More than 20 years ago, Gerry Galvin, cooking in The Vintage, Brian Cronin, running the Blue Haven Hotel, plus Heidi MacNeice of The Spinnaker, Peter Barry of Man Friday and Gino Gaio of Gino's were the first people to create, in Kinsale, what we might call a gourmet haven.
Ambitious and forward-thinking, they realised that if high standards of cooking and a decent variety of accommodation were put side by side, then you could attract outsiders to come and stay in the town.
Kinsale, of course, has never looked back, and its prototype, of a small, coastal village becoming a specialised tourist destination, has been followed by other places. Clifden, in Connemara, is one of the best known, as is Dingle, but it is unquestionably Kenmare, in Co Kerry which wins the crown for offering stellar standards of cooking and somewhere to lay your head at prices to suit almost every pocket.
But the town which is hottest on the heels of the south and west-coast hotshots is, surprisingly, Carlingford, in Co Louth. Why surprisingly? Well, simply because Co Louth has little history of good, artisan food production, often regarded as an essential first step for any town trying to put itself on the culinary map. But the good people of Carlingford have not let this deter them. If there are no farmhouse cheese-makers or other specialists, they long ago realised that what they have on their very doorstep - fine mountain lamb, superb shellfish, fresh fish from the lough and splendid local mushrooms - at least offered them the means to create a local culinary style.
Two things define the town, I think. Firstly, there is the fact that, for decades, no one paid any attention to it.
While Omeath, a few miles closer to the Border, has been destroyed by the ravages of its tourist days, when it offered the first bolt-hole serving booze on a Sunday to dry-throated Northerners, Carlingford was too far south for the day-trippers. It was by-passed, which meant its medieval character has survived almost intact, and this small-scale intimacy is one of its great treasures.
Then, as Brian McKevitt of the Oystercatcher remembers, when the Troubles came, "the town was forgotten". This sounds like bad luck. In fact, it was a blessing.
Carlingford today has few if any of the signs of shlocky suburban style found throughout the Border counties, and the local town committee has worked hard to preserve and protect the nature and identity of this little jewel.
Secondly, I feel it is the lilting slopes of Slieve Foy, rather than Carlingford Lough, which defines the village. It nestles at the foot of the hill, and the play of rolling hill with the quiet water creates a magical effect, never more so than in autumn.
The following are some of the major players in Carlingford's hospitality culture - folk you can expect to hear a lot more about in the coming years.
McGee's Bistro
Sheila Keiro and Hugh Finnegan have recently moved McGee's from the D'Arcy-McGee centre to a location in the heart of the village, and the generous room offers scope for Keiro's smashing culinary talents and Finnegan's droll sense of humour.
"Lots of people love him, and the rest can't understand him," is how they talk about Hugh Finnegan in the village.
"Sheila has worked in lots of different kitchens and I have worked on lots of different building sites," he tells you. And I have to say I find Finnegan's wry and self-deprecatory sense of humour spot-on. He sets the tone of the room at just the right pitch of intimacy and authority.
Sheila Keiro, meantime, is working away in her large open-plan kitchen with her team of yellow T-shirted and white-hatted female assistants. Keiro is a cook who has a sure touch. Her simple starter-course pizza, using a tortilla base topped with pesto, sliced tomato and mozzarella is a cracking little dish.
If this is the sort of clever cooking which is easy to admire, then my main course of wok-roasted tuna, served with a herbed rice, shows her utter assurance and panache with flavours.
The tuna is marinated in soy, mirin and sesame oil, then coated with what she calls an "east-west" spice mix, before being fried. It was outstanding, with the texture of the fish perfectly judged and the seasoning and spicing alive and vital. The herbed rice was perfect.
Keiro's daring menu roams from Thai beef, to vegetable and tofu kebabs (the vegetarian cooking is most imaginative), to chicken fajiitas, to Creole-style meat parcels, to mussels Bienville. Often, this is dangerous territory for a chef, for while you may have a sure touch with one ethnic cuisine, it is difficult to be fluent in them all. But Keiro is wise - the fundamental flavours of her food are kept precise and well-controlled - and she clearly relishes new ideas and combinations.
You choose from the selection of salads at the counter. Of course, the end of October is not the best time for salad, and corn, olive and peppers salad, and coleslaw, which were among the choices, were uninspiring.
