Wherever comfort and imagination coincide, you find luxury.
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This is true of design, and it’s true of cooking. In Gregans Castle, on Corkscrew Hill in County Clare, you encounter luxury – true luxury – in a pure, homeopathic form, in both the house itself, and with Jonathan Farrell’s cooking in the restaurant. It’s a provocative, happy combination.
Gregans has always had the most singular design aesthetic. It’s a house where the tradition of decoration gets turned, gently, on its head. Conventional ideas about comfort and decoration are transformed by the imaginative eye.
One of its secrets may lie in the fact that, when he was a teenager, Simon Haden was a punk, and the truth about punk was that it was an aesthetic movement, more than a musical idiom. In the words of George Melly, punk turned revolt into style, fusing the gothic and the grotesque into a style that would give birth to the Goths, and to The Cure. Punk is gone, but it’s not forgotten.
Gregans castle was built in 1750, and still retains the austere beauty of the Georgian style. It is a house that seems to be both of its era, and, also, a house out of time. In fact it’s a house that seems to move with time.
Simon Haden and Freddie McMurray have a telescopic grasp of style, plucking design motifs out of every historical era and repositioning and reimagining them in a house that seems old yet feels utterly of the moment. It’s not easy to do what Simon and Freddie have done: if it was, then everyone would be doing it.
If the style is characteristically oblique, it is mirrored by Jonathan Farrell’s cooking. A graduate in film and television, Farrell has worked at Relae and Amass, two of the most radical Scandinavian restaurants, then joined the team at Bastible in Dublin. He taught himself to forage whilst working in the hunting lodge of a large estate in Scotland, and his journey has gifted him the armoury of modern cooking techniques: curing; smoking; foraging; drying; and freezing are all used to bring a luxurious depth to his dishes.
Farrell has redesigned the restaurant menus, which now offer three starters, three mains and four puddings, with canapes to start and petits fours to finish. The canapes have an impish sense of fun, with hash browns topped with local beef and shaved frozen bone marrow with wild garlic capers, and buttermilk chicken fries served with spiced honey and pickled cucumber offering classy trashy eating with a real sense of humour, and a sense of style.
Local Flaggy Shore oysters are poached then served with smoked creme fraiche and a kelp and bonito dressing; a miso velouté has an apple cider purée and smoked eel; and beautifully crafted homemade ricotta has a confetti of semi-dried beetroot. Together, the snacks show how Farrell likes to meander through the flavour spectrum whilst having a firm resolve on how the finished dish should taste. The canapes are both compulsive and delighting.
The challenges Farrell sets himself can be seen in a dish of cured Atlantic scallop, scallop XO, kohlrabi, samphire, seaweed cream, grapefruit vinegar and roe. There are so many elements here that have to somehow find concordance with each other, so many elements that have to be counterpoint in order to make the dish work. But work it does, with the thinly sliced scallops seasoned with the XO and the vinegar, with a dusting of samphire powder, arranged around the dashi cream with a halo of fresh kohlrabi and the roe. It’s complex, but the complexity contributes to the final dish a terrific fugue of flavours.
By contrast, slow cooked beef with baked potato mousse sounds simple, but the beef is simmered for no fewer than 16 hours, then underpinned with onion confit and surrounded by the potato mousse, with a shot of walnut ketchup and crispy onions. The beauty of the dish is the textures: fall-apart beef, languid onions, ethereal potato mousse, agrestic ketchup. Beef and potatoes, then, but not as we know it.
Farrell’s playful rigour dances through all the dishes at dinnertime: sweet pink lamb rump with garden carrots; cod roasted in brown butter with crispy “scraps” and mussel sauce; a quartet of rhubarb and ginger textures with matcha cake and cardamom rice pudding; burnt white chocolate with plum and hibiscus. Everything is precisely judged and executed, and with 3 courses following the canapes, the food excites the appetite rather than merely sating it.
Whilst his virtuosic skill is evident, Farrell’s cooking ultimately delivers a quiet luxury, with every detail crafted to coincide and congratulate the finished dish. This is mature and unshowy cooking and, in the context of Gregans mature and unshowy aesthetic, you find the perfect double act on Corkscrew Hill in the heart of the Burren.
Taken together, the food and the design in Gregans combine to offer what we might call the Apple Effect, that magical unity of form, function and luxuriousness that the great designer Johnny Ive gave to the portfolio of Apple products, from iphones to watches. Gregans Castle defines luxury.
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