The Menu: Part 2 of Joe McNamee's Munchie food awards for 2023

Their range of fermented Irish food products is made using wild, foraged and cultivated organic, local, seasonal produce, resulting in a whole smorgasbord of vibrant, new, life-filled probiotic flavours to pep up your own dishes, whether at cooking stage or prior to serving a cooked dish, and their oak bark fermented ketchup garnered many initial plaudits.

But the more The Menu came to know the Cork-based couple’s ever-expanding range, the harder and harder he found it to pin down his deep admiration for their wares to a single product. 

And he is not alone for the Terra Ignis duo were one of the standout acts at The Menu’s Grub Circus food stage at All Together Now, last August, debuting their wild yeast drinks, and were afterwards sought out by audience members in their droves, the better to learn more about the brilliantly innovative couple’s methods and ethos. 

In fact, each time The Menu meets up with Linda and Ivo, they have some wonderful new creation to tickle his palate, from black garlic garum to fermented hummus to all manner of funky powders and salts, each and everyone adding magical new flavour dimensions to each and every dish, making Terra Ignis The Menu’s Food Newcomer of the Year.

• terraignis.ie

Food Organisation of the Year

Referencing Grub Circus once more, where another of The Menu’s special guests, septuagenarian Darina Allen—in attendance each year since it began in 2018—was yet again gallivanting around the music festival like a young thing, The Menu marvelled as he always does more at the vim, vigour and passion she brings to each and every enterprise that engages her attention. 

It was even more appropriate that she did so on stage in the company of Rory O’Connell, her brother, co-founder, foil and teacher extraordinaire in a special demonstration to celebrate 40 years of their world-renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School which saw the Grub Circus marquee absolutely jam-packed with adoring fans. 

Whatever about the superb and wide-ranging culinary grounding received by the culinary students who over the decades have come from all over Ireland and 64 other countries around the world, what caps it all is that intrinsically embedded in every single aspect of their ed is a passionate and unwavering commitment to the primacy of local, seasonal, organic produce and true sustainability, no greenwashing, in pursuit of the ultimate goal of a completely circular food system, and those same students have subsequently gone back out into the world, as zealous young evangelists spreading the Ballymaloe gospel of good food as originally conceived by Darina’s later mother-in-law and Rory’s especial mentor, Myrtle Allen. 

• Ballymaloe Cookery School is The Menu’s Food Organisation of the Year.

Food Hero of the Year

Another significant anniversary, as Denis Cotter’s Paradiso restaurant, in Cork City, celebrated the 30th anniversary of its founding in 1993. 

It was also the year in which his latest cookbook, Paradiso: Recipes and Reflections (Nine Bean Rows Books) — also The Menu’s Irish cookbook of the year 2023 — won Best Irish Cookbook at the 2023 Irish Food Writing Awards. 

The book is a fine production, a great cookbook, but it is equally a vital manifesto, sharing an ethos most timely in the face of the existential threat of climate change.

A committed vegetarian when first opening Paradiso, Cotter nevertheless spurned almost entirely the traditional tropes of vegetarian cooking —the ‘worthy’ larder of wholemeal, pulses, brown rice etc — instead creating a fine dining restaurant that just so happened to eschew meat. 

It was a groundbreaking decision on a global scale but Cotter wasn’t finished. 

His collaboration with Ultan Walsh and Lucy Stewart of Gort na Nain farm, began a partnership at the turn of the century which saw the Co Cork farm gradually over years become the primary grower for the Paradiso kitchen, implementing a planting plan decided in advance of each growing season by Cotter and Walsh, yielding superb produce, including exotic items often being grown commercially for the first time on Irish soil. 

In 2019, they received the Collaboration of the Year award at the inaugural World Restaurant Awards, in Paris.

And of Cotter’s legacy? As he said to the Irish Examiner last month: “It’s not wrong to say Paradiso has been an inspiration and influence on Irish food, more so in terms of how people source ingredients than anything to do with vegetarianism — and that is something I’m really proud of, to be honest.”

• Denis Cotter is The Menu’s Food Hero of the Year 2023.