I LOVE PORRIDGE, so it’s heartening that the cooks in the world’s best restaurant sit down together to a daily steaming bowl. One of them is sous chef Trevor Moran (31), the most senior of three young Irish chefs working at Noma, René Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant which has now held the title of San Pellegrino world’s best for two years.
Moran arrived first to eat and then to work in Noma just before the world flocked to Redzepi’s kitchen. The Stillorgan man had no professional training but fell in love with kitchen life through a job at Brasserie na Mara in Dún Laoghaire, and has also worked for Dylan McGrath in Mint in Ranelagh. In April 2009 he arrived at Noma, then a quiet place compared to the global fishbowl it has become. “I loved it. It was just so light and honest and pure and everything was new. There was a craft behind every dish.”
Through an unpaid stage he earned a chef de partie position and this year he rose to sous chef. Another young Dublin chef, Halaigh Whelan-McManus joined him on the staff this summer. Greystones pastry chef Louise Bannon completes the Irish trio.
And the hours? An average day is 9am to midnight with that breakfast of hot porridge at 11am and a “good dinner” later in the day. There are three days off in a week. “It’s a young restaurant, just eight years old. There’s still something very humble about the whole concept.”
Dozens of young chefs who’d kill for Moran’s job came to a circus tent in a muddy field beside Copenhagen Harbour for Mad Foodcamp. (Mad is Danish for food) late last month. The two-day symposium was led with messianic fervour by Redzepi in T-shirt and mud-spattered wellies.
Over two days the audience was rapt, frequently straining to hear over drumming rain on the canvas roof. British forager Miles Irving explained how his “weeds” are now on the menus of 50 of London’s restaurants.
Inaki Aizpitarte from Paris restaurant Le Chateaubriand cooked “fake risotto” using chopped up samphire stems to mimic grains of rice. (The inspiration? A journalist came and asked him to cook something green and it was all he had in his fridge.) It tasted sensational.
Sweden’s Magnus Nilsson of Faviken Restaurant showed how they preserve vegetables and herbs to continue to eat what they’ve grown over the long snow-bound winter. Ben Shewry of Attica in Melbourne made grown men mist up with a film about foraging for food with his seven-year-old son. David Chang of New York’s Momofuku gave a challenging science lecture on the microbiology of fermentation.
Basque chef Andoni Aduriz of Mugaritz restaurant said it was vital that chefs buy what is produced around them. And the father figure, French chef Michel Bras (64 but looked 10 years younger) spoke about the importance of making people happy, chopping his own ingredients, and how he insists his staff call him by name, as the moniker “chef” reduces him to a “living statue”.
See thefoodproject.dk CATHERINE CLEARY
Irish design
Irish designers will be in the limelight in the coming weeks both across Ireland and in London, as the Crafts Council of Ireland celebrates design-led craft. The Kilkenny Shop in Dublin’s Nassau Street will feature craft designs in its front window, and 150 designers will be opening their workshops to give people an insight into how things are designed and made. Meanwhile, 12 Irish design companies, including Ceadogán Rugs, Dunleavy Bespoke, Ben Gabriel, Klimmek Henderson and Shane Holland are taking part in the Tent design trade show (September 22nd-25th), which is part of the London Design Festival.
See Ccoi.ie. EMMA CULLINAN
Belfast celebrates its literary heritage
Belfast is a city that has long divided writers: arriving in the 1980s, travel writer Paul Theroux thought it an awful place – “mouldering buildings, tough-looking people, a visible smell, too many fences” – although the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien admired its “perverse and awkward” charm. Now a new initiative by Belfast City Council aims to celebrate the city’s rich literary heritage, from past greats such as CS Lewis and Louis MacNeice through to important contemporary voices such as novelist Glenn Patterson and poets Leontia Flynn and Sinéad Morrissey.
Literary Belfast launched at the Ulster Hall last Tuesday night with an impressive line-up of Northern Irish writers reading from their own work, including Michael Longley, Bernard MacLaverty, Ciarán Carson, Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby.
The focus for the project is a new website – literarybelfast.org – designed as a searchable showcase for literary events, writing workshops and retreats and online exhibitions. There’s also an iPhone app in which some of the city’s best known writers guide you around their favourite haunts. Or, for those who prefer a flesh-and-blood guide, you can take a literary tour of the city, starting at the most famous pub in Northern Ireland, the opulent Crown Bar in Great Victoria Street.
See literarybelfast.org. FIONOLA MEREDITH
