With a top us food magazine describing Ireland's artisanal-food industry in glowing terms, we could be inundated with 'gastrotourists' this summer. Catherine Cleary meets the one man in Ireland who might Be ready for them: Peter Ward, slow-food activist, chairman of the taste council and owner of the finest Gourmet shop in Nenagh - which, as she learns, is no mean achievement.
We step out of needles of cold rain into Peter Ward's shop in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, and a warm smell of meat, cheese and bread enfolds us. Moments earlier, the owner had stepped out into a sodden Kenyon Street in his shirt sleeves, tie and crisp blue-and-white butcher's apron after a phone call from this slightly lost journalist. Approaching me with a smile, he said: "I know everybody else on the street, so it had to be you." All along the street, food shops compete to have the most scrumptious displays. In a butcher's window the meat is arranged with the kind of artistry you might expect from a jeweller.
In the window of Country Choice, Ward's purple-fronted delicatessen, small almond- coloured eggs rest in a nest of hay, and a hand-written sign identifies them as bantam eggs. The little shop, and the cafe that stretches behind it, form a hub for local growers and food producers, and the establishment punches well above its weight.
Ward opened the shop in 1982, "the year of the Pope", having moved from Trim, in Co Meath, to the home town of his wife, Mary. He had been working for a multiple grocer, but he decided that the future lay in being a specialist food provider. In those dark days of recession, however, the banks took some persuading that a delicatessen could prosper. The couple worked long hours. Mary was at home with their three children, making jams, jellies, chutneys, relishes, soups and breads, while her husband worked all day in the shop and cafe.
The shop became a place for poetry readings and an impromptu gallery for local artists to hang their pictures. Recently, organic-gardening courses have been a big hit - and are bringing in a surprising number of young people (because, as Ward says, "older people know how to garden").
Today, as chairman of the Taste Council - a Bord Bia body set up in 2003 to develop Ireland's speciality food industry - and founder member of Tipperary Slow Food, Ward is something of an Irish Mr Food.
Now his appeal may be about to go global. In the months ahead he expects quite a few American gastrotourists over his threshold after he and his shop featured in a lavish 35-page spread in Saveur, a magazine that is not so much the Vogue as the New Yorker of the US foodie world.
The article is a lovingly photographed and painstakingly detailed who's who of artisanal food in Ireland. It portrays a country of ancient Agas, scrubbed pine tables, speckled brown piglets and butter-yellow gorse. Much more Celtic heifer than Celtic tiger. "If we didn't exactly find a gastronomic wonderland, we certainly found a delicious work in progress," wrote Colman Andrews, the magazine's editor-in-chief, in his introduction.
Over the St Patrick's Day weekend, the Saveur editor returned for his third visit to Nenagh, as guest chef at a slow-food convivium. He first visited four years ago, when he worked for two days in the kitchen. Why Nenagh? For starters, because Ward invited him there. Ward insists that Nenagh beats west Cork as a food destination. It is a real market town, he argues, full of "old- fashioned, affluent shops selling good-quality merchandise" and with " a culture of shopping with people as opposed to shopping with premises".
But better than west Cork? "In west Cork it's very much a vibrant summer cycle built up by tourists. Here it's a vibrant cycle built up by local people. It's the locals who are patronising the cafes, the restaurants and the butchers' shops."
Ward believes that, thanks to this culture, and unlike so many small towns, Nenagh didn't suffer the demise of its main street. The taste for home-made jam, soda bread and farm hens' nut-brown eggs that is being "revisited and reinvented" in other areas has never gone away in this part of Tipperary. A Tesco is due to open on the town's outskirts in June. Ward is hopeful that Nenagh's small businesses will weather the arrival.
Ward believes that Irish agriculture, as well as tourism, could benefit from changing its focus. "There's a great national need to get farmers as suppliers into farmers' markets. I'd love to see more primary producers of food such as milk, beef, lamb, eggs, chicken and pork start producing it for direct sale to customers, and respond to the changing taste in the market." With the help of family members who know about cooking or marketing, they could exploit the demand for good food through direct sales, the internet and box schemes. "But that can't happen without a whole course of education for farmers."
Ward remembers his mother travelling with her three small children in a lorry to sell turkeys at Smithfield in the run-up to Christmas. "That confidence has been lost in people, and there's a whole notion of, 'Maybe people will think we're down at heel if we have to go out and sell,' instead of thinking, 'Look at the queue of people who want to buy my produce.' So pride of produce and pride of place have to come back into farming, and then that has to be rewarded through a premium price."
