All you really need is nice things on plates – and in glasses

Cork has long been a conservative city but it’s changing. An influx of outsiders, many of them working in tech and pharma, are joining the more adventurous Corkonians in creating a market for food and wine offerings that were unthinkable only a few years ago. The likes of Ichigo Ichie, Goldie and The Glass Curtain, to name just a few, have opened new horizons for the city.

The latter received a bit of a drubbing in one of the national newspapers recently and it’s a measure of the scale of Cork that this was the talk of the town for several weeks. (I should add that I have always eaten superbly at The Glass Curtain and suspect that it was having an off night when it was under that particular critical scrutiny. Homer nods and all that…)

A more positive topic of conversation on Leeside has been the opening of MacCurtain Wine Cellar earlier this month.

The city already has the excellent Latitude 51, specialising in natural, organic and biodynamic wines, so with this new addition, Cork is actually punching above its weight in terms of population.

MacCurtain Wine Cellar is the latest addition to what is now known as the Victorian Quarter, centred on MacCurtain Street, just north of the river. The pioneering establishment here was Isaac’s, opening three decades ago, now a venerable institution and always fun. It has taken time, but there’s certainly a buzz about the area these days.

This little gem of a place has been created by Seán Gargano, a veteran wine consultant, and Trudy Ahern, who used to manage one of Dublin’s most consistently interesting and lovely restaurants, Etto on Merrion Row. Seán is probably best known for creating the wine megalists for The Legal Eagle and The Winding Stair. I can’t imagine a pair better equipped to do something like this.

They explain that MacCurtain Wine Cellar is essentially a wine shop (and in this sense, it’s probably the best in Cork, even narrowly eclipsing the brilliant Bradley’s on North Main Street) but it’s a wine shop you can drink in. They don’t have a kitchen, as such, but – in their words – they put nice things on plates. And what a lovely thing to do.

The lovely things they put on plates are much, much more than what one might vulgarly think of as soakage. Take, for example, the ricotta and wild garlic toasts (€9) that we had to kick off our impromptu lunch: delightfully creamy, pungent, and crisp with the pretty little flowers of tricorn leek adorning each.

Burrata, the creamiest version of mozzarella, from Buffalo milk and made in West Cork, came with slices of bresaola, the cured beef from Northern Italy, an exercise in contrasts, while we couldn’t decide between the cheese board (€14) or the charcuterie board (€16) so we decided to have a hybrid version.

This featured, inter alia, Shepherd’s Store sheep’s cheese from Tipperary (that featured last week in my lunch at Cashel Palace), Hegarty’s strong and very proper

THIS IS NOT A RESTAURANT, IT’S A WINE EXPERIENCE SO GO WITH AN OPEN MIND

Cheddar from North Cork, some nicely ripe Gubbeen from West Cork, green olives, semi-dried tomatoes, coppa (or capocollo, if you prefer), the cured meat from the neck of the pig, prosciutto and both membrillo or Spanish quince paste and panforte, that dense ‘cake’ of pressed dried figs. Both lovely foils to the cheese. Add some bread, as we did, and this is a feast.

Indeed, it was such a feast that we ended up bringing much of it home and grazing on it for a couple of days.

MacCurtain Wine Cellar doesn’t do coffee on the very reasonable basis that if they did it would turn into a coffee shop with wine as a kind of optional extra. But there is no doubt that after a grazing lunch of this kind, the mind does, indeed, turn to coffee. The great thing is that there’s good coffee within easy walking distance and from numerous outlets, ours being Cork

Coffee Roasters on Bridge Street this time. MacCurtain Wine Cellar is quite unapologetically all about wine and the food – or nice things on plates – is secondary even if they are all very good indeed. Please don’t think that it’s a restaurant, think of it as a wine experience, go with an open mind, don’t go thinking, ‘I only drink X and Y and maybe Z’ and be prepared to enjoy new things.

I have to say Seán’s debut selection of wines here is exemplary and carefully priced so that the addition of €15 corkage makes excellent sense in terms of value for money. It’s a lovely bright space with windows front and side, and a stunning shopfront designed to reference the area’s Victorian character. The arrival of this wine shop-cum-wine bar is a milestone for Cork and would be a very welcome addition to any city or town in Ireland – including Dublin.

So, lucky old Cork then.