The great Irish food revolution by Anya Von Bremzen

Irish food was once a worldwide joke, with potatoes as the punchline. But by forsaking the lowly spud for fresh local ingredients - forget the bangers and mash, try sugar-cured baby bok choy instead - inventive chefs at restaurants all around the Emerald Isle are creating stunning meals that astonish the senses.

Here's how I imagined it: I'd buy a gnarled walking stick and go wandering through shamrock-green villages, on the prowl for shining examples of colcannon, boxty, stampy, and champ. I'd commune with wild sheep on the moors....catch silvery salmon with my bare hands. Hour after hour I'd squander in dim, weathered pubs with Friends of the Pint, spinning leprechaun yarns over steaming plates of bacon and spuds. This would by my Irish food odyssey.
Was I serious? Not for a second.
By now, everyone must have heard of the great Irish food revolution......

....On a delicious 10-day tasting tour of the Emerald Isle - heading west from Dublin to Galway, dipping south into Counties Kerry and Cork, and looping back to the capital through County Carlow - I had only a few minor run-ins with black pudding (blood sausage) and champ (mashed potatoes with scallions). What I found instead came close to a Platonic ideal of food. Here were ingredients almost too good to be true (the seafood, the dairy, the organic vegetables) and cooks clever enough to borrow a bit from the world (basil, star anise - why not? Just don't call it fusion) and confident enough to let food taste like itself.

COUNTY GALWAY......Most important, they'll book a table at Moran's Oyster Cottage in Kilcolgan, about 20 minutes away. What? Reserve at a village pub? At Moran's, you must. Settings don't come any lovelier: a timeless thatched cottage, dark but festive inside, facing castle ruins across a swan-dotted river. In a region renowned for its oysters, Moran's are legendary. The irrepressible proprietor, Willie Moran, is not only an oyster farmer and champion shucker (30 oysters in 1 minute, 31 seconds) but also heir to a family restaurant business dating back more than 200 years.

The gigas oysters were everything I'd expected - plump, ethereal, and incredibly briny. But I enjoyed even more the seafood chowder, as expressive as a good bouillabaisse, and the huge pile of crab claws with pearly, vanilla-sweet flesh. Guinness was my drink, the lilting Galway brogue my dinner music. What directions to the WC? Prepare yourself for a meditation on Life and Death peppered with a thousand and one asides before anyone manages a simple "It'd be first on the right." ......

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