All good cooks need to make a journey to discover their true inspiration. For some, the journey is involved and tortuous. For others, it may take no more than a stroll down the road to discover what they want to do.
Dermot Gannon is the chef in Destry's, in Clifden, Connemara. A couple of years ago, dissatisfied with the direction of his cooking, he spent four months working in Estonia - not the normal sort of destination one would think of for one of Ireland's most exciting cooks.
The basic nature of the local cooking - "They had potatoes, pork, sour cream, and in the hotel we would buy lamb from a local farmer, a woman, and she would literally haul the animal into the kitchen over her shoulders" - was the catalyst which opened Gannon's eyes. "I just thought: this is what it's all about. I wanted to present food as close to its original nature as possible. I realised that this was the way I wanted to cook."
A further trip last year, to Fiji, confirmed his resolve to do something different.
"When I came back I actually wanted to serve the food on shovels", he tells you without a note of irony, an ambition thwarted by the fact that he couldn't source the right shovel tops. His compromise was to confine his main course cookery to char-grilling and roasting, and to serve his dishes unadorned, carried from the kitchen on the sort of sizzling platters we associate with Chinese restaurants.
Less than a mile from Destry's town-centre location, Hugh and Eileen Griffin run High Moors restaurant, in the townland of Dooneen. For 15 years, Eileen has cooked the food which Hugh grows down on his allotment and in his polythene tunnel, a stone's throw from their house, which is also the restaurant.
"I was up at seven this morning, digging the potatoes," Hugh Griffin will tell you. "You have to love it!" That he loves it is beyond doubt, and his dynamic energy as he scuttles around a room crowded with more than 40 diners on a Saturday night is electrifying. The menu says: "Main courses served with High Moors's potatoes, and vegetables or salad", and the logic of this set-up, where almost all the salad leaves and vegetables travel no more than 100 yards from where they are grown, is not merely unassailable, but irresistible.
Dermot Gannon's culinary journey was lengthy, while Hugh and Eileen Griffin's scarcely took them out of their own garden, but they have all effectively arrived at the same conclusion: to make their food as logical and delicious as possible. This means that Destry's and High Moors are two of the west's most invigorating places to eat. Radically different in style and content, they nevertheless preach a similar message in terms of cooking, and to eat in the two restaurants on consecutive nights is a delight.
Our dinner in Destry's began with starters of smoked eel served with corn cakes, pickled cucumber, lumpfish caviar and a chive creme fraiche, while I ordered fried crab wontons and shrimps in a Thai coconut soup. The eel is superlatively smoked by Frank Hederman, and Gannon is content to leave it alone, simply selecting perfectly matching flavours with the cucumber, the caviar and the corn cakes.
My soup was served in a coconut shell, and if Gannon showed that he can capture the simplicity of Nordic flavours with the smoked eel, this soup showed that his journey to the Far East has left him with a perfect understanding of the lightness and subtlety of Asian cookery. The melding of flavours between the coconut, the shrimp and the wontons was heavenly.
On the advice of a friend who had eaten in Destry's and tried the fagioli bean, turnip and Parmesan soup, we asked for a bowl, and enjoyed a brew which perfectly liaised the different ingredients. Gannon's food is normally intense, but this was mellow and autumnal, delightful.
From the six main courses on the menu, we chose roast rack of Connemara lamb with roast garlic puree and mint sauce, and seared scallops with devilled crab meat, pistachio oil and balsamic syrup. The lamb arrived from the grill on a sizzling plate, the scallops in a small frying pan, on a bed of spinach. Both were sublimely flavourful, their integral flavours expertly captured and then offset by the additional elements - little dipping pots with the garlic and the mint for the lamb, and the crabmeat and the pistachio oil and balsamic syrup for the scallops.
One can see a cook stripping away the complexities of cooking in dishes such as this, taking them back to basics and then reassembling them from scratch to find his own signature. Never a man to serve up a culinary cliche, Gannon's vegetables consisted of a ratatouille abetted by cashew nuts and goat's cheese, an ethereal puree of parsnips, and green beans with bacon and chilli, with the ingredients chopped microscopically fine. All three offered a new take on the expected textures from such ingredients.
Our desserts were a very exact creme brulee with a raspberry ice, and a clever chocolate cup which housed chocolate ice cream and a chocolate sauce.
Dermot Gannon's wanderings and wonderings have conspired to forge a restless, exotic style, but for Hugh and Eileen Griffin, just a bit down the road, there seems to be nothing in the pot but certainty, a culinary certainty made all the more special by the fact that Eileen loves to cook and Hugh loves to serve.
So, a Caesar salad will be simple and correct and scrummy, with no implausible, needless additions to the classic dish, and a little tartlet of prawns with chilli, garlic and coriander will be precisely cooked, the shellfish sweet as honey. Eileen's breads - "She'll spend at least two hours everyday just on the baking", says Hugh - were fine salty olive and sundried tomato, and with some crisp Aligote they were a joy.
Cornfed chicken breast with a creamy cider and thyme sauce was as noble a dish as I have eaten in yonks, the bird perfectly roasted, the sauce a soulmate for the fowl. Carna Bay scallops were served with a fresh basil sauce, and they were delightful.
When the huge dish of High Moors's vegetables is placed on the table with the main courses, you look at the generous helpings and think: "Oh, we'll maybe get through about half of these". There was champ, and cabbage with nutmeg and cream, and a stir-fry with red pepper, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, courgette, cucumber and carrots. You help yourself to some . . . and 10 minutes later the whole thing is eaten. And truth be told, if they offered more, you would probably suppress the guilt and say "Yes!"
This friendly, fun food also has the magical effect of setting the atmosphere in the room on fire. On a Saturday night, High Moors was humming with happiness, and I have no doubt that this is caused not only by the pleasure of eating the food, but because so many people who eat here are regulars, folk who wouldn't miss a meal in High Moors any time they are in Clifden.
The couple from Coleraine sitting at an adjacent table to us, have been coming to the restaurant for 14 of the 15 years it has been open. Hugh Griffin estimates that some nights 80 per cent of his customers are people who have eaten in the restaurant before.
One final factor which draws the regulars back are the desserts, creamy domestic confections such as a meringue gateau cake filled with raspberries, which was demolished, and a lovely crumble of strawberry, raspberry and apple.
The certainty and sureness of Eileen Griffin's cooking is such that it makes critical judgment redundant, a factor which struck me last year when I ate at another restaurant contained in somebody's private house, the Gernon family's Brocka-on-the-Water, in Co Tipperary. Then a friend remarked that the cooking expressed "the perfection of domestic cooking", and this is exactly what Hugh and Eileen Griffin achieve.
Destry's, Main Street, Clifden, Co Galway, tel: (095) 21722 Open 6 p.m.10 p.m., Mon-Sat. Major cards.
High Moors, Dooneen, Clifden, Co Galway, tel: (095) 21342 Open 6.30 p.m.9.30 p.m. Wed-Sun. Major cards.