Cork city cooking has been on a wild tear of creativity over the last couple of years. The city’s restaurants are high on their own supply of individuality and invention, offering cooking that is a feast of surprises and signature grace notes.
Then guess what happens: in the midst of all this excellence, at a lunch to celebrate Kate Ryan’s fine book Blood, Guts & Black Pudding, Harrison Sharpe, recently appointed to the head chef position of Market Lane restaurant, fires out a dish of O’Reilly’s drisheen tortellini and tripe ragu.
And the pasta is blood pasta.
A trio of ochre red tortellini filled with drisheen sit on a ragout of tripe – which doesn’t taste of tripe, such is its umami intensity – with a drizzle of milk sauce and fried leaves. Harrison explained that blood acts like egg yolks, with a mission in life to coagulate. And if you can make pasta with flour and egg yolks, then you can make tortellini with flour and… blood.
The dish is insane in every way you can think of: insanely intelligent; insanely creative; and insanely audacious. Sheer bonkers brilliance, a new dish for a city which, with its love of offal, is actually bound by blood.
Kate’s lunch tasked three chefs from the Market Lane collective – Harrison from Market Lane; Aishling Moore from Goldie, and William Bell, successor to Harrison, and now the new head chef at Elbow Lane – to flirt with new ideas for black pudding, and blood. Aishling baked a Rossmore oyster, reduced the oyster juices to underpin an onion soubise, then topped the oyster with a crumble of Hugh Maguire’s smoked black pudding.
William Bell fashioned a large, European-style pork blood sausage, augmented with a black garlic and bone marrow bordelaise sauce, with a caramelised apple and miso purée and a little hillock of pickled mustard seed. This was paired with a large hillock of Goldie’s signature colcannon, a dish which is rapidly becoming globally famous.
Aishling then turned the idea of a cheese course and a dessert course upside down. She used black pudding as part of the Goldie date and seed bread, topping it with a confetti of Young Buck blue cheese. And for pudding she nattily nicked the golden arches fried apple pie classic, but here the apple was paired with Sneem black pudding before being fried. The result was a sweet dish that managed to combine a cinnamon roll with a Xmas mince pie. Bonkers. Brilliant. Coming soon to a Christmas menu near you.
In a world of chef collabs and pop-ups, where the cooks tend to simply trot out their Greatest Hits, this was a creative collab that fizzed with the inventiveness and imagination that has made Cork city such a great culinary destination. The fact that the chefs could make such hay with a food that makes many people recoil made it even more special.
Blood, Guts & Black Pudding, and brilliance. Three chefs on top of their game, saluting a great book, and a great culinary heritage. September 20th, 2026, Blood Pasta Day.
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Incredible! A feast that will be talked about for years to come, no doubt.
This meal looks incredible! That tripe ragu dish is insane!! Wish I could have been there to try all of these dishes.