Reflections on the brilliant Dingle Food Festival
We headed down to the Dingle Peninsula Food Festival. Every year we join forces with Liam and Julie of Liam O’Neill Art Studio to raise funds for a local charity.
This year it was Cuan Counselling, a local counselling and therapy service for teenagers and young people. Liam puts one of his magnificent oil paintings up for raffle, and the second and third prizes are l’Ecrivain restaurant vouchers.
Unfortunately, due to work commitments and the IKA service, we didn’t make it down to join in the fun on Saturday afternoon. However, on Sunday morning people kept coming to Liam’s art studio at a steady pace to sample Derry’s Dingle Vodka cured Irish salmon, served with pickled vegetables, brown shrimp and horseradish cream.
There were awards for each county and overall awards for the Irish food industry in general. We met a lot of customers and suppliers there. Congratulations to you all! It may have been a festival of food but all the pubs in Dingle were jammed to the rafters with ceol agus craic pouring onto the streets. It’s such a lovely little town with so much to offer all of us — not just foreign tourists.
http://www.evoke.ie/viewpoint/sallyanne-clarke-column-from-dingle-food-festival-to-the-village-people
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The Taste Trail, which winds through the town and involves almost 80 businesses offering tastes of their food and drink, or hosting makers of great products in their premises, is one of the festival’s big draws. Generous portions and friendly rivalry among participants to put up the most popular offering make this a highlight of the weekend.
Jim McCarthy of the Chart House restaurant said 600 of the 800 taster plates they prepared for the weekend were sold on the first day, leading to an early Sunday morning session painstakingly wrapping black pudding in filo pastry and caramelising onions for a goat’s cheese tartlet to replenish stocks.
Maia Binder’s cheese shop had queues down the street for raclette and a wonderful fondu made with Irish cheese and Crean’s Dingle beer.
Dingle Dexter beef sliders at Fenton’s and cones of fish goujons and chips at Reel Dingle Fish generated good-humoured queues. The Fish Barr Seafood & Wine Cafe at the Marina was inundated with requests for tandoori prawn skewers.
Those in need of an afternoon pick-up found it in the Badger & Dodo espresso martinis at the new Bean In Dingle coffee shop, where you could also pick up a wonderfully aromatic and sticky cinnamon bun by Bácús craft bakery.
At the Global Village restaurant, Fáilte Ireland food ambassador and chef Martin Bealin’s tasting menu for the weekend featured wonderful wild boar from Ballinwillin House in Mitchelstown. Space was also made available for the much talked about Milesian restaurant in Castlegregory to showcase its work on the taste trail. On Orchard Lane, Donal and Virginia O’Gara of Cork’s My Goodness Food were serving South American pupusas, vegan cakes and probiotic kefir mocktails.
The Irish Times - http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/foodfile-something-fishy-about-this-year-s-blas-winners-1.2382601