Orna Mulcahy on people we all know.
Time was when you couldn't get a decent cappuccino between Cashel and Cork, but that was before Brian opened The Bistro, where six days a week he toils in stainless steel splendour, trying desperately to impress customers with his quirky new take on traditional dishes.
This is a thankless task when faced with posses of dreary motorists who look the menu up and down in confusion - ceviche, what in God's name is that? - and ask if he has any lasagne, with a bit of coleslaw on the side. Well, it's their loss, he thinks, banging away with the cleaver in the back, keeping an eye through the hatch at the comings and goings and playing his jazz music a little too loud for comfort. His sulks, unlike his saboyan, are quite good for business. The locals have been coming in just to have a look at the cut of him, and staying when they taste his amazing organic chocolate cake. A couple of newspaper cuttings yellowing in the window announce that the critics have been and liked it. Personally, though, Brian thinks that most restaurant writers are absolute tossers who don't know the first thing about food.
Having grown up on a farm, helping his granny to pluck chickens for stew, and having honed his skills in some very big-name London restaurants where the chefs are like gods, Brian feels nothing but contempt for people who want to eat ham sandwiches and weak coffee on the run. Unfortunately, though, there are a lot of them about, mostly living in his immediate neighbourhood.
It wasn't quite what he expected when he returned home to the Golden Vale with visions of turning the village into another Padstow. Instead of a slower pace of life and appreciative clientele, it's all exorbitant VAT payments, frightening food bills and people asking for full Irish breakfasts. They're not going to get it under his roof. Plenty of that in other cafés, and good luck to them.
Instead, they can have fresh pizza, an omelette with sautéed potatoes or some soup and his own brown bread, which is so good that there's a man who drives 30 miles each way to buy a loaf. At €6.50. Don't get him started on rip-off Ireland. There are two sides to that story. Trouble is that people aren't prepared to pay for decent food that has not been processed and mass-produced, and the ones that are prepared to, well there just aren't enough of them around.
And Sonia, his Croatian wife, is getting really depressed by the weather.
Never mind, there are some triumphs along the way. He loves the way some of the local farmers come in for their espressos now, just like they do in Italy, and he can't keep up with the demand for his elderflower cordial. Then women customers love his impromptu lectures on food technology and often inquire if he does catering on the side. Husbands, on the other hand, find him very fishy indeed.