The New Killarney
It was the Victorians who made Killarney famous.
Queen Victoria visited in 1861 and sailed on the royal barge across the lakes, from Ross Castle to Glena Cottage, and then through Muckross Lake and into the Upper Lake.
Shelley compared the Arbutus Islands of Killarney to Italy’s Lake Como, and Sir Walter Scott visited in 1825, at the height of his extraordinary fame. Friedrich Engels visited twice, in 1856 and 1869, and when William Wordsworth came, he climbed both Carrauntoohil and Mangerton Mountain.
Wordsworth probably had to be careful not to trip over a painter’s easel, for the hills and lakes have attracted landscape painters since the 18th century. And when you get away from the town itself and down around the lakes, you can understand the sublime beauty that captivated the Victorians.
Killarney however, was never celebrated for its food.
But today there is a new energy in Killarney food, and our four happening destinations show a bunch of people who are paying attention to Killarney’s future, rather than simply capitalising on its storied past. Perhaps it’s finally time for Killarney to be celebrated for its culinary character. Here is the New Killarney.
Tango Street Food
You need to allow enough time to enjoy Killarney’s Tango Street Food.
About three days should do it.
Lower yourself slowly into the immersive experience of Pamela and Facundo’s restaurant. So maybe start with a perfect cup of Cloud Picker Coffee, and maybe an alfie – a sweet alfajores treat, or an Argentinian sourdough medialuna.
Then hit up the large room on the Muckross Road at lunchtime, when you might have an empanada or two on your mind. The ham and fior di latte? The beef with vegetables and spices which won at Blas na hEireann? Both?
Good news if you are with the kids: the Tango wood-fired pizzas are superb, and the only issue is choosing which toppings you want to adorn the 48-hour fermented dough.
Then, the coup de grace: dinner in Tango with meats from their hand-built parilla grill, fashioned by the Smokin’ Soul maestros in County Wexford.
We tasted the asado first, the cross-cut short ribs, and reckoned we had ascended to wherever Argentinian heaven is.
But then we tried the entrana, the skirt steak, and it was even better.
Better than heaven? Yep. Better than heaven.
Add in a bottle of Disobedience by Francis Mallmann, a malbec, cab sauv and merlot mix, and you have culinary nirvana.
Pamela told us that one of the reasons they opened Tango in Killarney was because the mountains reminded her of Patagonia. Certainly, this robustly delicious food seems as if it has always belonged here.
Tango Street Food has what you want, exactly how you want it. Pamela and Facundo deliver everything better than you hope: their sourcing is superb right across the pantry, their skills across pizza making, Argentinian sweet and savory baking, and the art of the Parilla grill, are profound.
Tango offers some of the most enjoyable eating you can find and, to be perfectly honest, three days is scarcely enough to sample all they have to offer.
Good Boy Coffee Roasters
Good Boy Coffee Roasters should be called Very, Very Good Boy Coffee Roasters.
On previous visits to Killarney, in another coffee shop, we had one caffeine episode where the staff simply pushed the button on the coffee machine, filled our mugs, then put them on the tray. We then put the miserable mugs of dishwater straight down on the table and left.
On another occasion we asked for a flat white. We got a cafe au lait. And no explanation or apology.
So finding Good Boy, on New Market Lane, is a big deal, and it is very good news for Killarney. Daniel roasts the beans and fashions the brews, and the roasting and the barista skills are top class.
The coffees are balanced, perfectly poised and beautifully executed, whilst the turmeric latte is a drink for the ages. Seriously: the turmeric latte is worth the trip all by itself, one of the best drinks of the year.
There are bagels and sweet treats from local craft bakeries, and the bagel offer is smart: choose your bagel, choose your schmear, choose your filling. A plain bagel with avocado, goat’s feta and Egyptian dukkah does the job, whilst a filled bagel with smoked chicken Korean aioli, cucumber and rocket will rock anyone’s boat.
The room is compact and comfortable, and the Good Boy neon slogan which declares “You Brew, You Boo” is something we are still trying to get our heads around.
Harrow
“That’s great… that’s great… and that’s great.”
Sometimes you just need to bring a guest to dinner to get the pure, unvarnished and spontaneous reaction that good cooking deserves. Great. Great. And thrice Great.
