Watching Diana Dodog cooking, at the food cart that she and her husband, Mike, call Food Depot, is just like watching a really fine musician play, or an athlete perform.
No matter what the pressure – a big, snaking line of folk on a Sunday lunchtime, all of them hungry – she seems to have all the time in the world, all the time she needs for that final sprinkle of sea salt to finish the steak baguette, to carefully arrange the Toulouse sausages in their wrap, to slide the wedge of lemon into the squash and chickpea curry, before closing the lid.This fluency, this elegance, translates directly into her cooking, which is assured, satisfying and precise, cooking that elicits immediate “Wow!’ responses from the first taste of the dish.
The food is so good that you need to pinch yourself to remember that you are eating cooking that has come from a food cart, and you are eating it sitting on the wall of the beach in Courtmacsherry, in deep West Cork.Running a top-class food cart at the end of a seaside cul-de-sac seems like a very West Cork thing to do, and Diana and Mike have the chutzpah to pull it off.
Ask them to recommend something sweet, and they'll point to the magic slice, or describe the yogurt used in the blueberry and blackberry muffin, to add sharpness. They make a good cup of coffee, as you expected, and they have a confidence born from scratch cooking – the food is good because they have used all their efforts to make it good.
Their repertoire has several main-stays – 12 hour pulled-pork in a brioche bun; salmon with an excellent cous cous enlivened with fruits and vegetables; the chilli con carne with rice and lemon yogurt; the sirloin steak baguette with sriracha aioli – and Ms Dodog likes to ring the changes with a cast of wraps, flatbreads, potatoes, homemade spaetzle.
The simplicity of the set-up suits the proud nature of the cooking – this is elemental eating, where what counts is the goodness of the food, the largesse of its flavours, the honest style of this talented pair. Experiencing the Food Depot, and enjoying its wares in a seaside setting in West Cork, is the sort of thing we used to talk about as a magical encounter enjoyed somewhere overseas. Mike and Diana have just brought that magic back home.
John McKenna