A raspberry cheesecake, however, was right back on song, and the evening was just delightful. McGee's marries ambience and food especially well, with funky food and a relaxed atmosphere, and the waitresses were just as slick and confident as everything else in this classy operation.
Tel: 042-73751. Winter opening hours: Thurs-Sun 6.30 p.m.-9 p.m. (Last orders 10 p.m. Fri and Sat)
The Oystercatcher
It was "M.N.", from Ashbourne, Co Meath, who first alerted me to Brian McKevitt's Oystercatcher, right in the heart of the village.
Walking the Tain Way, in the Cooley Mountains, she stopped off in Carlingford, and spent the night at the Oystercatcher. "We got such a surprise - huge bright room, wooden floors, plain curtains, nice furniture an enormous hard bed - all spotless. Great breakfast, and for dinner we had a whole lobster each with a bottle of the best Chablis."
And you thought walkers were penitential types who lived in tents on cans of Campbells' soup! M. N. certainly knows how to make the Tain Way into a treat! I suspect that for breakfast she had the Oystercatcher porridge, which is laced with a drop of the local whiskey.
Brian McKevitt is a member of the family which has for decades run McKevitt's Hotel, across from the Oystercatcher and, after retiring from the army, he opened up this simple bistro with rooms. The style and the ambience are influenced directly by his own manner: quietly confident, an expert who knows just how to make a room work.
On the Sunday night I ate dinner, there was a cracking mix of courting couples (why is it that with courting couples, men do 90 per cent of the talking?), quartets who might have been sailors or walkers, and larger groups out for the night. It made for a terrific room, and the Oystercatcher food represents just the sort of sustenance we all want: nothing complex, just honest, flavourful and good value.
For starters, you can choose from oysters cooked any one of six ways - plain; with spinach mornay; with coconut curry; with black bean sauce; mixed; or with smoked salmon and horseradish cream. I picked the latter, and the fiery radish paired well with both the mollusc and the salmon. I then had a fine sole on the bone with a simple butter sauce and a slice of lemon. Again, you help yourself from the salad bar, which also has a couple of hot potato dishes.
While fish and shellfish predominate on the menu, there are also meat dishes - lamb with mint and garlic stuffing; chicken with aioli; beef fillet with Kilbeggan whiskey sauce - and a couple of choices for vegetarians.
Like M.N., I slept the good sleep in one of their comfortable rooms - possibly helped by the thumping alcohol content of a mercurial Italian red wine called Barbaglio - and for breakfast had a wonderfully simple dish of local mushrooms on toast, the sort of thing often done carelessly and badly, but here done carefully and just right.
Tel: 042-73922 Open: Tues-Sun 7 p.m.-9.30 p.m., B & B £25/£30
Ghan House
It is a sign of the confidence in Carlingford that the Carrolls have not merely brought the lovely Ghan House back from its parlous state of repair of less than a decade ago, but are now adding nine rooms in an annex to cope with the numbers coming for weekends, functions and assorted cookery classes.
It's a comfortable house, where it is easy to flop into an armchair - and damned difficult to pull yourself out of it. Joyce Carroll, her son, Paul, and daughter Cailinn, are the mainstay of the operation - with mother directing the cooking, and son and daughter marshalling the cookery classes and the house.
Joyce Carroll has an auto-didact's strong appetite for cooking, which she has progressively studied piecemeal over the years. This is reflected in her dinner menus which feature clever touches such as soy-dressed arami with grilled oysters, or a ginger dressing with spinach paired with lentil and coconut quesadillas, or polenta served with fresh brill.
Her exactitude in the kitchen is inspiring. Even a simple Sunday brunch, served from the buffet, sees food cooked with skill: excellent, sweet fish minestrone to begin, then a fine chicken and coconut curry, its flavours sharp and well-defined, then a lushly gooey strawberry roulade. The Carrolls have very cleverly turned brunch into a day-long buffet, so while you can have chicken and coconut curry, your partner can still order a fried breakfast with a potato cake, or go traditional with pot roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. This turns the dining room into a fluid, relaxed space, just right for chatting or, alternatively, chilling out and reading the papers with a glass of wine.
With a new chef to assist Carroll, Ghan House should look forward to opening its restaurant doors more regularly - at present it opens for Saturday night dinner and Sunday buffet and brunch, but otherwise just for functions. Carroll wants more time to devote to her cookery classes, while continuing classes featuring well-known chefs such as Ursula Ferrigno and Paul and Jeanne Rankin.
