JP McMahon, speaking at a demo in the Food Tent at Galway Food Festival
Everywhere we went in Galway, the service we enjoyed from restaurant servers, shopkeepers, hoteliers, café owners, marketeers and publicans was uniform: it was off-the-chart brilliant. Natasha who looked after us in Cava? Brilliant. Eric and his team in Morton's in Salthill? Brilliant. The crew at the jaw-droppingly-beautiful Gourmet Tart Co in Salthill? Brilliant. Malt House? Brilliant. McCambridge's? Brilliant. Massimo? Brilliant. Colleran's? Brilliant. The Kitchen? Brilliant. And on, and on, and without exception, over the entire Easter weekend.
Even when we gave our patient helpers opportunity to lose it – proffering an at-limit credit card in Ard Bia, which necessitated 'phone calls and whatnot in a jammers restaurant – our waitress was charm personified, patience personified, grace under pressure personified.
You cannot find better service anywhere in the world than you will find in Galway. That service underpinned and exemplified everything that was distinctive and true about the first Galway Food Festival. Everything over-delivered, and everyone over-delivered, from Peter Boland and Tomás Clancy at the Irish Wine Geese tasting in Aniar to Jp McMahon's bravura presentation on “Food in the History of Art” in the Galway Arts Centre.
But it wasn't just the service that was brilliant. Imagine an Irish festival where nobody was drunk. Where children were welcomed and entertained. Where demos were provocative, and where discussions were enlightening. Keeping everything free for entry meant that the weekend was truly democratic: if you hadn't the money for lunch, you could still luck out and enjoy a taste of Ray Colleran's baked ham or Cormac Dalton's pizza. The chefs fed the people.
The last time we saw something as unified and motivated as this, it was in San Sebastian, more than a decade ago, as the post-Adria wave of Spanish chefs who today dominate so much of world cooking were acting as if they were the Barcelona football team: not cocky, just confident, supremely confident.
If we are right, then that makes Jp McMahon, of Cava restaurant, and the organiser of the festival, the Lionel Messi of Irish food.
