Menu: Look after your best friend with a puppucino while you enjoy brunch
Fido You're At Dining An Killarney’s While Also Du Feeding Parc Cafe Option Now Is
The Menu has a long and storied history with the venerable old Metropole Hotel, in Cork city, which is this year celebrating its 125th year in operation.
Unsurprisingly, much of that centres around the Cork Jazz Festival which first originated from within its hallowed walls back in 1978 but there have been many other events besides, not least a very splendid evening at the Cáis National Irish Farmhouse Cheese Awards, in more recent times. It was of course designed by the late Myrtle Allen’s father, Arthur Hill, and still struts with all the aplomb befitting the most striking senior citizen on Cork’s MacCurtain St.
The Menu shall be paying an especial visit to sample the new cocktail menu launched to celebrate this august anniversary.
The hugely impressive hospitality operators in Killarney continue with their extraordinary pivot away from servicing the traditional US coach tour market, increasingly offering more for the local, domestic market and a more contemporary class of international traveller.
Now, it appears they are even reaching out to the canine contingent: Café du Parc is offering a Puppy Love Brunch, with a puppucino and a locally-sourced Irish dog treat for your hound while you sit at the heated outdoor seating at the intersection where Killarney’s bustling Main St meets Ireland’s oldest national park, eating your own breakfast, brunch or lunch and watching the world go by.
Though a most cosmopolitan man of the world, inordinately fond of travelling and sampling from the global larder, The Menu, as regular readers know, maintains an almost entirely Hiberno-centric focus when writing in this particular neck of the woods and is usually particularly loath to cover imported restaurant models arriving on these shores seeking to hoover up the local dollar, with several high profile UK operations underwhelming in recent times.
But it has to be said that the imminent arrival of steak restaurant group Hawksmoor may well herald an alternative and more welcome model of operation, at the very least, upping the game of various domestic operators.
Co-founder Will Beckett, son of the legendary food and drinks writer, Fiona Beckett, has a genuine grá for Dublin City and he and co-founder Huw Gott have managed to acquire a splendid premises in the former National Bank on 34 College Green.
Hawksmoor’s accolades include being nominated as No 1 Steakhouse in the World and their focus on sustainability and supporting local producers is very genuine (and Irish supply chain is currently being built), and having recently become carbon neutral, they plan to be Net Zero by 2030, so their opening will be anticipated with keen interest and at the very least, it will be good to see such a venerable old building receiving some of the TLC for which the group are known to lavish on their other premises around the world.
World Chocolate Day is next Thursday, July 7 — a rather ridiculous concept in The Menu’s eyes who has for years agitated for the creation of World Chocolate Year, to be held at Chez Menu on an annual basis, 365 days a year. But, in the spirit of things, he is very happy to this week feature a comparatively new Irish producer, Wicklow-based Nibbed, and their new 200g pure organic Cacao Block.
It never ceases to amaze how challenging times down through the years seem to inspire the emergence of new Irish food producer and hospitality enterprises and Nibbed is in the same bracket. It is a chocolate bean-to-bar business founded by aunt-niece duo, chef Lisa Kleiner and Anna O’Sullivan, in 2021 during the pandemic. Nibbed’s Cacao Blocks are classic examples of chocolate as a superfood and are hand-crafted in small batches using ethically sourced, fairly traded and certified organic single-origin cacao beans.
Cacao is high in theobromine, a natural stimulant similar to caffeine but without the jittery effects and is also high in dietary fibre, antioxidants and many minerals such as iron, magnesium and potassium amongst others, and well-documented research shows it is a powerful prebiotic and cardioprotective, and can have a positive impact on on blood pressure, mood and concentration.
This Cacao Block is very much the real deal made from a Trinitario-Criollo hybrid bean from the Dominican Republic and, what’s more, each taste offers a compelling masterclass in the true taste of real chocolate, as it is completely free of any of the additives (eg sugar, dairy, soy etc), even those ‘good’ ones that turn ‘raw’ chocolate into the more familiar sweetened confection. (For a simple experiment, break off a chunk of the Nibbed chocolatey ingot and pop it into your mouth along with a bit of sugar and you begin to experience ‘chocolate’ as you more probably know it.)
100% cacao can be overly drying, even powdery on the palate, but this is very agreeable, bright, creamy and with smokey notes of dark cherry and a mild salinity but it really begins to make sense once The Menu brings it into the lab and gets to concocting up various methods of consumption.
It makes for a quite delicious hot chocolate, not overly cloying and was very smart grated on top of a lemon tart but most intriguing of all was a savoury chocolate ‘mole’ or sauce.
It was only in the 16th century that sugar was added to chocolate; prior to that, for thousands of years, cacao was viewed as a gift from the gods and eaten as a savoury food so The Menu made a delicious Mexican-inspired mole with chicken broth and chipotle chillis which was only exquisite when served up with barbecued chicken.