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Photography by Nathalie Marquez Courtney
Words by Aoife Carrigy
“People say Irish food culture is so young,” JP McMahon says, as I study the printed map of Ireland with which each guest leaves his Galway restaurant, Aniar. Entitled “Our Ten Thousand-Year Food Heritage”, the map is dotted with landmarks far-flung in time and diverse in food histories. Derry’s mesolithic Mount Sandel, the island’s earliest known site of human habitation overlooking an ancient salmon run and Lough Neagh eels’ migration route to the Sargasso Sea. Mayo’s neolithic stone-walled Céide Fields, the world’s oldest known field system dating back almost 6,000 years.
Dublin’s Jammet Restaurant, once the jewel of what was then the British Empire’s second city, as well Cork’s English Market and Achill Island Sea Salt nodding to Irish food producers past and present. “They say that Irish food only really developed in the last 50 years,” McMahon continues. “But I think we can reclaim our food identity in the same way that the Spanish or the Nordics have. It just takes time.”
It’s a bright Galway day when I meet the chef, restaurateur and food writer at his 20-seater Michelin-starred restaurant and cookery school. Inside of Aniar 2.0 – which is how the recent press releases have dubbed the relaunch of Aniar restaurant, first opened in 2011 and now redesigned by Aidan Conway of Marmar Architects – it feels like a theatre several hours before the stage is set for the audience to enter. If Aniar 1.0 was a blank canvas onto which the fresh question of “what is Irish food” could be sketched and answers improvised, then Aniar 2.0 is a tableau staged with props and artefacts resonant with meaning.
Later the blinds will drop and the lights will dim, drawing the linen-draped ceiling lower and the oak-panelled walls closer. Low-slung pendant lamps will spotlight fragments of oyster, mussel and periwinkle shells encrusted into each tabletop of polished concrete. Backlit gaps through the green-stained oak cabinetry will proffer jewel-like glimpses of the collected objects that make this room a treasure trove of Irish food stories.
For now, boxes of freshly delivered local organic vegetables pile atop tables like a still life study. McMahon’s long-legged dog Sam lollops about, and busy-handed chefs discuss new iterations for the 24-course menu, dropping out samples for McMahon’s consideration. As a terroir-focused restaurant, all of Aniar’s kitchen ingredients bar two – white flour and sugar – are sourced from Ireland, if not from the west itself. Many of the courses revolve around wild or indigenous ingredients that Ireland’s earliest inhabitants ate 10,000 years ago.
“Mount Sandel and Lough Borra were the first sites of mesolithic Ireland where you had the diet of fish and game and nuts and wild food,” McMahon explains. “When I was writing The Irish Cookbook [McMahon’s ambitious 2020 investigation of Irish food’s surprising sprawl] I thought it was a nice metaphor for Aniar. What we’ve tried to do here is to discover what Irish food is by peeling back all the different historical layers, getting rid of whatever doesn’t grow here and asking what can we make out of what we have.”
McMahon says people often assume that a menu of native Irish foods will be limited in scope and appeal, yet he was fascinated to learn that the earliest known diet in Ireland consisted of “things like salmon and trout and eel, and hazelnuts, and then later on, wild boar and shellfish, seaweed and wild herbs. I thought, that’s exactly what we do in Aniar, but 10,000 years later.”
In Aniar’s early years, McMahon resisted the inclusion of spices like coriander, nutmeg and mace in his menus. “At the start, we were more idealistic and thought we were going to uncover the ‘real’ Irish food,” McMahon reflects. “We’ve realised over time that we’re part of this historical continuum.” McMahon loves sparring with his friend and food historian, Regina Sexton. “She said one time, you know what you’re doing is like an aberration of history? You can’t just say ‘there are no lemons in Ireland!’ There are lemons and there are spices.”
Writing The Irish Cookbook allowed McMahon to grapple with what Irish food might be, and to distinguish between “Irish foods” that grow indigenously, and “food in Ireland”. “In my head, Irish food is not spiced; it’s from the land and pure and clean. But so many dishes from the Normans onwards have lots of spices like nutmeg and mace. I had a real difficulty about putting these in because it contradicted my vision of Irish food,” he admits with a smile. “When I found an oyster recipe from the 1600s or 1700s that had pickled oysters with coriander seeds, I finally made my peace with coriander. We use it occasionally, or maybe a little nutmeg or cinnamon, in a very subtle way, to show this is part of the narrative of Irish food, but it’s not necessarily the direction that we’re going in.”
Thirteen years after starting to sketch answers onto that blank canvas, how does McMahon characterise “Irish food”? “It is always going to be ingredient-led,” he reckons. “For about 7,000 years of existence of people in Ireland, farming and cattle and the land have been important – so I think Irish food will always be tied to the land, as much as we might want it to be tied to the sea.
He believes that Ireland’s food culture is “now catching up” on countries like France and Italy, albeit running about 150 years behind. While our neighbours were firming up their repertoire of distinctive dishes, our relationship with food was being shaken to its core. “When you think about it, no-one had recognisable dishes before about 1800. We were a colony, and we had a famine in the 19th century – at exactly the time when France, Spain, Italy were all building themselves up.”
Happily, an innate strength of our emerging food culture lies in our love of hospitality and community. Just as “we’re always interested in people coming from other places” and will ply tourists with questions about where they’re going and send them off with recommended places to see and people to meet, so too do Irish chefs tend to work together and pool resources. “There’s a sharing nature of the Irish that you don’t see in other places,” McMahon believes. That openness raises all boats, whether it’s Galway’s Handsome Burger discovering Brady’s Family Butchers of Athenry via Jess Murphy in Kai, or McMahon sharing his supplier contacts with Jordan and Majken Bech-Bailey when they were setting up Aimsir restaurant. “Fine dining can be very territorial but it’s not like that in Ireland, and that’s been a really important part of Irish food culture.”
McMahon is upbeat about the future of Irish food, which he thinks will have many faces, expressions and flavours, and about his own path in that journey. The relaunch of Aniar 2.0 was a welcome reckoning point in his ongoing investigation into Irish food and culture, one that has included his various published books and his annual international chef’s symposium, Food on the Edge. “Covid was the break we needed,” he reflects. Aniar was closed though McMahon was still running the cookery school while doing his PhD in Theatre and Drama. “I was really unsure of my place. We were closed for two years and had to ask ourselves, will it reopen?”
Aniar did reopen, with a new ten-year lease. The need for a new floor led to a commitment to a new kitchen led to the redesign. As always though, Aniar remains a work in progress. Just like the forging of a new Irish cuisine and culture, there is room here – to paraphrase Beckett – to always try again, to fail again, to fail better.
This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of IMAGE.
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