In post-modern cooking, everything goes. A chef might draw inspiration from an artwork or a literary text just as much as a plate of food he or she once ate in someone else's restaurant.There is only one problem with post-modern cooking: it's difficult. In fact, it's incredibly difficult. If you want to do it right, it will do your head in. Where to start? Where to end? Where does the comfort zone dissolve into incoherence? When does the free-form stop making sense?
The best thing we can say about Martin O'Donnell's cooking in Upstairs @ West, at the Twelve Hotel in Barna, west of Galway city, is that his food is alive to the impulse that led him to create the dish, but also alive to the reactions he needs to make sure the dish works on the night.
There is a spontaneity to his food that shows the work of a chef who has arrived, and it is invigorating to see him lay out his palette of foods, bright with colour, vividly focused, delicious to eat.
In our notes we wrote that, “The cooking is point, counterpoint, blue note. There is contrast, and then the note gets bent out of shape, there is a little surprise for the senses.”
The maturing of Mr O'Donnell's cooking is not just the maturity of experience, but lies also in the fact that having been involved in the food served downstairs in the Twelve Pins bar, he now has time to concentrate on what he wants to do at West.But let's go back to the blue note.
Mr O'Donnell uses foraged elements very well, so a little cone with smoked salmon and Cleggan crab gives the bent note in the shape of sea lettuce. A superb carpaccio of venison with horseradish ice cream does the point-counterpoint bit, then the blue note comes with a wild pea shoot, tingling the taste buds.But it's not all crab and venison and lobster and loin of lamb – though they are all present – that shows his application.
When we tasted the brown bread that arrives in a little sack of breads, we went “Wow!“.Wow! for brown bread? Yes indeed. And a simple, but perfect, squash soup, took another standard into the sublime, and so did a stunning elderflower granita.
Yet it was the ability to focus on all the disparate elements of a dish that was perhaps most impressive: every part of the dish of ceviche of lobster with steamed dumpling and lobster bisque was a good as every other part, and the same was true of a dish of loin of lamb with cauliflower and sweetbreads.
In fact, there wasn't a single element of a ten-course dinner that was out of place or unnecessary, making for a dinner that was full of blue notes, and yet wonderfully harmonious. West is offering some of the best cooking on the west coast, and in a year when the west coast has been offering some of the best cooking in the country, that is really saying something.
John McKenna
