There is an emergent culinary culture which has the power to knock your socks off.
It’s called Third-Culture Cooking, and it’s what happens when the second-generation children of emigrants take their birthright influences, marry them to their birthplace influences, and in the process create a third-culture hybrid, a collision where beautiful, delicious things are made to happen.
Think of what Barry Sun is doing so beautifully in Volpe Nera in Blackrock, County Dublin. Think of what is happening at Amai by Viktor, in the centre of Dublin.
And then look at what Meeran Mansoor is doing with his Chennai heritage, his French-accented culinary training, and his position as executive chef at Rare, in the Blue Haven Hotel, in pretty Kinsale. Meeran is setting third-culture cooking on fire.
“I wanted to get back to the flavours I grew up with, so we flipped it” he says, and the result is that the tastes of Chennai now electrify the flavours he presents in his dishes.
Mansoor’s kitchen doesn’t hang about. A trio of snacks arrive first and are three of the best snacks ever: steak tartare with beef curry emulsion is sandwiched between a pair of sable biscuits and is a radical tartare re-boot; a steamed batter bun is a nest for smoked Ummera chicken and a confetti of aged Coolea cheese; a buckwheat tart nestles cured cod with karavadu chutney and a soupcon of caviar. Three bites and you have already been halfway around the world.
Manosoor’s cured fish is a thrill, so cured Goatsbridge trout with a burrata mousse, a tomato dashi rasam and chilli and curry leaf oil is positively electrifying, the diverse flavours and textures commingling perfectly in a sublime dish. If you had to stop dinner at this point, for what ever reason, you would leave happy, your senses all a-tingle. You have tasted third-culture cooking, and it’s an indelible experience.
But to miss the lentil-based sambar with king oyster mushroom cooked in sesame ghee, with a backdrop note of Irish truffles, would be some sort of heartbreak, because no one else is concocting dishes like this. Mansoor’s edge-of-the-seat style will put some in mind of Niall Davidson’s wild style in Dublin’s Allta restaurant: peak ingredients pushed to the very peak of their potential.
Some chefs would dial it back at this stage, so Mansoor dials it up. Turbot is wrapped in seaweed, stuffed with a turbot mousseline and anointed with trout caviar and dill oil and a southern Indian tamarind fish curry foam. On a separate plate a courgette flower has been stuffed with cumin ghee rice, with a crab XO sauce and a buttermilk sauce. Kill me now.
Meantime, sommelier Cecile has been pouring one of the best wine flights we have experienced in yonks, starting with an Aussie Vermentino, then an Alsatian Pinot Blanc, and a Provençal rosé. The wine menu also includes the fine Kinsale mead, an Georgian red, a Portugese Pet Nat and an Austrian Eiswein. On paper, the food and wines sound like a collision. In reality, they are a dream team, two sympathetic streams meeting halfway.
Before the duck course, a sorbet of lemon and mint is set on fire by chilli salt, a delightful hot-cold riff, and it sets up the fried duck leg which comes with hot sauce and a kaffir lime and lemongrass emulsion. Frying something as a rich as duck leg is daring, but this iteration is the bomb, beautifully effected and resoundingly moreish.
Its excellence makes the failure of the following dish of duck breast with a salan gravy sauce simply mystifying, as the dish fails. But then, every Icarus must fly too close to the sun.
The even temperament is restored with two lovely puddings courses. A geometry of saffron custard is designed to be mopped up with fine lavender Madeleines, great kiddy, messy fun. And then one of the defining tastes of the West Cork summer, Bushby’s strawberries from Roscarbery, are offered with a rose and cardamon rabdi mousse, with strawberry ganache and pistachio fudge. On the side is a whipped mango pannacotta with pistachio ice cream.
Meeran Mansoor has stepped up every detail of Rare since our last visit and review. And yet the beauty of this cooking is that it has all the energy and high-wire intensity of a work-in-progress. That means that this is great food to eat, and great food to think, as Mansoor blends in the flavours and techniques of southern Indian food into elegant European contexts. Rare is third-culture cooking in all its vivid, tactile immensity, wild with ambition, hungry to find new forms of culinary expression, every dish dotted with Icarus yearning.
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