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Here is the text of a speech delivered this morning to launch the newly sited market in Clonakility.
It was only when Jix Kelleher asked me for a few words that I realised that it was just over 21 years ago that the story told in the speech happened. 21 years! And Tom O'Donovan and his sisters are looking as young as ever!

We are just off on our way to Dingle, to officially open their newly reconstituted Farmer's Market, tomorrow.
So, that will be a very Good Friday in Kerry, and we will post some pics of the stall holders after we have cut the ribbon, smashed the champagne bottle against the trestle table, thanked the Mayor and the Committeeee, kissed the babies, arm-wrestled John O'Donoghue, launched the regatta and eaten our way through the town.
The kids can taste those Murphy's ice creams already...

Great retail experiences aren't too common in Ireland. We still lack a dedicated service culture, one that expresses the nobility of a retailer who truly understands their chosen calling.
But if you take a trip to Waterford, you can get a Double-AA retail experience, in two very different circumstances.
The first A is Altitude, Eamon and Julie Barrett's store up the hill in Ballybricken. Buying a bike and a pair of hiking boots here offered us two masterclasses: how to find the right pair of boots, and how to get advice to make sure you have gotten the right bike.

Getting fish and chips perfect isn't easy. Late last Friday I tried to make battered haddock and chips for the kids, and it was a modest disaster: not epic, but still embarassing.

The greatest uncontrolled experiment in human history, or, What we don’t talk about when we talk about food

Several years ago I was one of the panel at a Eurotoques food conference in Wicklow when one of the speakers, Dr Uwe Hild of the Irish Doctors Environmental Association, said something that has troubled me ever since.

It is an enormous luxury to be allowed write 1,200 words in a restaurant review, as we were asked to do for the sublime American quarterly, The Art of Eating. So here is a look at 17 years or so of Chapter One


Chapter One Restaurant,Dublin: Proper Behavior for the Occasion

There is great pleasure to be had in introducing food lovers to the extraordinarily rich trove of great writing which underlies the business of cooking and eating. In our one-day course at Ballymaloe Cookery School we are hoping to introduce the class to the great prose stylists who realised that writing about food is the most important thing anyone can do. We are also hoping to show them just how to make a food book, and how to blog!

I have several reasons to be grateful to Luc Dubanchet:

1. Two of his photographs look directly down at me from the wall above my computer, and they always make me smile.

2. He once took a photograph of me in which I somehow didn't look like a blithering eejit.

3. He introduced me to the sublime jazz piano music of Tord Gustafson.

4. He was the bloke who helped me to understand why French gastronomy was in dire trouble.

The Irish Times Healthplus February 2010

John McKenna

What Will We Tell The Children?

“Parental Advisory: Explicit Content”.
That’s the sticker on the cover of the sort of cds my kids seem to love buying and listening to, the ones where some rapper mouths off with the sweary language and the street bravado.

No More Mister Nice Guy

The well-known wine writer and television celebrity Tom Doorley had a pot shot at me in The Daily Mail this week. The Irish Independent asked if I would like to reply to Tom's criticisms. One rarely gets a right of reply – especially via a different newspaper – so here is what I came up with in defence of what we have written in the new Bridgestone irish Food Guide. I'm still slightly amazed at being allowed to discuss these issues in the mainstream media.