Back in 1996, in the fourth edition of The Irish Food Guide, we included Bernadette O'Shea in a list of 10 people who changed the taste of Irish food.
Ms O'Shea, then cooking pizza in her Sligo restaurant, Truffles, rubbed shoulders with such luminaries as Gerry Galvin, Catherine Healy of Dunderry Lodge, Myrtle and Darina Allen, and Paul Rankin.
On the face of it, the inclusion seems absurd. How could a pizza chef compare to the mighty, starry figures who rewrote Irish menus and Irish susceptibilities in Shanagarry and Belfast and Kinsale and Galway and Meath and elsewhere?
And anyway, later that year Ms O'Shea shuttered Truffles, which only served to underscore our poor judgement.
Yet, eighteen years later, if you had walked in to the fine Bruno's pizza restaurant, in Kinsale, on Tuesday evening, July 8th, 2014, then one of the specials written on the blackboard for that evening was pizza with Jack McCarthy's black pudding, leeks and pine nuts.
That's a Truffles pizza. A Bernadette O'Shea pizza. The recipe is in her book, Pizza Defined, published in 1996.
Almost twenty years after she last cooked the recipe in Truffles, the pizza lives on.
And that's why it was right to include Ms O'Shea in our list of people who changed the taste of Irish food. When it comes to cooking pizza in Ireland, to making pizza a flatbread which showcases Irish artisan foods, Bernadette O'Shea wrote, and re-wrote, the book.
In this regard, Ms O'Shea is like The Velvet Underground, or Nirvana. Those bands live on because of their power to influence everyone who came after them. Just about no one bought the first Velvet's album, Andy Warhol presents The Velvet Underground. But the few who did buy it then did a simple thing: they formed a band. Just as today, every wannabe band starts off by thrashing its way through Smells like Teen Spirit at their first rehearsal.
Having influenced one generation, Ms O'Shea is set to influence a second generation. She is back at the stove, in a sweet little room she has called Luna, in the sweet little village of Dromahair, County Leitrim, close to where she lives. And she is cooking pizza, but today it is allied with other dishes that have come to obsess her, dishes like potstickers, and empanadas.
But first, the pizzas. They are, as before, unlike any other pizzas. Despite being loaded with ingredients, the Luna pizzas are ethereal, the base as light as a cloud. You munch your way through a slice of fennel sausage pizza, or the new courgette and feta pizza and, when there is just a piece of the pie crust left, it almost seems to float in your hand.
But it's not just the pizzas that have this incredible lightness of touch and of texture: the potstickers have an ethereal wrapping; the pastry on the empanadas is ethereal; the sausage cannelloni is wrapped in a envelope of ethereal pasta; the pecan tart with lemon curd is ethereal thanks to a pastry that melts away in your mouth.
Bernadette O'Shea proves in Luna that what makes great cooking is lightness. Lightness allows the senses to explore the textures, tastes and temperatures of the food, sending the senses ricocheting around the brain. And she also demonstrates that the showcase for the ingredients – the pie crust; the pasta; the pastry; the wrapping – is fundamental in the success of the dish, because it serves to foreground the flavours by contrasting with them. The ingredients are the furniture, whilst the pastries and pastas are the palace in which they are housed.
The room in Luna isn't quite finished yet – there needs to be a wee bit of rearranging of the furniture – but the room is beautiful, thanks to a magnificent series of art works on the wall and around the room. Service is relaxed and professional, and Bernadette O'Shea is once again changing the taste of Irish food.
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Luna, Dromahair, Co Leitrim, p: + 353 71 916 4728 e: lunadromahair@gmail.com
