Every week, Michael O Crualaoi writes a new menu - an unremarkable practice for a restaurateur, but O Crualaoi is not a restaurateur, but a butcher.
He is one of the new generation of butchers steadily transforming our conception of what a butcher's shop should be, what it should sell, and how it should sell it.
For a start his shop, on Main Street in the bustling town of Ballincollig, Co Cork, doesn't look much like a butcher's shop. Rather, it looks like a fashionable delicatessen with its modish interior, its sharply dressed staff, its vivid lighting and generous floorspace. It is as far removed, in fact, from the traditional butcher's shop as you can get, but the style works perfectly, and the space is welcoming and provocative.
But what is most significant about O Crualaoi's is that a greater area of counter space is devoted to cooked-food-to-go than to the conventional business of the butcher's shop.
Of course, all the usual varieties of meat are here - superb, free range chickens, splendid beef from O Crualaoi's own abattoir, fabulous sausages - but even here, a great many dishes are already semi-prepared, so there will be stir-fry chicken in its marinade, kebabs and prepared pork dishes such as a fine pork teriyaki.
But as the counter turns a corner, we enter the new generation butcher's shop for real. What O Crualaoi has done is to introduce what is in effect a traiteur - the sort of cooked-food-to-go outlets which are such a feature of French towns. Beginning with a multiplicity of cooked meats and filled vol-auvents, there are numerous salads such as tuna and pasta or wild rice salad, heading on to cottage pies and various pastries, and an array of desserts such as profiteroles with chocolate sauce, and the counter ends with a hot food section, where folk come, literally, to buy their dinner. And they come in droves.
"Meat, potatoes and two veg is our basic success," says O Crualaoi, so every day sees a fairly conventional choice of roasted meats and vegetables - glazed carrots and parsnips, roast spuds, cauliflower mornay - but this will be abetted by prepared dishes such a beef Catalan, or pork and apple burgers with a sweet and sour sauce, or spaghetti Bolognese with garlic bread, or poached smoked haddock with an onion and mushroom sauce, all of it overseen by Teena Hornibrook, the head chef, who prepares everything upstairs. SOME years back O Crualaoi, along with many other butchers in the Irish Quality Guild (of which he is the current chairman), realised there was a market for handmade food, prepared with care and without the chemical additives which bedevil mass-market frozen and chilled foods. Earlier this year, I was a judge at a competition held by the guild, and I was thrilled by the high quality of the cooking coming out of butcher's shops from all over the country. The butchers had realised they had to become chefs as well, to combat the voracious supermarkets.
In O Crualaoi's shop, there are no compromises made with the quality of the food, whether it is chicken chasseur with a rice pilaff, or grilled gammon steak with mushroom sauce. O Crualaoi's is truly a Godsend for those without the time or skills to cook, and clearly there are lots of people without the time or the cooking skills, for O Crualaoi He sells on average 1,500 dinners each week - an astonishing figure for one medium-sized butcher's shop, which may suggest no one in Ballincollig does anything other than buy dinner at O Crualaoi's!
He sells food at lunchtime, in the afternoon as children are collected from school, and then again in the evening, as folk head home from work. Then, on Saturday, as part of his "Dining at Home" idea, there are more elaborate dishes such as roast loin of pork with mixed fruit farci and apricot sauce, or chicken Stanley with honey and mustard sauce, and the shop stays open late. And the operation will also cater for "21st birthday parties, christenings, barbecues, stations, anniversary parties and engagement parties". They will make up display platters, cook a particular dish of your own choice, and they accept all the major credit cards.
"It's all a new business, and things have changed steadily and progressed over the four years since we began to cook the food," says O Crualaoi. "What we do is to listen to the customers, and let them set the direction for the shop by telling us what they want."
O Crualaoi, the Butchers, Hot Food and Deli, Main Street, Ballincollig, Co Cork. Tel: 021 871205 Open Mon-Thurs 7 a.m.-7 p.m., Fri 7 a.m.-9 p.m., Sat 7 a.m.8 p.m.