An ambitious café that truly brings home the bacon

THERE are several things you need to know about Kilkenny’s Foodworks Café. The first is obvious. It’s a café and not a restaurant as such.

I know this can be confusing because there have been some great restaurants that describe themselves modestly as cafés and of which I retain very happy memories. Johnnie Cooke’s eponymous Café brought Cal-Ital cooking to Dublin in the early 1990s and more recently Rowley Leigh had the exquisite Le Café Anglais in what had been one of London’s biggest and only art deco McDonald’s.

But there’s the other kind of café too, of course, the natural habitat of the chemical-cocktailflavour flow-wrapped muffin and the goof-proof coffee machine: a kind of l ame tribute act to Starbucks.

Anyway, Foodworks is a café in the sense that i t operates between the hours of 12 noon and four, Wednesday to Sunday. And while it does good coffee and lovely baked things, there’s some very proper and ambitious cooking going on here.

Oh, and the other thing about this establishment is that the couple who run it raise their own pigs and serve the resulting pork and bacon.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be shouted from the rooftops but, modestly, they prefer to mention it quietly, in small type, at the bottom of the menu. It’s the kind of thing that makes me dizzy with excitement. I think really good pork is probably my favourite meat but I may have to sit down and have a long, hard think about that.

We meandered over the Knockmealdowns for Sunday lunch and found Kilkenny busy and basking in autumn sunshine. Whatever about social distancing on the streets, we had no worries once inside Foodworks. One couple were at the point of leaving and two others turned up during our meal in what used to be an extensive banking hall.

The menu is the kind where smaller plates gradually merge into larger ones, so it’s not exactly starters and mains. As a result we decided to share ‘roast garlic prawns, Pernod and almond crust, house-baked bread for dipping’ (€10.95). The prawns were plump and just cooked and sat in sizzling garlic butter; the almond crust was not very crusty and whatever aniseedy whiff of Pernod it had once harboured had vanished into the ether. But did we care? Not a bit. The prawns were juicy, the butter gloriously hot and savoury and the toasted tomato bread was good in itself and even better when employed for messy mopping.

The words ‘Thai yellow curry, cod, prawn and smoked haddock with arancini rice balls’ (€12.50) promised either a culinary car crash or a multicultural delight. In the event, it was surprisingly pleasant. The arancini had been made from a tomato risotto, encasing it in a thin, light coating of crisp breadcrumbs. The curry was mild — a lot milder than any yellow curry in Thailand — but subtly spiced with a lot of tur

meric and, I think, lemongrass. The combination of Italian rice and oriental spice, with good seafood, was, as I say, surprisingly pleasing. I might not want to make it at home, but still...

‘ Free range house smoked bacon loin, homemade gnocchi, leek, damson, mustard sauce’ (€12.50) was even better than it sounds. The bacon well- cured but not over- salty, assertively smoky, balanced with sweet leeks and tart little damsons, classically underscored by bacon’s best friend, a creamy mustard sauce. Oh, and there were dinky little cubes of crisply fried potato too, as a bonus.

And just reflect on the price for all of this. A mere €12.50.

We shared a baked Alaska for dessert — with impeccable Swiss meringue (remember that from

Bake Off?) densely frozen icecream at its heart, sitting on a little square of lemon drizzle cake. And all around it, a pool of crème Anglaise and raspberry purée. Our cup overfloweth.

Real cooking, from scratch, clever ideas, great raw materials and a nostalgic retro finale. What more could you ask for?

How about, i n our present restricted circumstances, takeaway. That’s exactly what Foodworks is offering too.

THE SMART MONEY

Honestly, €12.50 for that bacon dish. Where else would you get it?

AND ANOTHER THING...

Foodworks@home offers a range of dishes to cook at home. See foodworks.ie/order