With Cork city’s Paradiso restaurant, we have to run the numbers first.
Paradiso serves a six course tasting menu, and the price is €72.
I know some folks would imagine that there has been an editing error there, and that the 6 courses should cost €172, in line with the modern, top-end, creative city restaurants serving tasting menus.
But there is no error. The price you pay to enjoy Miguel Frutos’ sublime food is what you would expect to pay in countries with much lower structural and labour costs than Ireland.
But wait. There’s more. A flight of wines from Dave O’Mahony’s cellar, picked to make Miguel’s dishes shine, costs €40.
Yeah, yeah, no mistake. €40 for a flight of gorgeous natural wines.
Once you get past the numbers, you encounter the superlatives. Is Paradiso the best vegetarian restaurant in Europe? Or is Paradiso the best vegetarian restaurant in the world? We have been debating this for over thirty years, and there is life in it yet.
Costings and status, however, are not actually the heart and soul of Paradiso. What counts is the fact that Paradiso is a one-off. It is unique. There is nowhere like it, and there is nowhere capable of being like it.
For decades, we have marvelled at the fact that Denis Cotter, the original chef and owner of Paradiso before Dave O’Mahony took charge, had detailed all of his recipes in no fewer than five of the most important books written by a working chef. And yet nobody can replicate Paradiso food.
The techniques and ingredients are all laid out and described. But what isn’t described is the Paradiso magic, the sui generis creativity that has driven this restaurant since it opened in October 1993. Making the dishes is – somewhat – easy. Making the magic is, for any other kitchen, impossible.
Part of that magic is the tight relationship Paradiso has had with the organic farmer Ultan Walsh, whose produce from Gort na Nain farm is simply peerless. Just try the opening taste of that strawberry gazpacho and Boom! there it is in a tiny cup: summer, distilled.
That’s what Miguel Frutos does. He distills the essence of his ingredients, so the dinner courses coalesce to form a pointillist rendering of the season. August, therefore, is strawberries, tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines, jalapeno chillies, each flavour etched and sketched, standing its ground, whether foreground or background.
It’s dizzying stuff, because this is a new language of food: vegetable be-bop. Frutos takes a vegetable, then plays theme-and-variations with it, crafting a still life for each serving.
The gig begins with a trio of snacks - that electrifying strawberry gazpacho; a free-form rice cracker cradling a rubble of chopped beet tartare; a little sablé biscuit made with Dan Hegarty’s Templegall cheese topped out with jalapeno cream and pickled kohlrabi. The snacks ring all the texture, temperature and temperament changes, and show how Frutos has a deep batterie of techniques to draw upon.
With this sort of wild card cooking, Dave O’Mahony has to work hard to keep up with matching wild card wines. For the next dish of a trio of tomatoes which have been charred, smoked and cured, then served with an ajo blanco, sofrito and beetroot, Dave proposes the 2024 Cour-Cheverny, made by Herve Villemade in the Loire Valley.
The wine is made with a grape we had never heard of: it is 100% Romorantin, a grape cultivated nowhere else but the 71 hectares of this little appellation. That’s a wild card, all right. Of course, it’s perfect. And of course I should have checked page 820 of the Oxford Companion to Wine before I left the house, where I would have learnt that it is “fast fading from the French vignoble.” Not in Paradiso, it ain’t.
How to follow the most perfectly seasonal dish of the year? With another, this time the kitchen’s riff on courgettes – two fried, stuffed courgette flowers atop a tiny tumble of the vegetables, with basil leaves and a bean purée – a concoction that tastes like a vegetable garden in sunshine, a riot of green flavour compounds.
Dave matches it with a wine from the Czech Republic, Okr, made by wunderkid winemaker Milan Nestarec. Milan describes his wines as “ideas that just happen to be represented through wine” and Okr is one of the best ideas ever, up there with the Sacrament of Penance and solar power. Nestarec is a member of the Authenticists Association, and this wine is as genuine and real as it gets.
Miguel’s culinary elaborations feel contiguous with the natural ingredients he is using in each course, so the stuffing of cavolo nero and Swiss chard in a scarf of tortellinis tastes like one more chance to put a deposit of sunshine and chlorophyll in your health bank as winter looms. Dave pours a glass of the Clos Lentiscus 2019 from Spain, a wine named Wow Wow. At this stage of dinner, it is Wow! Wow! All the way.
The final savoury course is a tranche of roasted aubergine served with mutabal, the Middle Eastern aubergine and tahini purée. But Miguel draws the dish eastwards with togarashi and a miso caramel, and it works beautifully, especially with Dave’s glass of saperavi from Pheasant’s Tears, one of the best examples of this fast-popularising grape.
Dinner had begun with a strawberry gazpacho, and the presence of a strawberry consommé in the house pavlova, with raspberries and mint, made the choice from the three desserts a simple one. In addition to the sweet things, Paradiso offers the cult Carrignamuc cheese from deepest West Cork, which is paired with a young Coolea cheese from the adjacent terroir.
33 years on, and Paradiso is firmly in the saddle, and firmly in the lead. Miguel Frutos cooks with great empathy and elaboration, amplifying his ingredients to flavour crescendos that allows them to shine. Dave O’Mahony’s wine pairings make for a marriage made in culinary heaven. You would pay any amount of money for such skill and sympathy, for skills that take you right inside the magic of food, the magic of wine. Eating in Paradiso is humbling, defining, world class.
What a fabulous sounding place. Definitely one to put on the list.
I’ve been meaning to go since that first brilliant book, which amongst everything else had such an influence on how I thought a food/cook book should look too