Head chef and owner of Cork’s award-winning Goldie Aishling Moore on her life in food

Earlier this month, Aishling Moore — head chef and owner of Cork’s famous, sustainable, seafood restaurant, Goldie — won Best Young Chef 2023 at the prestigious Food & Wine Awards.

Noting her “wonderful talent for working with seafood”, the judges said, “even at this young age [Moore] is a leader in the industry and is known for her exceptional ability and delicious food.”

Cork-born and bred, Aishling was to be bringing the title home to her team and to the city. A graduate of MTU and a former head chef of another beloved Cork institution, Elbow Lane Smokehouse & Brewery, Aishling opened Goldie when she was 24, just six months before the pandemic.

Located on Oliver Plunkett St in Cork’s city centre, Goldie, a small restaurant with a big heart, it’s famous for its sustainable approach to cooking. Moore uses as much of each fish as possible to create a daily changing menu of delicious and inventive seafood dishes. The restaurant also adopts a ‘whole catch’ approach by allowing what’s landed, predominately in Ballycotton, to dictate its menu.

Here, Aishling Moore shares her life in food…

What are your earliest memories of food?

I guess it would be blackberry picking when I was maybe five or six. In Cork, we call them ‘blackas’. That was the first time that food made an impression on me. The act of seeing them in the wild, picking them, and making something from them. Even just simply picking a berry in a field and understanding that it’s food and that’s where food comes from.

What was the first meal you learned to cook?

A roast chicken dinner with all the trimmings was the first proper thing that I learned to cook that was an actual food source. I started cooking pretty young because my mom was working. She would prep parts of the meal beforehand and then I would have timings of when to put certain parts in at.

What’s your favourite ingredient or dish?

At the moment, it’s probably raspberries. They’re like balls of jam, they’re absolutely delicious.

What’s an ingredient or dish you cannot stand?

An ingredient I hate is pomegranate seeds. I absolutely detest them and I hate when I get a salad and they’re in there. I love the flavour of pomegranate and I love pomegranate molasses but I just can’t stand the seeds.

Guilty pleasure or go-to comfort food?

I probably only cook at home maybe once a week now, so I always do something kind of comforting on a Sunday. Lately, I’ve been very into lasagna, but my go-to comfort meal would have to be bacon and cabbage. There’s lots of nostalgia attached to it for me.

Food for thought — what would you do to improve the Irish food/restaurant/hospitality scene?

There are lots of things we need to improve on, but I also think there are lots of things we have improved on. I remember being at Food on the Edge seven or eight years ago when a lot of us in the audience were listening to our overseas peers in conversation surrounding four-day working weeks and wondering how we could make it work here. Luckily, there are a lot of restaurants doing that here now, and there’s a much better work-life balance.

One thing that I think would be amazing would be if our communities were smaller. Don’t get me wrong, our community is huge and that is such a benefit to the industry, but if our communities were smaller, if we were all able to source more food locally to our restaurants, and if we had smaller economies of food producers within that larger economy, that would be amazing. Having multiple local growers of certain ingredients to keep smaller communities more self-sufficient, that would be fantastic. From a restaurant perspective, the closer we get to the food, the better the experience is for the customer. Whether that’s service or the end product in food, and we have such a massive influence over that as chefs.

Chef’s kiss — Tell us about one standout food experience you’ve had recently.

I was in Italy back at the end of May, in the countryside outside Milan, and it was just amazing. We didn’t order anything off the menu, they just brought us everything they had. They had this gelato trolley that came out of this gelato machine that had been in the restaurant since the 60s. This machine is just sitting in the middle of the restaurant and it still works. Simple, vanilla gelato, I loved it so much. It was a really special meal.

Secret ingredient — What, in your estimation, makes the perfect dining experience?

I think as chefs, we might underestimate the importance of everything that happens in the front of house that affects a meal. For me, it’s completely 50/50 between food on one side of the pass, and service, music, lighting, who you’re eating with, what time of the day or evening it is, on the other. Something we try to achieve at Goldie is that we really want our guests to relax while they’re here. Simple things like seats being comfortable, having enough water on the table, getting the right pairings — it’s so important. But at the end of the day, it’s all about what’s on the plate and who’s sitting opposite you.

Who is your culinary inspiration or food hero?

Jamie Oliver got me into cooking when I was really young, I just thought he really made food cool. I’ve always been a big fan of his, and I think he does great work. Closer to home, Sally Barnes is a master fish smoker in West Cork and she is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. She has the most information about seafood in Ireland, and I feel so lucky that she’s shared some of that with me. Conversations with her have massively influenced the way I think and how I perceive things.

What would your last meal on earth be?

It would definitely have to be three courses! I would be hard-pressed not to put bacon and cabbage in there, so that will be the main. I love bread and butter pudding, with butter and cream, and I would have a bowl of clams or mussels to start with.

Feature image via Sue James PR, all other imagery via @goldierestaurant on Instagram