Having recently washed dishes, cutlery, pots and pans and assorted kitchen paraphernalia for five straight hours, two nights in a row, I think I’m qualified to say that being a kitchen porter is a far tougher job than being a food writer. How many plates, bowls and sets of cutlery do 17 diners get through over a six-course dinner? Do the maths, and then double it, because when there’s a Michelin-starred chef at the stove, plates come on top of other plates. And no, they’re not dishwasher-proof, these particular plates and bowls.
When I offered to help in the kitchen at a series of Meet the Chef dinners hosted by Mark Moriarty to celebrate Food Month at The Irish Times, and the third series of his TV show, Beyond the Menu, I thought maybe I'd be doing a bit of light chopping and pot stirring. But it turns out that there isn't a spare potwasher to be found in all the land, so someone had to do it, and that was me. My Irish Times journalist colleagues Conor Pope and Róisín Ingle were recruited to work front of house, and we put the dates in our diaries, two sold out evenings with Moriarty being joined in the kitchen by two of the chefs who feature in the current series, Gráinne Mullins on the first night and Ahmet Dede the second.
Mullins, a chef turned chocolatier and owner of Grá Chocolates, and the reigning Euro-Toques Ireland young chef of the year, was sous chef to Moriarty as he sent out the first four courses to 12 guests in the private dining room at Pembroke Wines. There was a tartlet of sea trout, redcurrant and soured cream, followed by celeriac baked in bread, hazelnut, apple, preserved black truffle jam. The fish course was wild sea bass, clam and yuzu kosho butter, pink fir potato and aged schrenckii caviar, draped with edible gold leaf. The meat course was Sika deer roasted in barley, Indonesian long pepper, artichoke and pear.
Then it was Mullins’s turn to take charge and in the first of her two desserts she introduced guests to oabika, a dessert ingredient made from cacao beans, making its first appearance in Ireland. Green apple, oabika, crab apple jelly and apple crisps was a refreshing switch from savoury to sweet. The final course was spiced orange cake, pumpkin custard, candied pumpkin and orange compote. There were a lot of plates, and more cutlery than at a royal banquet.
And the amateur pot scrubber? Not too bad was the verdict from the chefs on my first night. Though I could have done with a pair of rubber gloves, comfier shoes, and an assistant to dry while I washed.
But then Baltimore came to the big city, and things got a lot more frenetic, at least at the sink. Ahmet Dede brought his sous chef Ali, his business partner Maria, front of house powerhouse Carly, and his sommelier Joey Scanlon, on a roadtrip to Pembroke Wines to cook for 17 Food Month guests, alongside Moriarty.
He also brought the restaurant’s hand-thrown pottery bowls and plates, and practically every pot, pan and gadget needed to create a six-course Dede menu, including a stove-top barbecue, a special hotplate for cooking pancakes, and ice-cream machines, plural.
West Cork langoustine, isot pepper, preserved lemon, chilli was the first course, followed by cured sea bass, jamon Ibérico, potato and aged schrenckii caviar. Dede’s Turkish heritage came out to play next with a delicious kofte with yoghurt, almond, garlic and cumin. Barbecued turbot, pumpkin cooked in spiced tomato water, vin jaune, was the fish course, followed by Moriarty’s deer roasted in barley. Dessert was Turkish mulberry ice-cream, pomegranate and black mulberry dressing, sour cream.
And this is where the amateur potwasher came gloriously unstuck, blaming a temporary lack of hot water, a blocked (single) sink, and a ridiculous amount of dishes and pots. But, chef Dede came to the rescue, working magic with a plunger, and soon he and Moriarty had the wash-up situation back under control. They didn’t offer me my job back though. Sad, that.
In addition to these two memorable nights, readers also signed up for an Irish Times Food Month evening celebrating 25 years of the Tannery restaurant, with Paul and Máire Flynn in conversation with Russ Parsons, former food editor of the LA Times, and a dinner showcasing some of the restaurant's signature dishes. There was crab crème brûlée, of course, beef cheek in Blackrock stout, and hedgerow jelly spiked with all sorts of delicious foraged berries.
Earlier in November, chefs Niall Sabongi and Karl Whelan hosted a Crudo & Craic, a Food Month readers' night at their Saltwater Grocery in Terenure, where caviar and oysters, and four types of aged-fish crudo were on the menu, along with shellfish pasta and dessert. And November got off to a flying start when Food Month at The Irish Times joined in the celebrations marking the publication of Gaz Smith and Rick Higgins's much talked about cookbook, And for Mains...
For more information on Meet the Chef events like these, click here to become a member of The Irish Times Food and Drink Club. We hope we can invite you to join us again in the future, once Covid protocols and regulations allow.
The next episode of Beyond the Menu, featuring Ahmet Dede, will be on RTÉ 1 on Wednesday evening at 8.30pm. The episode with Gráinne Mullins is available to watch on the RTÉ Player.