Our guest was passing judgement on our three starters in Harrow, John O’Leary’s year-old restaurant in Killarney.
Pan-fried scallops with cauliflower purée, capers and hazelnuts – O’Leary likes hazelnuts – and a spiced pork croquette with chicken jus got the thumbs up, as did the thinly-sliced waves of salt and hay-baked celeriac with pickled cranberries and toasted pistachios – O’Leary clearly loves all types of nuts. A Caesar croquette salad was also awarded a Cesar, and this was a fun riff on the classic, with croquettes of confit chicken offering up taste bombs alongside the cheesy construction.
O’Leary has a fine CV – Adare Manor; the Killarney Park Hotel; the Four Seasons; Dublin’s Pichet – and he has brought a chef-patron’s culinary care and culinary polish to Killarney. With each dish, the kitchen team looks for ways in which to put their signature on what reads like a conventional menu: mussels; Caesar salad; pork belly; feather blade of beef; sole meuniere; ribeye steak.
But the dishes that arrive are not conventional. Like that Caesar salad, or the artful lamb Wellington which encloses a tabernacle of lamb loin with spinach, sun-dried tomato and pancetta in a delicate dome of pastry, the kitchen is aiming to surprise whenever it can.
This ambition makes for great savoury cooking, producing lip-smackin’ plates of food that keep your attention to the last bite. The kitchen needs to pay attention to each little detail to make these dishes work, and Harrow’s secret sauce in this regard is the smart use of cooking jus in meat dishes, and of cream sauces with the fish dishes.
Meat jus? Cream sauce? If it sounds like classical cooking, it is. But the plating is contemporary, and O’Leary also likes nduja as much as he likes nuts, so the final result is a contemporary classicism that feels just right.
The puddings are classics to the core: apple tarte tatin; chocolate fondant; PX creme brulée. The chocolate is a belter of a dish, and whilst we applaud the experiment with Pedro Ximenex, it slightly fudges the flavour of the brulée.
The staff are excellent, and the young man, three days in, who kept dropping the knives when clearing the table will get the hang of it soon. Prices are keen, and next time we will kick off with some of the fine-looking cocktails.
Harrow has a sharp edge, and it has opened the furrow of good, intelligent cooking that Killarney really needed.
Killarney Brewing & Distilling Co.
We would wager that whenever people get their first glimpse of the Killarney Brewing & Distilling Co, a towering and rather sublime campus out on the Fossa Road heading towards Killorglin, the first thing they think is: Wow! How much did that cost?
Well, that was what we thought and so, after we had enjoyed lunch, we asked the manager who told us the investment in the KBDC was €36 million. The standard media reports suggest €24 million, but that has clearly increased somewhat.
As they say in the movies, the money is all up there on the screen. The KBDC is gorgeous, fitted out and kitted out to the nth degree. They have taken the luxury hue of Kilarney’s hotels such as The Europe and The Killarney Park and manifested themselves as a destination for all manner of social behaviour.
The Killarney Brewing Co is not new, of course, and has been making excellent beers for almost a decade in their original site at the Mineral Water factory on the Muckross Road, where they still serve good pizzas. But the scale and ambition of the new building was immediately apparent once they got the doors open in September 2022: the wow! factor is huge.
We had lunch upstairs in the dining zone, ensconced in deep-pile banquettes amidst the plethora of balconies and zones with vistas designed to focus the gaze on Carrauntoohil. The menu is a single page offering, divided into Signature Sandwiches and Signature Dishes & Burgers, with some light bites, and there is a page of beers, spirits and wines.
Our trio of dishes were all good: stout brisket sambo which uses the brewery’s Casey Brothers stout to good effect, served on sourdough with mustard, cucumber, pickled red onion and piccalilli; a Po Boy breaded prawn torpedo sandwich with chipotle mayo, and a very good smash burger with Eve’s Leaves tomato relish. It’s no surprise that this style of punchy, savoury food suits the Killarney brews pretty perfectly.
It’s still early days for the KBDC, but the scale of the ambition here is stratospheric: think of it as a Guinness Storehouse for Killarney. In a decade, they will be counting the visits in the millions.
