novel, Ulysses.

Notably absent from his centre, alas, is any mention of dining, which seems a major missed marketing opportunity at a time when his country is in the process of reconstituting itself as a European culinary capital.

But James Joyce was also rather heavily into eating well. His work riffs on themes of starvation, famine, gluttony, feasting and hospitality, all rolled together under the rubric of national identity. And because the quirky protagonist in Ulysses also happens to be born of a foreign father — in this case, a Jewish one — the text is redolent with dream-like passages in which the foods of other lands, beginning with the produce of Jaffa in mandatory Palestine, are also woven in.

Nearly a century since Joyce first wove his magic — and in the past decade in particular — Ireland is rediscovering that same spirit in an impressively new style.

You can see it in the potpourri of foreign ethnic restaurants now sprinkled throughout the city, the trendy new eateries specialising in traditional Irish food done in a fresh, cosmopolitan style, or in the number of established venues re-dedicating themselves to getting the basics right. You can taste the new difference elsewhere in the Emerald Isle, too.

Ross Lewis, one of the leading new restaurateurs in Dublin has been quoted as saying, while ‘‘we might not have the food history of the Ottoman Empire yet’’, it is a work in progress.

For New Zealanders of a certain age, the process is not unlike the evolution of our own epicurean culture, which began in earnest in the 1980s when we moved away from a style of food that would — let’s be honest, now — have caused seasoned guests to leap out a window.

I know a thing or two about this subject. My Irish mother was born in County Carlow — a kind of far-flung Hamilton to Dublin’s Auckland — and many of my formative food memories growing up in the Hutt Valley are drawn from the same cultural cookbook.

If you take the average New Zealand fare of the 1970s and divide it by two, you might end up with something that often used to pass for regular Irish cuisine: boiled carrots, boiled meat, boiled eggs, boiled onions, boiled potatoes, boiled leeks and boiled cauliflower, served with a kind of mutant white sauce.

Typically, such items would be seasoned with the two great staples of the Irish spice rack: salt and pepper.

A random web search on traditional Irish cuisine tends to throw up images of the same