Tel: 042-73682 Open: Sat 7 p.m.-9.30 p.m., Sun 11.30 a.m.- 5.30 p.m., B & B £25-35
Jordan's
Harry and Marian Jordan's restaurant with rooms needs little introduction to regular readers. Typical of the dynamism you will find in the village, however, is the fact that they have not simply stood still and relied on their good name to bring in the punters. Recently, the bar at the front has been converted into a comfortable dining-room where smoking is allowed. Jordan's familiar air of calm and consideration is found in both the restaurant and the rooms, and it is no surprise that this is a favourite destination for weekending Dubliners, and likely to prove even more popular so since the Balbriggan by-pass was finished and you can get to Carlingford from the capital in not much more than an hour.
Their signature dishes are a constant feature of the dinner menu: Slieve Foy mushrooms with crushed walnuts; Carlingford Lough oysters; pastry-wrapped shank of lamb; lobster from the tank. The staff at Jordan's are superbly directed by the owners, who, despite 15 years of hard service, are today as jaunty and inspired by the business as when they began.
Tel: 042-73223 Open: Tues-Sat 6.30 p.m.-9.45 p.m., Sun 12.30 p.m.-2.30 p.m., B & B from £37.50
Georgina's Cakes
Georgina Finnegan has run her bakery from Castle Hill in Carlingford for more than 20 years, (her speciality was to bake and supply meringues to delis and restaurants throughout the area). More than a year ago, she opened the little coffee shop which now adjoins the bakery, and here you can find that charming, semi-domestic baking which often seems to have vanished.
There are lovely pert little gingerbread men, the famous apple scones which are the best-sellers - "people seem to hear about the apple scones from a great distance", says Georgina - apple pie with sultanas, carrot cake, coffee cake served with fresh cream, rich chocolate gateau with fruit and smashing little coffee kiss biscuits.
At lunchtime, there is Russian salad soup, perhaps mushroom soup with nutmeg, but everything including the coffee - particularly good - shows the care of a woman who says about her shop: "It's very special to me - it means so much." It shows.
Tel: 042-73346 Open seven days, 10.30 a.m.-6 p.m.
Other Carlingford Addresses
Michael and Glynis Caine are well-known to food lovers of the north-east, from their time at the Gables in Ardee - for many years the culinary destination of the area.
After 15 years' hard work, they sold the Gables, and now operate Beaufort House, a new B & B on Carlingford's waterfront, in tandem with a yacht charter business. It's a comfortable, thoughtfully-designed house, with lovely views across the lough, and the hospitality of the Caines is a guarantee of a good time.
Beaufort House and Carlingford Yacht Charter and Sea-school Ltd, Tel: 042-73879
McKevitt's Village Hotel, tel: 042-73116. Terry McKevitt's hotel has long been the mainstay of the village.
The Terrace Restaurant, tel: 042-79731. Joanna McCarthy's Terrace restaurant also functions as a coffee shop.
Kingfisher Bistro, tel: 04273716. Set in the old McGee's Bistro home, this is the town's newest venture, where Mark Woods is the cook. Open Tue-Sat 6.30 p.m.-10 p.m. Sun, 6.30 p.m.-9 p.m.
The Marina Restaurant. This fine building, a mile or so outside the village in the direction of Omeath, is run by Ronan Hand and is home to a smart new restaurant, where a young French chef cooks sole meuniere, Cooley lamb, sirloin with a pepper sauce, and other classics.
P.J. O'Hare's. Also known as The Anchor Bar, this is a fab pub, its interior ageless and timeless, and, as likely as not, packed to the proverbial rafters.
Lily Finnegan's Pub, Whitestone. A few miles away from Carlingford, on a remote stretch of the coast, this is a grand little pub, which was jammed with horsey types - still in jodhpurs - on the Sunday evening I dropped in for a drink. A local secret which is worth discovering.
Among the craft shops and galleries in Carlingford are: The Tholsel, Memories, Irish Secrets, Old Quay Antiques, Village Antiques, Creative Licence Art Gallery, Contemporary Crafts and John Haugh Studio.
From early next year, all Carlingford numbers will have the prefix 93 added, so Ghan House, for example, will become tel: 042937 3682.