Consuming ambition

IT USED to be easy to be a chef. All you had to do, in the old days, was polish and perfect your style, and it would last you a lifetime. Chances were it would be based on classical French cookery and, if you were good at it, you prospered.

That just won't do anymore. A chef has to be able to navigate the cuisines of the world. Not only must a cook be fluent in different ethnic styles, but nowadays we judge cooks by how truly, authentically ethnic they are if your risotto isn't as good as they serve it in Milano, trouble!

This is a murderous demand on a cook, but it is a sign of the ambition pulsing on the working side of the kitchen doors in Ireland today that so many chefs now are happy to run with it. Conscious of the need to avoid the ersatz, the key element of their cooking is not just its international embrace, but also the fact that it has a true personality. They do it their way.

Patricia Cahill is, by this reckoning, a quintessential modern Irish cook. Her cooking incorporates many diverse elements and boasts a cracking sense of ambition. We featured her on these pages some years back, when she was cooking in Caherbolane Farmhouse, near Corofin in Co Clare, helped by her sister Anne and her mum Brid.

Ms Cahill could have continued working in Caherbolane cooking for the guests of the B&B and the diners who frequented the place. But if you thought she was going to stay put, you reckoned without that ambition. For Patricia Cahill has made the leap from a house with its small, domestic kitchen to a fully fledged, lunch and dinner wine licensed restaurant. It is called Flappers, it is in Tulla Co Clare, near to Ennis, and with it, she has fashioned a smart room out of a simple space, decorated with some terrific paintings by Ger Sweeney.

The name comes from the fact that the shop was formerly owned by a Mr Flapper, and while it is nice that Ms Cahill has held onto this little piece of local history the name is misleading. For here is a restaurant run with thundering precision, and even after only a few days in business, Ms Cahill and her team had made the leap into the professional world smoothly.

The confidence and stylishness of her cooking have been brought intact to Tulla. Pick three diverse starters - such as wild mushroom, cheese and leek tartlets; spicy crab cakes with chilli mayonnaise; and fettucini with a gorgonzola cream sauce and toasted nuts - and it is the diversity and the accuracy of flavours in each one which wins you over.

Creamy, melting cheese and leek in a pastry case; punchy, funky chilli with the crab, and smooth, yet well defined, flavours with the pasta. The dishes take a hop, skip and jump across different cuisines, but the finishing was just excellent and pleasing.

This is succulent cooking, with nothing lost in terms of flavour by the jump into the professional arena, and our main courses again showed a cook who can wear a chefs toque and a mother's apron at the same time.

Roast rack of lamb au poivre with flageolet beans was absolutely spot on, the meat sweet, the beans soft and comforting. The roast duck breast with a honey Sauternes sauce and a pineapple chutney was pure drool territory, the chutney offsetting the richness of the meat, but the sureness of the skill was shown best with a dish of curried monkfish with an apple and date compote.

This was spiced and sauced to perfection, the curry giving the cream sauce just the right amount of attack to make it enlivening to eat and yet remain wine friendly. Vegetables were a fine potato gratin, and there was a large dish all a-tumble with crisp green beans, broccoli, and carrots, lathered with a hollandaise sauce.

If starters and main courses roam around the globe for influences, then desserts bring it all back home apple tart with hazlenut praline and orange custard was a kiddysome treat, a chocolate Grand Marnier mousse was unapologetically rich and lush, and only a coffee creme caramel was disappointing, the one dish which lacked the zing the others enjoyed.

We did a bit of global hopping ourselves with the wine, trying the splendid Casablanca wines made in Chile by Ignacio Recabarren, and we positively fell upon the brilliant Essensia desert wine, made by Andrew Quady in California.

SERVICE was still finding its feet in the early days of the restaurant, but the staff - with the exception of a token man in the kitchen, they are all women - are keen as mustard, and should quickly pick up a little more polish.

If you have been startled by the increase in restaurant prices in Dublin in the past year, then the trip to Tulla will reassure you that costs in some parts of the country haven't gone crazy, for prices in Flappers are amazingly keen.

Starters cost between £2.95 and £3.50, main courses come in at 50p either side of a tenner, with desserts at £2.50, and a cheeseboard at £3.75.

There are great tastes to be enjoyed in Patricia Cahill's cooking, a marvellous confidence and grasp of global influences, but perhaps the nicest thing about her work is the sweet taste of ambition.