Hotels also need to link up with nearby producers, he says. Instead of shipping in food in sealed containers from large suppliers, they need to offer local tastes. In 2003, when the Saveur team first mentioned Country Choice, he got "phenomenal business", and people would stop off to pick up a picnic. Ward sent visiting food enthusiasts to the local mart to see authentic Irish agriculture.
Summer and autumn would be the perfect times for food tourists to visit, he believes. "I think that we could do a fantastic tourism thing in the autumn. In south Tipperary and Kilkenny we could do an apple trail. More and more producers are now bottling apple juice. Also, we could network with the farmers' markets for a farmers' market trail." So the orchards of the southeast could become tourist attractions, like the vineyard trails of Tuscany or Santa Barbara - immortalised in the buddy movie Sideways (Ciderways, perhaps?)
But how do you protect the tender gastrotourist's palate from the dismal food experiences we all encounter, such as standing in front of an endless row of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, seeing nothing you want to eat? (For more underwhelming food, see Tom Doorley's review on page 23.)
"I believe we could have an artisan food stand in every Spar and Mace, and in every filling station. I addressed a Mace conference recently and was very strong on this point. If they talk about these being family-run businesses, then they really have a responsibility to do some ethical retailing in their own areas. They have to ask if it's right to buy 98 per cent of their stuff off a lorry coming across the country, yet leave the local guy selling his spuds in the car park.
"The hire-car tourist's first port of call, where they buy a map and get some petrol, is definitely the garage and the convenience store. And I think they could sell more artisan foods and upskill their staff with a little bit of regional information."
Slow Food Ireland's Tipperary branch evolved out of a trip two years ago to an international food forum in Turin. When Ward was asked to bring some food-industry people from Tipperary, he invited a number of his suppliers, including a lettuce grower, cheese makers, a butter maker, a supplier of poultry and chicken's liver, and his brother James, a pig producer whose animals are reared on a steady diet of good food and country music. Almost half the group of 10 or so had to get their first passports for the trip, as they had never been out of the country before. "It gave us a lot of respect for ourselves and what we're doing as a food community."
They set up the Tipperary branch of Slow Food Ireland when they got back, and they're now up to 40 members. They have a mission to help educate people, from school children to the pierce-and-nuke convenience brigade, who might have forgotten how easy it is to cook simple food. "The biggest thing is probably the time factor, and every day people make major compromises for convenience. Generally, people are not that happy making compromises. I think there's an element of guilt in everybody's mind every time they give the children the processed pizzas. The culture of food as being a very important family occasion is passing and being replaced by a 'how-do-we-eliminate-the-hunger?' culture."
People may convince themselves, or let global food producers convince them, that processed sauces are ethical and healthy, with low sugar or salt, he says. "But deep down in their own hearts they know it's not and they should buy a can of organic tomatoes and make a five-minute pasta sauce themselves. What I would say to people is: leave the global food brand behind and try and find the time to make your own pasta sauces or make your own soups."
The shop is packed with delights, from rose and lemon flavour Turkish delight to paperback-sized blocks of white and milk chocolate for cooking. Ugandan vanilla pods, black as liquorice and the length of pencils, add their caramel sweetness to the air. The business now also operates as a food wholesaler, with a large warehouse in the town, importing from all over the world and supplying a growing number of specialist food shops around the country.
After leaving Country Choice, word reaches me from a Nenagh friend about a story, well known in the town, of a piece of cheese in the shop window. Years ago, Ward took his courage in his hands and spent several hundred pounds on a wheel of Parmesan cheese, his first such purchase. The cheese was the size of what used to be known in well-appointed sittingrooms as a pouffe, and it sat in the window for weeks, as customers were asked to guess its weight. As the weeks passed, the pressure to cut it was too much for its owner - he was worried that he would not get the perfectly straight line needed. In the end, he lifted it on to cardboard on the floor in the middle of the night and did the deed. The butter-coloured Parmesan was perfectly aged and tasted delicious.
Another window display was not quite as successful. To coincide with a local drama production of The Lion in Winter Ward devised a medieval-themed window, with rich green velvet and two pigs' heads on white porcelain stands. Unfortunately, he did not cook the heads, and overnight the blood and gore leaked down slowly, creating a shop of horrors for bemused passers-by the next morning.
Now he cooks his pigs' heads before using them as eye-catching window displays. In the meantime, the bantam eggs are there as a talking point. Few customers want to eat bantam or guinea-fowl eggs, but they are a point of interest and a reminder of times past. It is not the kind of produce he expects to see on display on supermarket shelves any time soon. u
Country Choice's website is www.countrychoice.ie. See also www.slowfoodireland.com