The Druid of Druid Lane
Like a wandering hero of old, Enda McEvoy has travelled Galway’s long road.
He cooked in Galway’s Spanish Arch. He cooked in Galway’s Latin Quarter before it was the Latin Quarter. He cooked in Galway’s West End when no one even knew Galway had a West End. He cooked in Galway’s Fairgreen.
And now, the great druid of Galway cooking is cooking in Druid Lane. That seems like a homecoming.
McEvoy’s nest is called Éan, an ancient stone building with the patina of character a room can only acquire after a few centuries on the west coast of Ireland. For the restaurant’s first year, after McEvoy and his wife, Sinead Meacle, took over the room, Christine Walsh ran the kitchen. Walsh quickly won acclaim, and quickly established a pair of iconic dishes: oysters with an ice-cold kimchi granita, and squid toast with katsuobushi.
Ms Walsh has decamped to London, and McEvoy has joined Jorge Ballester in the kitchen, having closed Loam, his Fairgreen restaurant, which he opened in 2014 and where he honed a distinctively green West Coast cuisine.
Where Loam was a big campus of a room, Éan is a tiny cocoon. The menus echo the concise edit that is the restaurant’s signature: four snacks, five little plates to begin, then seven larger protein and vegetable plates, with two desserts and a cheese selection.
The good news first: the oysters are still here, this time with an icy fennel granita, and the squid toast still has that culinary crowd wave of katsuobushi swaying back and forth on top of the narcotic bread and miso mayo.
The rest of the good news: service has been buffed up, and the waiting staff are both expert at their job, and conversationally adroit. As a space, Éan now has a rhythm to suit its cuisine, a formal informality that suits the quiet expertise and confidence of the food.
The cooking is druidic, in that it is practised by a learned class of chefs, and has a magic at its core. Even more than magic, some dishes eat like spells that have been concocted by culinary wizards waving wands, instead of manually striving with knives and spoons.
These spells work their magic instantly, lighting up your taste receptors, prising open the gates of perception to otherworldly flavours and textures. And so cauliflower with caramelised onion and cheese – cauliflower cheese to us muggles – becomes a ramekin bearing bright, vegetal, sumptuous and almost candied flavour notes. To recap:
In human terms: Cauliflower + onion + cheese = cauliflower cheese.
In Ean terms: Cauliflower + onion + cheese = omigodimnotsharing.
How do they do that?
All we know is that they can do the same thing with sardines with tomato and capers; with dathúil potatoes with burnt scallion butter; with scallop with pumpkin and lardo; with sourdough bread and cheese.
We also like the way in which they elide suspicion of their druidic status by serving an ordinary dish: Dexter beef tartare with green olive and bone marrow was just ok.
Of course, a pudding of rose with beetroot and blackberries was one of those dishes that was made famous in Loam, a tongue-teaser composed of disparate elements that align to show their common antecedence: boom!
The wine list is a page of vinous joy, and at good prices.
Éan translates from the Irish as bird. With its inspired undercurrent of improvisation, this high flying avian takes wing like that other great Bird, the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Half the time, you scarcely know where this murmuration of deliciousness is going to go next. But it’s okay: they know where they are going.
