Kennedy's Food Store in Fairview

Out in deepest Fairview, Sarah Kennedy is doing the Good Thing. Leslie Williams catches up with the Fairest of Fairview, a shop/deli/restaurant that every neighborhood should have at the centre of its culinary culture.

Kennedy's Food Store in Fairview is the kind of food shop/deli/cafe which planners should require builders and developers to provide along with schools and libraries in new housing estates. Every community needs a place to go for home made brown bread for breakfast, sandwiches and home made soup at lunchtime and maybe a cheap meal and a glass of wine when you come home from the office wrecked at 8pm and can't face the kitchen - oh and the meal should cost around a tenner.

Kennedy's does all this and you can also pick up some decent chocolate and a bottle of wine to guzzle in front of the TV when you get home. Almost all the food is home cooked and that which is not is sourced well from the likes of Maison des Gourmets for bread and ham from Hicks. All food served is cooked from first principles using essentially the same principles as you would use at home. Eggs and chickens are free range and the ham and beef for sandwiches is cooked on the premises.

The dinner special on the evening I visited was Lasagne, Salad and a glass of wine for 9.95 but I opted for the Pork and Leek Sausages in a Lyonnaise sauce with roast potatoes (9.95) and a glass of Hungarian Bulls Blood. This was simple fare but tasty nonetheless with good quality sausages from Morrisseys of Wexford Street. For dessert I had a slice of triple layered chocolate cake that was a little dryer than I would have liked but the ample layers of chocolate ganache filling more than compensated. Add a cup of Americano coffee and a bar of Green and Blacks to eat on the way home and the bill came to a very reasonable €21.35.

So lets get lobbying to have the planning laws changed so we can all get a place like this near us!

Kennedy's Food Store
5 Fairview Strand, Dublin 3
Tel: 01 833 1400
Web: www.kennedysfoodstore.com
Opening Times: Mon-Fri: 7.30am-9pm, Sat- 9am-6pm, Sun- 10am-4pm

Tell us about your favourite local deli heaven.

"The Creators" Individuals of Irish Food by Dianne Curtin

Dianne Curtin's first book could be described simply as a series of pen portraits accompanied by superb photographic portraits of some of the major players in Cork's rich artisan food culture.

In fact the book is much more than this, and is the story of a series of producers whose work has helped the author to see creative food culture in a new and richer light. The Creators is a mixture of love letter and tone poem about a group of dogged determined individuals whose work has come to be of supreme importance in our food culture. Ms Curtin captures the nuances of personality of these people with deftness and Philip Curtin's photography, in a typically beautifully produced book by Cork University Press, includes some photographs that are nothing less than transcendent.

Atrium €29.95
Published 1 November 2007

We come to bury Chicken Caesar

Believe it or believe it not, but I have sitting on my desk a menu from a popular Irish restaurant which offers its customers "Classic Chicken Caesar salad".

I'm not making this up. We are living in an age when Irish chefs think Caesar Salad comes with chicken.

The same guys who have desecrated Caesar Cardini's classic creation, however, tend to be less inventive and rather more derivative when it comes to the rest of their menus.

The Chicken Caesars, these Emperors of invention, offer these things on their menus: Confit belly of pork. Braised shank of lamb with root vegetables. Dry Aged Rib-eye steak with béarnaise and chips. Bangers and mash with onion gravy. Warm salad of goat's cheese. Hamburger with crispy onion rings and potato wedges. Battered cod with pea purée. Bailey's parfait. Panacotta.

We live in a universe of untold diversity. But you sure wouldn't think it if you were eating in Irish restaurants.

Time and again, the new warhorses, the new prawn cocktail-sirloin steak/black forest gateau clichés are wheeled out in every county of the country. You could travel the length and breadth of Ireland and eat nothing but battered cod with peas and shank of lamb and risotto with mushrooms and crème brulee. What on earth is going wrong?

I mean, if you are going to copy someone, for Heaven's sake make it Seamus O'Connell - tea smoked duck with Earl Grey gravy; wild Irish salmon with carrot crust and grapefruit sauce were two things Seamus had on the menu at Parknasilla during the season - or Denis Cotter - beetroot mouse with orange-scented yogurt, watercress and fennel crispbreads - or George Kehoe of Carlow's Waterfront Restaurant - carpaccio of Hereford beef with horseradish ice cream and beetroot pickle - or Seamus McDonald of Kerry's Out Of The Blue, who created a stunning dish of turbot cutlet with its own foie gras and with the roe of the fish smoked and then stuffed into morels. A violet mustard sauce completed a stunning creation, and one that used every bit of the fish.

Why not copy the best, in other words? Why not plagiarise those who are worth plagiarising? Why copy those who think that adding chicken to a Caesar salad somehow makes it "Classic".
So, let's ditch the clichés, and let's have a new template of things that are Worth Copying: Niall McKenna's lobster salad with tomato ceviche; Alden's haunch of rabbit with cabbage, pine nuts and currants; Danny Millar's rump of Finnebrogue venison with boxty and Bushmills; Aine Maguire's bacon collar with parsley sauce and organic cabbage.

So, tell us the dish which you have most enjoyed in an Irish restaurant, and suggestions for any other "classics" that should be deemed forbidden.