At some time in our lives, most of us have had a run-in with vegetarian cooking. Lentils, pulses, sawdusty wholemeal loaves, cooking sans meat has had a remarkably bad reputation and one all too often deserved. For the longest time, worthiness and healthiness seemed to be the keys to any vegetarian dish rather than the prerequisites of a dish for the omnivorous - taste and quality. A new Irish cookbook out this week, The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook, looks set to finish off this notion of vegetarian cuisine for good. Slickly designed with beautiful photography, it is full of sophisticated yet simple recipes for dishes such as gingered sweet potato spring roll with sesame-fried cabbage or braised spinach parcels of feta, green pepper and caramelized onion - food that is innovative and indulgent and quite incidentally, vegetarian.
This will be no surprise to anybody that has already discovered Cork's Cafe Paradiso itself. Founded by husband and wife team, Denis Cotter and Bridget Healy in 1993, it has a huge fan base of people who appreciate what Denis describes as "serious food in an informal setting". This is a cafe that has managed to convince the most hardened of the country's meat-eaters to do without and enjoy the experience while the rest of us probably just don't notice the meatlessness in the first place. "For me the two things were always completely separate" says Denis, the chef and author of the new cookbook. "I always wanted to cook and own my own restaurant and I just never even thought about working with meat." He has been a vegetarian since the age of 21 - "it was one of those things that happens, but the only reason I stay vegetarian is for ethical reasons."
The rather roundabout manner in which Denis started cooking professionally has probably influenced his methods nearly as much as his vegetarianism. Born in Macroom, Co Cork, he worked as a bank inspector with AIB for over nine years after leaving school: "I hated what I was doing, hated it." Cooking, on the other hand, was always something he enjoyed and eventually he went to the chef at his favourite Dublin restaurant, Bananas, and asked him for advice.
"He told me to give up the idea altogether, that it was incredibly hard work and very difficult. I had some crazy idea that I'd own my own restaurant within a year." He didn't give up the idea, but he did give up his bank job and headed to London where he got his first chef experience working with Cranks, now a major chain of wholefood restaurants but at that time just three small restaurants. It was there he met Bridget, a New Zealander, and when she became pregnant a year later, the pair headed for her homeland. Although they were only there for a year, the New Zealand way of cooking has had a profound effect on Denis's cooking. "The whole Pacific Rim fusion thing hadn't really kicked in, but people were cooking without reference to classic cuisines. In England at the time, each restaurant worked to a certain style and didn't move outside it."
It's a style of cooking that never appealed to Denis: "I did work in a very classic, French cuisine style restaurant but I lasted only three nights - I think I left five minutes before they fired me. It seemed as thought they'd been working in the same way for 1,000 years. You know the way you hear tales of chefs throwing saucepans at the plongeurs, well it actually happened there. Incredible."
But the main thing that Denis took from his time in New Zealand was the idea of seasonality - using each vegetable only when it's in season. "I was amazed at the quality and the abundance of the produce and the freedom it gives you. They would use something when it was good and cheap and, when it finished, something else would come along. I was aware of seasonality as a concept but there everybody just used it as a matter of course."
Denis left New Zealand three months before Bridget. "I was so naive. I was going back to find us somewhere to live and start a restaurant before she came over. I hadn't even found a job."
They considered living in New Zealand "but I wasn't happy with the outdoor lifestyle there. Everybody had these hobbies and I don't have a hobby," he laughs.
Back in Cork, Denis worked for the Quay Co-op, a vegetarian co-operative on O'Sullivan Quay, where he stayed for five years. "It was a classic vegetarian wholefood restaurant with left-wing policies and all the rest. We had to have major discussions about buying a chair." In the end, Cotter felt that his ideas on cooking were going a different way from the Co-op's, and he left to set up Cafe Paradiso.
THE restaurant was influenced by another trip to New Zealand which had introduced him to a new wave of cafe-style restaurants. "I was blown away by it all. These were places that were serving incredible food in a `caff' environment with loud music and brilliant waitresses that pretended they weren't. I loved the cheek of it."
It was a formula that worked just as well in Cork as in New Zealand. From their very first lunch when they did 50 covers they have remained hugely popular. "We worked very hard to simplify everything and yet we had very high expectations. We threw everything at it and did it exactly the way we wanted it - our thinking was that, if it didn't work out, we'd up and go to New Zealand."
Undoubtedly, the main reason for that success lies in Denis's strong feelings about food. "What I focus on is vegetables. I ask myself `what's good? What can I do with that?'. You know if people go to Jacques down the road they'll be offered turbot or sole, whereas I'll be giving them spinach and will have to make that into something special. That became the challenge."
From the start, he nurtured good relations with his producers and suppliers, opting for organic wherever possible. "Since my days in the whole-food business it has been ingrained in me that organic is good. At its best it can be picked and brought into me in a matter of hours, whereas other suppliers ship in from Holland and no one knows where its from or how long since its been picked. Still I wouldn't buy organic vegetables if they tasted worse and that's always been the basis of my relationship with suppliers - if he brings in something and it's crap, I'll reject it."
Notes from other cuisine tradition are brought together in new ways - there's a roasted roots and couscous pilaff, chilli roasted squash and a most unusual Thai cucumber and green bean salad with a roasted peanut-citrus dressing. However, Denis is quite firm that this is no innovation on his part: "Whole-food cooking has always had to look to other cuisines because there is no vegetarian cuisine as such. Falafel was nicked and brought in from Morocco in the 1960s, vegetable curry from India."
He is similarly firm about the shortcomings of the notion of a traditional Irish cuisine. "I just don't think the repertoire is there. Morocco has a cuisine, India has a cuisine but the Irish repertoire is just too narrow and certainly not enough to sustain an actual cuisine. I think there is one now but it's being created by people cooking in Ireland today." Seamus O'Connell from Cork is just one such person who he singles out for praise "because he's cooking with wild or organic, locally produced food."
Yet despite this use of other traditions, Cotter is dismissive of much of the fusion cooking that is currently popular. While his recipes often bring disparate elements together, it is done with sensitivity and a knowledge of flavours and textures. "At its worst fusion cooking is just people throwing together obscure ingredients to see if it works. Then chef sends out a dish and if the customer doesn't like it, its because they don't understand. There's so much bluffing going on that it's impossible for the diner to enjoy good food."
When it came to the cookbook, Denis was determined that the end result would be something a bit special. "I didn't want to give away the recipes unless it was a part of something good." The distinctive front cover was designed by Eoin Kelly, the artist who created much of the artwork in the restaurant, while the clean, cutting edge design was dreamed up by John Foley at Bite! design, who had been a regular at the restaurant for over two years. The text itself is full of advice, stories and Denis's views on the use of everything from chilli to beetroot.
"They hardly edited it at all - I presumed they'd send it back for re-writes. These are mostly very simple dishes like tortilla or risotto which have been done before so I wanted to explain how I cook them that's different." From here the logical next step might have been to expand the business or open another restaurant, but Denis is not rushing into anything. "Given that it's taken this long to get the restaurant exactly how we want it, we're determined to stay here. I've always admired restaurants that reach a high standard and then cruise there. If we could do another five years at the standard we're at now, that would be my aim."
The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook by Denis Cotter is published on June 28th by Atrium, priced £20