“I wasn’t expecting this to be the meal of the year”, said the man at the adjoining table to ours, in the dining room of Gregan’s Castle. “But it’s definitely the meal of the year”, he said again, before relegating a Dublin restaurant hotshot to second position in his own private pecking order of 2014.
Many others will agree with him after they have finished eating David Hurley’s cooking at Gregan’s. Mr Hurley has arrived, and he’s done it in an unusual – and unfashionable – way: he’s arrived slowly.
His career arc has echoes of the previous incumbent in the kitchens at Gregan’s, Mickael Viljanen. Both chefs worked with Paul Flynn, in The Tannery in Dungarvan, then migrated west to County Clare, to Ballyvaughan and the handsome hotel on the Corkscrew Hill where they shared the kitchen. When Viljanen moved on to Dublin, Mr Hurley succeeded him, in what amounted to the most difficult “Follow that!” succession in recent Irish culinary history.
But follow him is what David Hurley has done, and he is creating food that has the same sense of excitement and vigour that made Mr Viljanen so celebrated when he cooked here. There are elements of his cooking that are new, drop-dead classics – the lobster lasagne that comes with pan-glazed halibut; the puffed salmon skin with cured Clare Island salmon; the roasted onion jelly with pea velouté; the potted shrimp raviolo with butter-glazed cod; the gingerbread crisp with foie gras and duck terrine; a dark chocolate gateau so fine that our notes read “Off the chart!!!”.
The gentleman at the next table urged us to order the passionfruit curd tart, served with set coconut meringue, Alphonso mango purée and blueberry. We won’t get a better piece of advice all year.
What Mr Hurley’s cooking shows is that he is Master of the Unctuous: his food delivers a mouth party of both tastes and textures, a series of teasing, lush and sexy adventures in eating. There is an extravagance in this food, but when you think about the cooking afterwards, you see the logic in everything he cooks, so the cooking recalls great masters like Michael Deane, or Eugene Callaghan – there is rhubarb with foie gras; there is dill with crab; there is ham with pea soup; and the lemon curd tart with celery is an old-fashioned lemon meringue pie made new and – like everything else – made better, made irresistible.
David Hurley’s cooking shows his metier: he works on something until he perfects it, and he works slowly: he isn’t in a rush, because he knows that the more often you do something, the more you learn from it at each repetition. And yet his cooking isn’t overworked or tortured: there is a sense of spontaneity and creativity in every bite, the sort of vivid flavours that lift the energy – and the decibel level – of everyone in the dining room.
John McKenna
