Paradise for vegetarians

Denis Cotter's garden-led cooking is deceptively simple, and priced for the times, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

‘I THINK I’LL have the tofu.” Six words you never thought you’d hear your meat-loving husband say with any great relish. We’re sitting in Café Paradiso on the quays in Cork city and we’ve done a rough headcount of men in the place. It’s around a dozen. Twelve angry men, we joke, brought to eat pulses by their wives or girlfriends.

Gender cliches about men and meat are not always wrong. Recently, one foodie friend remarked how her husband refuses to eat chickpeas. Hummus, yes. Chickpeas, no. Even a rebranding as bloke-peas wouldn’t help matters, it seems.

In Denis Cotter’s restaurant all the baggage about vegetarian food fades. Liam has eaten here before, returning with tales of amazing flavours and how great tofu and vegetables can taste in the hands of a supremely talented kitchen.

Cotter is an interesting chef. Apart from rooms upstairs, he has resisted the urge to expand out of the small restaurant with a Paradiso brand. He has given Dillinger’s restaurant in Dublin’s Ranelagh some vegetarian recipes, but that’s been it so far as empire-expansion goes. His cookery books are challenging and didactic, the other extreme from bish-bash-bosh-it’s-done recipes. You have to get out your weighing scales. The lists of ingredients are as long as your arm.

I’ve been looking forward to eating here. It’s reassuringly understated inside. The walls are a dramatic charcoal olive colour, which make the diners look like characters in a Vermeer. Light fittings are expensive and beautiful, chairs likewise. The tables are simple, zinc-topped squares and the floor is dark wood. The room got an unplanned makeover after the place was flooded in 2009. This explains why the restaurant, which has been here for 18 years, looks fresh.

A sunflower seed brittle as an appetiser sets a good note. It’s sweet and salty and the kind of thing my boys would munch happily. I get a pink sloe gin Prosecco (€7), a nice twist on the pre-dinner drink. It’s delicious and makes me want to start buttering up anyone with a sloe- berry supply this autumn to start my own jar.

My chocolate chilli soup starter is a bit of a wintry start on this spring night, but a great example of what Cotter does well. The dark beany flavour of the soup (there’s no great note of chocolate other than the colour) hasn’t swamped the chunks of perfect avocado, fresh coriander and spring onions. There’s crème fraiche in this, too. The coriander retains its freshness and colour even after a bog snorkel in this soup. You get a warm, gloopy note of dense soup, with the clean voices of the fresh ingredients carrying over the top.

Liam’s sweet potato and ginger spring roll demonstrates what heroes both ingredients can be. They come wrapped in a perfect envelope of crisp filo. For main course, he has a panfried tofu with pak choi, noodles and a wonton of gingered aduki bean. The tofu has been marinated to a salmon-pink and looks like a particularly square and perfect piece of fish. There are plenty of Asian and Indian flavours in Cotter’s cooking, the countries where vegetables are the staple and meat a rarity.

My couscous cake has a dollop of harissa jam on the top, plenty of greens, spicy chickpeas and a coriander yoghurt spooned around it. Inside the couscous there are lumps of soft, salty feta. And finding them is like locating the juiciest raisins in a fruit cake. We have a carafe of the house Albariño (€15) which sets off the flavours brilliantly.

By now we are definitely full. “What’s the vegetarian equivalent of the meat sweats?” himself asks. But we squeeze in desserts. I get vanilla pod ice cream with brutti ma buoni cookies (which translates appropriately as ugly but good). The cookies are made with hazelnuts and softly-melting chocolate chunks and are chewy and still warm from the oven. Liam’s limone Paradiso (as much a signature dish as the chocolate soup) is a line-up of all things lemon – a sumptuous mascarpone, sorbet and a gorgeous mini lemon tart.

We come away feeling full and happy, with a copy of his latest cookbook under our arms. It’s called For the Love of Food, a title that is both passionate and also a small bit narky. It has a testy introduction by Cotter where he decides against lecturing us all about the importance of our eating habits and instead just outlines the dinners he has made at home and enjoyed. One dinner was not a dish “that called for reverence or any acknowledgement more than an occasional ‘mmm . . .’ We ate it watching a movie, the food just one part of a lovely evening.”

The food you’ll find at Café Paradiso is deceptively simple and priced for the times. My set three courses cost €35. It’s more intricate than the muddiness of much vegetarian cooking. Each ingredient gets to keep its own flavour and punch with pride in the combination. A mediocre chef can cook an outstanding steak. It takes real talent to do what Denis Cotter does in Paradiso. His food is genuinely seasonal. You can look on your plate to find out what the weather’s doing outside. It’s not fussy enough to impress the Michelin inspectors or the macho meat brigade. But in the meantime, the rest of us can enjoy it wholeheartedly.

Dinner for two with a Prosecco and carafe of house wine came to €104.

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Cafe Paradiso

16 Lancaster Quay, Western Road, Cork, tel: 021-4277939

Facilities: Small, grey and unisex

Music: Salsa, jazz and anything else you're having

Wheelchair access: Yes, but restricted room

Food Provenance: Superb. Cotter works with Ultan Walsh and Lucy Stewart who grow many of his ingredients at Gort na Nain, a nine-acre farm outside the city. Menus come from what's in the fields and polytunnels rather than the other way round.