The Farmgate Café, Cork

Lunch and Japanese Tourists – May 2007

Japanese tourists try some boiled potatoes

Lunch at the market café, called the Farmgate Café, which, we guess this from the number of Japanese tourists who turned up, some obviously not speaking a word of English, appears to have got itself a name in the guidebooks. One couple, with their regulation upturned flowerpot cloth hats that identify a Japanese tourist anywhere in the world, obviously had no idea what the menu said, but perhaps had been advised by the guidebook to ask for fish chowder, followed by the fish of the day. The woman of the party skipped main course, possibly she thought that struggling with one unidentified foreign dish would be enough, but the man manfully got his roast cod and dutifully ploughed his way through it to fulfil the itinerary. We both had fish chowder for starters, which was indeed very good, and I had Irish stew for mains, accompanied, as was the Japanese man’s cod, by potatoes done the old-fashioned Irish way, boiled in their skins. This works very well with something like Irish stew, as the potato soaks up the gravy. Quite what the Japanese man made of it we couldn’t tell for he remained impassive and intent upon doing the itinerary. But not much by the look of it. Hilary had a salad with smoked salmon, also very good. No wine for us, as it was lunchtime, but we noticed a couple of Marche wines on the menu, ah, that’s nice.

Irish Dutch cheese and conger eel

Although we had lunch in the market we’d really gone there to buy some Irish cheeses to take home, there being a good range of Irish cheeses now, for example we bought some Irish mature Gouda that, though I’m not a Dutch cheese expert, seemed very good to us. We were told that it was made by a Dutch woman who’d emigrated to Ireland, and on our walk in the hills the previous day we’d met a local man and his current girlfriend, possibly his only ever girlfriend we didn’t ask, who was Dutch, and you kind of think, how does someone find their way from Holland to the far west of Ireland? But obviously they do somehow, we didn’t ask how, because that would have seemed, to us anyway, too forward.

The thing I really wanted to buy in Cork market as soon as I saw it was some conger eel. You don’t see conger eel in the north of England and possibly no longer do you in the south, which if true is a shame. In Cork market were two fine, ugly, conger eels. But I didn’t buy any as we were travelling back on Ryanair, and if they confiscate a tube of lipstick because you could attack the pilot with it I dared not imagine how they might react to a kilo of conger eel.

The Coal Quay of Cork

Cork – April 2007

‘In the year of our Lord, 1806, we set sail from the Coal Quay of Cork’. (The Irish Rover song). We went to the Coal Quay. Not much to look at, now. The Irish Rover isn’t really an emigrant tale, but we wondered what the boatloads of economic migrants leaving Ireland for America in the 19th century would make of Cork if they saw it now, which of course they can’t because they’re dead, but if they weren’t dead, we think they’d be saying, who’da believed it? The Cork quays are still there, they just don’t have any elegant craft that are rigged fore and aft, any more. But you can somehow imagine it.

Russians unloading grain

A Russian tanker was on the opposite bank, from which was being unloaded grain. A crane lowered its grab into the ship’s hold and brought up a crane-grabful of what looked from where we were like white powder, dripping from the grab, which was then swung round and dropped into a hopper under which was a lorry. Once the lorry was full it drove away to be replaced under the hopper by another. The lorry won’t have had to drive far, as the mill was right close by. Surely there must be a more efficient system than that. We learned that that mill is scheduled for closure, to be relocated further out and its buildings converted into bijou waterside residences, at some point. Periodically someone on the Russian ship shouted through the tannoy, in Russian.

A visiting French naval frigate

Equally intriguing and also on the opposite bank was a French naval ship, with French sailors dressed as they do with a silly red pom-pom on the top of their white hat. And there was obviously some sort of concord going on, for on the back of the ship’s deck a marquee had been erected and people were standing around on one leg with a glass of something. A Black Velvet (Champagne and Guinness) maybe. Probably wasn’t, but should have been. On the back of the ship were draped an Irish and a French flag. Pity we hadn’t been invited, we could have found out what it was all about.

A bistro on every corner

Éamon de Valera came to power in Ireland as it lurched to independence during the 1920s with a vision of a country of Catholic Conservatism, to maintain a land of happy peasants. So there was yet more hardship and yet more emigration to complement that which had taken place in Ireland for decades, emigration this time primarily to England.

It wasn’t really until Ireland joined the EU that its fortunes began to look brighter, with the effect that over the past 20-odd years Ireland has been transformed. It’s now a country with a charming bistro on every corner – well, not really, but it sometimes seems like it’s going that way.

And palm trees

In Cork we were working, and for me who had only one meeting to attend this work was partly on the laptop in the hotel and partly sitting under the palm trees on the quay. For Cork, like the whole of the southwest coast of Ireland, has palm trees in every municipal park and private garden. Palm trees everywhere.

The main shopping street in Cork is St Oliver Plunkett St.

A Visit to Cork

Dinner in Cork – April 2007

We’re invited out to dinner

We were invited out to dinner with friends. They called for us at the hotel and first, there’s a bit of time, let’s go to a bar. So we walk to one of their favourites and I have a pint of Beamish stout as that’s the local brew, but no one else seems to drinking Beamish – disgraceful. Busy bar with people of all ages, we join a table of youngish people speaking Spanish.

Then to the restaurant which was very good quality, French-style, I had a timbale of salt cod Irish-style and then three of us had breast of guinea fowl for mains, Michael opting for a lamb steak with a kind of puff-pastry crust which he said had been flavoured with mint, possibly his choice was the classier one, though ours was very good, and anyway, the French don’t eat mint with lamb – possibly they do more so now, but Asterix the Gaul says they don’t. Service, French style, was quite slow and along the way we got through two bottles of Lebanese red wine. Then it came to dessert and Michael said to the waitress, do you have a dessert wine at all? And so it was glasses of sweet dessert wine. And then when we eventually left at about 11.30 the female half of our hosts suggested that we’d need a nightcap and she thought the bar next door was still serving, so she went in and checked and sure it was, and so along came another bottle of red wine and four glasses, not cheap, €27, and after a walk by the River Lee, watching a heron fishing in the darkness, and bumping into some friends of our friends and a chat at about 1am, we eventually got to bed at about 1.30.

In Ireland, go with the orange white and green

In Ireland, it’s like Italy, you just have to go with the flow. The main difference is that in Ireland this flow seems inevitably to be accompanied by a vast amount of booze. The other difference is that whereas Ireland’s flag is orange, white and green, Italy’s is red, white and green. The main similarity is that the place operates in a state of surprisingly efficient chaos. And they both begin with I. As does India, whose flag is also orange, white and green and where also there’s no avoiding the chaos. So now we know, it’s the flag and the initial letter what does it.