TwoCooks duo get their claws into The Lobster Pot

Nicola and Josef Zammit of the popular TwoCooks restaurant and cafe in Sallins have taken over The Lobster Pot in Carne, Co Wexford, and have renamed it TwoCooks at The Pot. They plan to continue to run both restaurants, with the help of what Nicola describes as their “really great teams”.

The couple have worked in London – Nicola at The Ledbury and Josef at Tom Aikens, as well as in kitchens in Australia and France. Back home in Ireland, Josef cooked at The Brown Bear in Twomilehouse, and Nicola taught at Cooks Academy, while they looked for a restaurant to run themselves. They opened in Straffan in 2016, and prior to the onset of the pandemic, in January 2020, they closed for renovations, adding a ground floor café and moving the bar upstairs.

“The restaurant became a storage area for doing takeaways during the pandemic. I built a studio in the restaurant too and recorded 50 episodes of a cooking show for everyday home cooks,” Nicola says. The series, called Cookalong Kitchen, will be launched soon as a subscription-based website.

Like many family owned food business, they were forced to adapt during the pandemic and developed a healthy takeaway trade. “I really enjoyed it, it took us out of our comfort zone. We had great support in the village. Everyone kept their jobs and we kept busy,” Nicola says.

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Though they have a long lease in Sallins, they wanted to buy a property outright, and when The Lobster Pot came up for sale, in an area they are familiar with, they bought it. “That’s our beach place, my aunt has a house near there and Josef and I have been going down there for the past 10 years.”

They describe the new property as their “forever place”, and although in the midst of menu development, testing dishes to see what suits the local market, fish and in particular seafood platters, will continue to be the backbone of the business in Carne. TwoCooks at The Pot is open for dinner Wednesday to Saturday, and lunch on Friday to Sunday.

A Taste of Spain

Teresa Calvo, from Cordoba, and her Irish husband James, are celebrating the first anniversary of A Taste of Spain, their Camden Street, Dublin, food and wine store, by opening a tapas bar, La Taberna 60, above the retail space. The couple also own A Taste of Spain in Capel Street, which they opened in 2020, and sell their range of Iberian food and wine online at atasteofspain.ie. La Taberna 60 serves traditional Spanish tapas, including patatas bravas, gazpacho, empanadas and croquettas, made on site by a Spanish chef, and is open Thursday to Sunday.

Teresa, an architectural technician by training, came to Dublin 10 years ago to improve her English, and she and James now have four children together. Finding it difficult to source the Spanish ingredients she wanted to cook with, Teresa initially relied on her parents, who are olive farmers, to send provisions to her. The couple then decided to fill what they saw as a gap in the market, first in Capel Street and then in Camden Street.