Young Turks plan to wow Dublin diners

Pop-up restaurants might be very now but Giles Clark's cooking is about something timeless: cooking simple, tasty things with beautiful ingredients, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

A POP-UP is the one-night stand of the restaurant world; a fling compared to a marriage. A chef can beguile and charm and then be gone, leaving happy memories. The restaurateur has to spend at least some of their time thinking about grease traps and getting someone in to fix the leaky fridge.

And that’s what makes the genuine pop-up nights so enjoyable for the diner, the fresh enthusiasm of a for-one-(or two)-night-only chef. Giles Clark is a young English chef who studied at Trinity College Dublin and worked in the kitchen at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud at weekends. His summer jobs included work at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley California, Alinea in Chicago and Noma in Copenhagen. Now he works in London with a group of chefs calling themselves the Young Turks, and regularly returns to Dublin.

Clark is part of that new breed of chef more likely to get on his bike and go foraging than pick up the phone to a white-van supplier. (Cue cynical eye-rolling or fond smiles depending on which side of the fence you sit on this).

Around a tightly-packed table in Dublin’s Cake Cafe, owner Michelle Darmody has gathered food people, producers and wine experts to share a supper to see what Clark and two of his London colleagues, James Lowe and Josh Plunkett, can do. Next month he will cook a “summer supper” for a larger group of 50 people for two nights in an old schoolhouse on nearby Pleasant’s Place.

We start with gorse cocktail, a tumbler of golden liquid made from a syrup of gorse flowers and gin. Next the mismatched sharing plates come with young green lettuce leaves used as edible baskets for an oyster, with a fiery horseradish cream and topped with thready fried onions. They are gorgeous, large, unladylike mouthfuls.

I’m sitting beside organic grower and importer Denis Healy and his partner Rike Lehmeier and we bemoan the cold. My courgette casualties (four baby plants) pale into insignificance beside their 1,200 plants that died in our Arctic early summer recently. Food blogger Caroline Hennessy shares stories of turkey-rearing and micro-brewing. We hear about the bullet hole in Leslie Williams’ granny’s leg and a pike on the Healy farm that bit someone on the finger but got its comeuppance by being cooked for dinner. It’s that kind of evening.

The next dish is a bowl of gnarly baby carrots, curly and imperfect in the way that organic vegetables are, cooked simply in butter with some of their carrot tops still on and sitting in a bowl of bread sauce with lovage. It’s a homely dish and another sharing bowl.

Then comes a plate of perfect baby beet halves with their cone shaped roots like elf hats sitting in a pale yellow rapeseed and mead sauce with elderflowers on the side. Each beet leaves a gorgeous splodge of purple bleeding into the pale lemon yellow sauce as they are scooped up with fingers and eaten.

Then come individual portions: a perfectly poached egg on nutty brown toast with a raw radish and its greens arranged in a swirl. There’s a bowl of lamb suet dumplings which are soft and fatty and salty, in a broth beaded with jewels of lamb fat. There’s a piece of china-white hake with tiny rounds of cooked cucumber, (which falls slightly flat for me by not having enough flavour).

Then comes a dish of oxtail stew with cauliflower sliced thin enough to look like a delicate alien flora. The stew is full of textures and flavours, thready meat with bursts of fat, all in a syrup of meat that has us running fingers around plates to get the last juicy drop.

A slice of poached pear with a small topping of verjus sorbet and grated almond finishes it off in a quiet way. Finally, there’s a selection of Sheridans cheeses with buttery oatcakes.

Maybe it’s the mismatched willow pattern plates we’ve eaten from, but it’s been a surprisingly old-fashioned series of dishes, like those that might have been cooked in houses with sculleries and pantries. Pop-ups might be very now but Clark’s cooking is about something timeless: cooking simple, tasty things with beautiful ingredients.

Giles Clark’s Summer Supper, a four-course meal with cocktail reception, will take place on June 1st and 2nd. Tickets cost €30 per person. Wines from Corkscrew Wine Merchants will be available to buy. Email thecakecafe@gmail.com, or tel: 01-4789394.

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Two days of talking, debating and eating food will take place in Dublin early next month as part of the grandly titled Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. More than two dozen papers will be delivered over the two days, ranging from food history, food in literature, molecular gastronomy, culinary tourism and a history of Les Halles market in Paris. The keynote speaker is Darra Goldstein, editor of Gastronomica, the American magazine. A lunch in the DIT on Tuesday is a "celebration of Irish artisan producers". Dinner that evening will be in Thornton's and lunch on the second day will be in Chapter One.

Tickets for the event including both lunches and dinner cost €150. There's a €40 student ticket that includes the first lunch. The event is being organised by Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire in the DIT building on Cathal Brugha Street on June 5th and 6th. Registration is open until Monday, at arrow.dit.ie/dgs.