Okay, let's start by maxing out: Matthew Strefford of Moy House, just outside Lahinch in County Clare, cooks a dish of St. Tola goat's cheese tortellini, served with pine nuts, raisins and brown butter. After I had finished it, I wrote in my notebook: “Tortellini may be the best pasta dish I have had in Ireland.”
Yeah, that good. And not only good, but unusual, because the pasta is actually made with flour and potato, a riff on a Neil Perry signature dish, which Mr Strefford has borrowed from his time cooking with Mr Perry in Rockpool, in Australia.
If the tortellini is wow! in taste and execution, it is however emblematic of Mr Strefford's cooking in being also mature and unshowy. He is a discreet cook, so the dishes don't shout at you. Instead, from the taste of truffled cauliflower velouté to a piece of Catalan orange cake with vanilla ice cream, this is a cuisine of whispers, of flavours that have been tweaked until they are perfect, pitch perfect, and in complete alliance on the plate.
Roast hake with mussels, chickpeas and chorizo, for instance, comes with samphire and semi-dried tomatoes and piquillo peppers, and it's as Spanish as all get out, and a textbook demonstration of how to cook fish and shellfish, and how to plate the dish. Fillet of beef had gorgeous celeriac purée, a shallot marmalade, and beautiful mushrooms and spinach, yet this was the one instance where I felt the technique didn't optimise the main ingredient: Mr Strefford, like many avant garde chefs, cooks the meat sous vide at low temperature, before finishing it, and I personally don't think this technique does justice to great Irish beef.
There were no doubts about that Catalan orange cake, however, and a roast orange purée with the cake is an inspired touch. The level of assurance Mr Strefford brings to his cooking is utterly convincing, and this is some of the best cooking that you will find on the Wild Atlantic Way. What's more, it's going to get better, as the produce from the Moy House garden, organically grown by the inspiring Feargal, comes on stream: 15 varieties of potato!
Mr Strefford's culinary broom isn't the only new act in Moy House, however. Sinead Foyle, one of the great Foyle tribe of Clifden in Connemara, has also arrived, and brought her own brand of assured management and hospitality DNA to this magnificent house. As a double act, working in sync with this third element that is this magical house, Ms Foyle and Mr Strefford are squeezing out sparks.
