St Francis Provisions
The spirit of '68 in Kinsale
Some people are so radical they don’t even know they are radical. That’s how it is with Barbara Nealon and her team at Kinsale’s St Francis Provisions.
Look at what they propose for Sunday lunch, for example. In the well-worn land of roasties and morto animal protein, St Francis offers: roasted peppers with labneh and anchovy toast; cauliflower with XO sauce; trotters with chanterelles; dressed winter chicory with bottarga; grilled mackerel; a “gorgeous broth of tomato, fregola and basil”; pistachio baklava; fennel shortbread. See? Radical.
On a Sunday afternoon, the room is full, there is CMAT on the sound system, and you reckon that if they played The Mamas and Papas or even some Jefferson Airplane, well then that would simply add even more juice to the vibe that defines St Francis.
That vibe is left field, alternative, and punkily real, the spirit of ‘68. The vibe is so powerful it makes modern wokeness look somnambulistic. When Barbara explains that in her days of wild youth she was part of a female dj trio called Vaginal Vinyl, then you just think to yourself: well, of course you were.
Head chef Rebeca Recaray Sanchez and her crew cook some of the best food you can eat in Ireland today. The food is exuberant, generous, and has a natural warmth: they want to feed you in St Francis, as well as delight you.
What is really interesting about Rebeca’s cooking is that it seems avant garde, without using any avant garde techniques. She will grill a mackerel and put it on a plate with half a lemon as if it was a still life by Camille Souter. She cooks trotters with wine then plates them with chanterelles. The food is treated with simplicity, yet somehow is completely transformed. The dishes have it everywhichway, being both ancient and modern at the same time, and morphed through Rebeca’s very personal style, where this very petite cook rustles up monster-sized flavours.
The radical style extends to every aspect of St Francis. Service is relaxed yet utterly precise. The wines are natural, but selected with considerable care, so they are not signalling anything: they are just delicious things to drink.
We hit the jackpot on Sunday because we were three, and there are three seats at the bar, with the rest of the little room offering two tables of four and half a dozen stools along the window.
The small scale means the team are over everything, greeting, taking orders, opening bottles, carrying the plates from the kitchen, carrying the empty plates from the tables.
What’s radical is that St Francis, whilst utterly professional, scarcely feels like a professional operation. Instead, it feels like an optimistic venture with a communitarian outlook and a commune-of-women energy. The Spirit of ‘68.
Eating in St Francis explains why we want to eat in restaurants. You don’t go to get fed – the normal focus of Sunday Lunch. You go to enjoy the fruits of creative people doing creative things, which happily happen to be the interesting things they like to do with food.
A party of four could niftily work their way through the entire menu, and that is one hell of a way to go, tasting everything, sharing everything from the focaccia with romesco all the way through to the boozy affogato, one dish after another hitting the heights, happy plates in a happy place.
