Jp McMahon and his architect, Aidan Conway of Marmar Architects, have described how creating the new interior for McMahon’s Galway restaurant, Aniar, gave them the opportunity to create a “cabinet of curiosities.”
In fact the extraordinary transformation they have achieved in the little room on Dominick Street Lower in Galway’s West End accomplishes something altogether more radical.
Aniar 2.0 is not just a cabinet of curiosities that you might look at. It is a cabinet of curiosities that you inhabit. Step through the door, step into the cabinet. You and your friends are the curiosities, as if you were a piece selected by Joseph Cornell for one of his remarkable shadow boxes.
Along with the other exhibits – the maps; the seaweeds; the paintings; the historical artifacts – you have become an exhibit. Spotlit by focused downlighters, your table becomes a tableau vivant. It’s wild. It’s like nothing else anywhere else. Avant Garde Galway. The perfect restaurant for the city of Macnas: otherwordly; crazy; surreal; Dadaist.
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This isn’t really a surprise, other than it is an extraordinary surprise at first. McMahon has a visual arts and theatre background, so he has turned Aniar into a living art work. Everything from the tables – extraordinary creations by Paddy O’Malley from Ballyconneely – to the crockery to the food reveals a man whose work explores the life force in everything he touches: the venison may have been living ten days ago, and the fossils in the tables 8,000 years ago, but McMahon can see the life energy in both. Aniar 2.0 is a palimpsest, etching new meanings onto ancient texts.
Eating at Aniar is therefore a culinary journey that takes in the contours and complexity of landscape and the slow and quick passage of time, time measured in both the millennia of creation, and the almost-instantaneous time of cooking.
No one has ever done anything like this in Irish food.
Aniar cooking is a series of observation points along this journey through time and place, with the ingredients acting as signifiers: pepper dulse from the shoreline crowns a Galway oyster from the sea bed. Hen of the woods mushroom share the plate with venison, the creature of the woodland. A little cornet of lobster is topped with fish roe, as McMahon and his kitchen team seek symmetries and symbiosis everywhichway.
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Best of all, Aniar food is fun to eat, playful with ingredients, and witty. McMahon may think seriously about cooking and its historical and social context, but he never stoops to deliver a lecture or push a thesis. He knows it ain’t worth a thing if it ain’t got that swing, and Aniar 2.0 food has got that swing, and delivers a mighty entertainment, right the way through multiple courses that conclude with a quintet of petits fours which are the best we have ever eaten.
McMahon gives each diner a map of Ireland, with key historical places and people outlined, from the Vikings to Cork’s English Market, from Newgrange to Jammet’s restaurant in Dublin to Achill Island sea salt. Aniar 2.0 is deserving of its own place on the map, as the destination which offers the deepest dive into what Irish food means, and can mean.
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Time to plan another Galway trip!
Thanks Sally and John