🌞 Summer Substacks 🌞 Blackthorn Restaurant
The Twelve Hotel, Barna, Galway
We rather like the way in which Food and Travel Writer, Ciara McQuillan described how Blackthorn’s wine maestro Fergal Guiney works the room in Barna’s Blackthorn Restaurant:
“Out front, maître d’extraordinaire Fergal Guiney continues to glide through the room with stealth-like precision, warmth and genuine enthusiasm. A true master of the craft, he greets guests like old friends returning home.”
That is a beautifully precise and descriptive way of evoking the balletic and organoleptic skills that Mr Guiney brings to the job – it’s no easy thing to be both stealth-like and genuine. He is a master wine taster, but perhaps his greatest gift is the ability to serve wines in a straight-ahead, no-nonsense, friendly and informal way. Best of all, he wants to show you the magic of wine, and does this by using his authoritative skills to cut through the fog.
Tell him you are impressed with the way in which Pet Nats have improved so radically in recent times, and he will gently poo-poo their progress, and claim that there is still too much green apple in the bottle to make it a good match with food.
For Guiney, it is finding that right bottle to pair with head chef Nathan Hindmarsh’s dishes that is his goal. If you are the sort of person who relishes the perfect conjunction of the dish and the glass, then Fergal Guiney is your man. Blackthorn is where you order the wine pairing every time, because Guiney has all the rabbits up his sleeve, and it is sheer joy to taste what he proposes, and then pulls from the hat, and to taste just how perfectly it pairs with Nathan Hindmarsh’s creation.
Just look at what he serves with the two puddings on the Blackthorn menu, for example. With rhubarb trifle, his choice is an Austrian dessert wine, a Beerenasulese from the Karcher winery. Why? Because it has notes of black tea, which restrains the sweetness, making it a good partner. Take a sip, and? There it is: black tea astringency, that touch of tannin, all around the edges of the wine. Perfect.
And for buttermilk and strawberry soft serve, with pine cone syrup and doughnut, Guiney jumps overboard: let’s pour a Yuzusake, from the family-run Tosa Brewery, which comes in at a neat 8% alcohol. Yuneki Matsumoto uses traditional, local rice grains, and the Kochi region is famed for its yuzu citrus fruit. This means that the citrus element is delicate rather than forceful, making it the perfect way to conclude dinner. Perfect.
This “stealth-like precision” gifts dinner in Blackthorn as a Twin Peaks experience: the wildly creative food, and the sublimely appropriate wines. Nathan Hindmarsh’s dishes are as unpredictable and quixotic as Fergal Guiney’s wine choices, and the use of a Mibrasa grill gives his cooking a whole other organoleptic edge.
The menu offers four starters, five mains and four puds, but whilst it reads straight-ahead – crab; scallops; quail and beef tartare to begin; black sole and prime rib as sample mains – the cooking turns corners and utilises different complexions and counterpoints to other chefs.
The good news starts straight away, with the arrival of Nathan’s celebrated Parker rolls, so you tear and share to your heart’s content with a glass of good Cava from Papet del Mas. Hindmarsh and Guiney form a tag team who make things accessible whilst also revealing their complexity, so Kilkeel crab matches with a Sancerre from Domaine des Brosses, whilst ember seared scallops with smoked tomato meet their dream date with an Albarino from Terra Gaudas. Often, Alabarino and Sancerre prove to be disappointing choices, but this duo are pitch perfect.
Lamb loin with white asparagus sends Fergal off to Austria, bringing home a Spatburgunder from Thorle. Skeghanore duck welcomes California in the regal form of a 2017 Lytton Springs from Ridge, one of the great American wines from Paul Draper, one of the greatest American winemakers.
The duck was the one dish that was a step too far, as the foie gras ramen sauce poured over the dish overpowered everything underneath. The lamb and Spatburgunder was a delight, and side dishes of fresh green asparagus and stonkingly fine roast potatoes were just ace.
The full Land, Fire and Sea menu offers five courses and a wine pairing, whilst our trio of dishes with snacks is served with four wines. Whichever you choose, the result on the plate and in the glass is intriguing, unexpected and delighting. The made-over room is a light, bright charmer of a space, and service is excellent. As The Twelve Hotel heads towards twenty years of service to Barna, it has two of the very best operators in place, people who aim to take the experience to a higher place.
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