Capturing the Essence of Ómós
Cúán Greene and his team rewrite the Irish vernacular.
Ómós is audacious. It’s not audacious in scale, which is the traditional way in which we measure the ambition of a new project. By those metrics, Ómós is almost modest.
Instead, Ómós is epic in detail. Cúán Greene and his team have excavated deep into Ireland’s past to re-present what we understand as our vernacular in terms of food, style, design, and content.
Ómós is Irish, but in a new and different way. It’s a thrill, a deep dive like no other.
Millbrook House, just a couple of miles outside Abbeyleix town, was a wreck when Cúán Greene and John Collison first encountered it. The roof had caved, the front wall was but several months away from collapsing in on itself. Its rescue deserves to be spoken about in the pages of heroic Irish adventures.
The main house where guests stay and hang out was an architectural resuscitation job, whilst the restaurant where Greene and his team work is spanking new, set around two courtyards, the windows overlooking the walled garden beds on one side, and the pond on the other. Steeply raked roofing brings Japanese design to the Irish vernacular.
It is still early days for the gardens, which aim at creating a Piet Oudlof effect of waves of colour and texture that change through the seasons. How fascinating to see a sea buckthorn tree brought from a coastal scenario to find a new home in a courtyard garden in the Midlands.
It’s expensive to stay at Ómós, especially in the house itself. Our gaff – Room 16 – was out in the old stablehouse, and was somewhat more affordable. It was also sublime, a testament to texture at every point: Portuguese tiles laid with arty haphazardness in the bathroom; an Irish linen cover on the bed, offset by a Mourne Textiles tweed throw from County Down; a gorgeous traditional hedge chair which was wonderfully comfortable; a contemporary cabinet which housed the fridge and other essentials and which was both practical and an objet d’art in itself.
And, while we’re here – about that cabinet: Ómós guests get treated to a range of exceptional treats, including Something & Nothing Uzu soda, Hopburgh Helles lager and Bare Bones Chocolate.
Look at the curving leg of the small table, and admire the irregularity of the woodwork, a homage to the domestic vernacular furniture of the old Irish house. The modern woodwork and cabinetry is stunning, so expect lots of interior designers to be your fellow guests, along with chefs, architects, and tech bros. We had the chat over breakfast with an Irish tech bro who had just sold his software company. As you do.
Greene’s menu is multi-course, but the voyage through the dishes is not the tasting menu slough some of us have come to dread. Instead, the procession of plates is sensory, intriguing, quixotic, and fun.
Greene is aiming for depth of flavour with lightness of texture and some dishes deliver this with aplomb: a fig leaf broth is pure electric juice; the rhubarb ponzu with dry-aged hamachi zonks your brain cells; and the Irish salad – already known as the “Mammy salad” will make you smile and most likely laugh: it’s a hoot.
There is nothing grandiose about this food. Instead, it reveals a search for dishes that combine ingredients in order that they achieve perfect pitch. Ómós cooking is always seeking to find and sustain the right note. The cooking has an easy power, with one sprezzatura gesture after another: the umami of a Garryhinch shiitake jelly, offset against pumpkin seed and woodruff, with tiny Kilruddery peas for sweetness; Kampot peppercorns bringing fire to 60-day-aged West Cork beef; tart cherry juice with nasturtium leaves and a fine raw milk ice cream.
So, three hours of fun as the plates tease and surprise and, then, at the conclusion, you get up from the table feeling as if your have eaten two water biscuits and a glass of kefir.
The dining room and cooking zone are not separated in the traditional way, and the food service is shared between the kitchen crew and the waiting team. The crew have natty aprons, but the wait team have awesomely cool tweed jackets, and they all reply “You’re welcome” when you thank them. Both are right up to cue on the details of all the dishes.
The room feels and looks like a gallery, save for the live-fire corner, and everywhere you look the attention to detail is audacious, the little things that delight, like the fact that their napkins have a little hoodie helmet in their corner, so they can be hung over the top of your chair when you go to the bathroom. Smart.
Every piece of the cutlery and the crockery has been utilised for maximum effect - horn spoons; a vintage Hamachi fork; wooden spoons hand carved by Eamon O’Sullivan, of Hewn Spoons, accompany each dish.
This dish of yellow fin tuna was served with a rhubarb ponzu with a coriander flower, and the piece of rhubarb had been frozen beforehand, so that at the table you could juice it just like a lemon.
Poached lovage and mint are used to flavour the water that cooks the potato, which is served as its own course. Toasted scallions are laid underneath, and house-made cultured butter is lavished on top of the spud. As a cultural and culinary icon it stands on a par with the black pudding and oyster dish presented by the poet-chef Gerry Galvin, at the first ever Irish Eurotoques dinner, in 1989. Both chefs took the simplest, most common, everyday ingredient, and ennobled it. It’s the most emotional dish you will eat this year.
The breakfast room at Ómós may be the best example of the lean, almost severe style of Irish vernacular design which the house espouses. This might be that room where your grandmother served everything from breakfast to supper, pulling from the large dresser all the plates and miscellania needed to feed everyone throughout the day.
But your granny would hardly have been so iconoclastic as to offer the breakfast served here, which includes salad leaves and toasted granola, and there is no Irish fried breakfast. Like Ómós, your gran would have had some good ham from the butcher’s shop in Mountrath and some Mossfield cheese, and she could certainly scramble some fresh eggs on good handmade bread. It would have been her own, home-churned butter, of course, and where gran would have served a piece of apple tart, in Ómós they offer a slice of garden courgette galette.
Purple wheat grown and milled in Kilkenny is used by baker Ryan Lally to make a purple croissant served at breakfast. Even attempting such a feat with such a flour is, frankly, heroic. But Lally pulls it off, and the croissant is wonderfully flavourful and crisply crumblesome. It’s the hero element of an excellent breakfast that sends you on your way with a pep in your step, because in Ómós you have just enjoyed a truly world class experience of contemporary Irish cooking, hospitality, design, and audacity.
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