Waterford’s New Wave
The Old Couch Café
Marvelous, unexpected, and lavishly surreal things happen during the 11-course dinners chef Luis Martin offers in Waterford’s Old Couch Café. For instance, your salad Caprese will appear as a bowl of sliced Grantstown tomatoes with tomato water, whilst alongside the mozzarella becomes an ice cream, with a companion tomato ice cream.
Luis Martin is not so much a magician, as a magic realist.
You’re not dreaming all this. It’s real. And it’s happening IRL. Textures are reshaped and re-imagined, so a smoked miso butter looks like a Brancusi sculpture and tastes light as a cloud. Concepts are turned upside down, like the salad Caprese, or the baked Alaska which appears on a lollipop stick.
If some of it didn’t work, you would still applaud Mr Martin’s audacious artistry, and his authoritative discipline.
But here’s the thing: it does work, all of it, right through eleven courses, from a tiny cone filled with potato tortilla to the concluding popcorn snowball.
And Luis Martin does it all on his own. He’s not just a superstar chef, he’s a superhuman chef.
We don’t know just how long he can manage to offer such sophisticated food at such amazing value – €100 for dinner, with an 8-glass wine pairing at just €55. But getting the chance to enjoy his food feels rather like winning the lottery.
The cooking is not just inventive, it is also innovative. Martin has no grá for sugar, so his puddings are actually slightly saline, in particular the umeboshi plum which comes with salted white chocolate and timur pepper. It’s a pudding, but not like any other pudding. Rather than sating the appetite, it provokes the appetite.
He doesn’t much care for butter, so that smoked miso butter seems to have no fat. The lack of sugar and fat means his food is effortless to eat, so you glide through the eleven courses and finish with the appetite still primed.
Best of all, the cooking is a celebration of diversity and skill. Look at the roasted quail, served on the bone, which has a 90% chocolate mole, strips of deep-fried tortilla, and strawberries spiced with habanero chilli.
It’s Mexican, of course, but it’s Mexican in the way that Frida Kahlo is Mexican: mezcla magic at its best, surreal and dreamy, gorgeous to look at and even better to eat.
If the merit of a chef is their ability to render a perfect mirepoix, then Mr Martin’s knife skills will win him any Olympic medal. The perfect dice of cured prawn tartare with ajo blanco; the perfect rubik of strawberry and chilli with the quail; the precision-cut slices of Grantstown tomato all exhibit the chef’s control over every single element of his dishes.
Gracia Alarco pours the wines and serves the dishes alongside Martin, and together they are a dream duo, creating one of the most original dining experiences happening right now.
Eamo & Ro
Eamon and Róisín are doing the good thing in Eamo & Ro, in pretty Kilmacthomas, on Waterford’s Greenway.
They make nice things for breakfast and lunch, and have just started to serve dinner at the weekends. If you are navigating either the Greenway or the N25, then this E&R is your new stop-over.
We like the food, and we especially liked the modesty and simplicity of what they do. They rather shyly call themselves a Café and Larder, so there are dishes to take away for a picnic as well as a generous choice on the menu. That modesty applies, in particular, to the prices for dinner: €45 for the three-course menu, with two choices for each course, and with the Kilmore Quay hake dish also featuring some Copper Coast lobster from Bunmahon, it’s the bargain of the South East. Add in the fact that it’s BYO, and you want to start calling all your mates.
They cook what they like to eat, so the lunch menu can roam from Thai green chicken curry to chickpea tagine to baked gnocchi with herb pesto. On our visit, we enjoyed crispy haddock fish tacos on corn tortillas, with pico de gallo and chilli crema. A slice of mikado cake was a slice of sweet deliciousness, the kind of treat that makes the detour worthwhile.
Beatha Bakery Pop Up in Arch Coffee
You don’t get to lie-in on a Saturday morning in Waterford.
The old truism that “If you snooze, you lose”, has never been more apt when you consider that Beatha Bakery open their pop-up at Arch Coffee at 9am, and sell out their sourdough and pastries by 10am.
All gone by 10am! Set the alarm!
The Waterford early birds are richly rewarded by Grainne and Darren Collins’ superlative baking. The couple started baking and selling back in 2019, and their confidence and élan have grown steadily and surely. The sourdough might be flavoured with za’atar, lemon and herbs. The sausage rolls will be freckled with pistachios and caramelised onions.
Darren makes an old-style potato pie which is basically pommes boulangere in a pastry house. There are granola bars, and delicate custard tarts flavoured with passion fruit – no pastel de nata down in the South-East.
Some punters even bring their own Tupperware to transport the delicate fancies home safely, and everyone is happy as Larry, except those who arrive too late, when everything will have been bought.
And then the coup de grace in this Waterford double act is the perfect coffee brewed by George McDonald and his team in Arch Coffee. They source from Sligo’s mighty Carrow Coffee and Dublin’s superstar 3fe, and the coffees are some sort of magic, exemplary beans and exemplary barista skills.
Smiling like Cheshire cats, bags loaded, cup in hand, the early birds parade back home.
Waterford Whisky
There are a number of reasons to do a double-take when you see a bottle of Waterford whisky.
The first reason is to admire the beautiful blue hue of the bottles themselves.
And the second is to note the spelling. Waterford don’t spell whiskey the way every other Irish distiller does: they use the older term, without an E: whisky.
We dropped in to their Growers Gathering Festival at the distillery on the Waterford quays, where the company was offering an organic single-farm origin whisky, from Killone in County Laois, with barley grown by Denis and Pat Booth.
Waterford has pursued a very singular path over the last eight years, rebirthing old varieties of barley, and focusing on organic and bio-dynamic parcels of land as the means of expressing terroir in their whiskys.
The hi-tech of the factory seems antithetical to the simplicity of a field of carefully minded Irish barley, but founder Mark Reynier has always had a focus on site specific whiskies which makes him more akin to a winemaker than a whisky maker.
And how lovely it is to see Irish farmers, and Irish farming, acknowledged and applauded for their hard work and, in particular, to see organic and bio-dynamic farming appreciated both for their respect for the land, and for their ability to offer world-class taste experiences through the magic of Irish malted barley. This year’s winner of the Barley Grower of the Year was Denis Dalton, of Chancellor’s Mills, a family firm established way back in 1870.
The result of all this painstaking is a whisky lover's chance to bi-locate, every time you pour a dram. You might be sitting on your sofa in Ballyjamesduff, but one sniff of a Waterford cuvée, and you are brought straight to that field in Laois or Wexford or Kilkenny, smelling the soil, seeing the barley wave in the breeze.