The Menu: The off-grid cabin experience in top-secret locations

There is a full tank of filtered rainwater and battery sufficiently charged for the stay and, outside, a fire pit, grill and seats to recline in and marvel at the planet’s ongoing daily revolutions. While you currently make do with bringing along your own selection of finest Irish produce to fill your larder for the weekend, the company plans Irish food collaborations for the future. Available from Aug 1, bookings launch shortly though, this being Ireland, The Menu wonders at what time precisely on Aug 2 will the entire country have learned of the secret location?!

• www.slowcabins.ie

Grub Circus returns

Should any readers be off to the very splendid All Together Now music festival (Aug 29-31) in Co Waterford, The Menu extends an open invitation to one and all to drop into the Grub Circus food stage where he has put together a two-day programme (Aug 30-31) of food-themed events covering all that is wild, wacky and wonderful about Irish food and the people who make it happen, including Michelin-starred chefs, growers, producers, activists, food and wine writers.

Events include live fire cooking; urban food growing; the Grub Circus Food Quiz with great prizes from Kenwood for audience members; natural wine, Irish whiskey and cocktail tastings with a drop for all in the audience and tunes from the GC house band, Cookie Cuisine & The Culinary Clownshow. Performers include Paul Flynn, Darina Allen and Rory O’Connell, TV Gardener Diarmuid Gavin, Michelin-star chefs Kevin Thornton, Enda McEvoy, rising star Aishling Moore, chef/co-proprietor, Goldie, and the legendary Sally Barnes, Alexandra Raitaneva (Cliff House Hotel), Lily Ramirez Foran and more.

• www.grubcircus.com

West End ‘Feastival'

Galway’s West End Street ‘Feastival returns to Raven’s Terrace (July 31) after a Covid hiatus and the area will be pedestrianised and turned into a giant dining plaza, with vendors including Botown Burgers, Hooked on Henry Street, Murphys Ice Cream, Alainn, Space Cowboys Tacos, Handsome Burger, Ember Firehouse, An Tobar Nua, Tartare, Danny Donuts and Sweet Dreams confectionery. Drinks and beverages from the Salthouse, McGuire’s Daybreak and Gourmet Tart.

• www.galwayswestend.ie

Today’s Special

The Menu admits to having favourites amongst the mighty army of redoubtable Irish growers; most especially, Ultan Walsh, of Gort na Nean farm, in Nohoval, long time grower for Cafe Paradiso, and one of the true originals, a national innovator in his field, literally and figuratively. Stephen Sinnott of Food For Humans, in Ballygarvan, outside Cork city is fast coming up on the inside rail.

Sure, Stephen grows the usual suspects, albeit of superlative quality: salad leaves, micro-greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, potatoes, carrots, turnips, green beans, sugar snaps, aubergines and so on; but he is not the first in the country to do so.

However, The Menu will be immediately on to his milliner to procure a new chapeau for the express purpose of eating, with or without salt, if it turns out that Stephen is not the first in the country to grow melons on a commercial scale.

What’s more, these are Charentais melons, a class of French cantaloupe, rarely found outside France as they don’t tend to travel especially well. At the tail end of last year’s season, The Menu sampled one of the very last of Stephen’s trial run and was quite blown away, spending the entire winter anticipating this year’s first commercial crop. The Menu sampled an early arrival several weeks ago and, though decent, it lacked the depth and complexity of last year’s sample. One heatwave later and he sampled another and if he told you salty tears of joy were coursing down his face mingling with sweet sticky juices of said fruit, it wouldn’t be the most outrageous exaggeration The Menu has ever pawned off on his dear readership.

Stephen’s Charentais melon announces itself ever before tasting with a heady, musty, grassy musk that insinuates itself into every corner of the room. It slices like butter, revealing pinky-orange flesh, dripping sweet nectar and then the first taste … extraordinary! There is a candied bubblegum sweetness but it plumbs far greater depths, revealing rich honeyed sugars with floral and fruit notes resolving with a gentle acidity to tie it all up in a bow.

It is a sublime pleasure on its own but also a delightful sparring partner in all manner of food pairings: excellent with aged Coolea cheese and cucumber pickle; a splendid and refreshing sorbet, especially wearing a grace note of fresh mint; and is particularly fine with salty, savoury cured meats and charcuterie.

One of The Menu’s most pleasurable taste experiences of 2022 so far occurred while dining al fresco in his garden as a quite Mediterranean sun slid from the sky like a drunk melting from a bar stool. He sipped a fine chilled Rós Rosé and ate premium Iberico jamon with the Food For Humans melon, the glistening fat near rendering in the heat and the meat’s sweet salt and umami ever more pronounced when wrapped around a chunk of the gloriously sweet cantaloupe and lobbed into the gob!

• www.foodforhumans.ie