Eden restaurant in Temple Bar is 10 years old, but chef Eleanor Walsh hasn't time to celebrate. She's running the new Eden at Co Meath's hip new hotel, Bellinter House. She talks to Gemma Tipton.
Talking to Eleanor Walsh is a mouth-watering business. The chef, and creator of the menus at Dublin restaurants Eden, Café Bar Deli, Odessa, The Market Bar, Bodega and the fish restaurant, Mackerel, has been putting the finishing touches to the restaurants at Bellinter, the country house hotel just opened in Co Meath by Jay Bourke and John Reynolds. Walsh started working with Bourke and his business partner Eoin Foyle 10 years ago when Eden was first established in Temple Bar. She was working in Cooke's at the time. "I joined Cooke's about five months after it opened. I hounded Johnny Cooke for a job, pestered him with phone calls until he gave in." Now the pair are great friends. "I learned so much from him," she says. "He put the funk into food in Ireland. When he's in the kitchen, he sets it on fire [although not literally, of course]. When he used to go off and leave me in charge, he'd say 'El, cook it with love' in this Al Pacino voice, and I'd be so into it."
Cooking it with love evidently worked, and Walsh was soon making food for the likes of musicians REM (all vegetarians) and U2. "Edge asked me to go on tour with them to cook, but Bono said I shouldn't, that I'd just end up hating them because they'd be wanting meals at 4am; and as I'd been talking about Eden, he said 'stay and open your restaurant'. I think I was disappointed at the time, but he was right. Eden happened, and I never looked back. Now they're some of my best customers. Bono loves good honest food, and that's what Eden's all about."
Eden at Bellinter will initially be the same as Eden in Temple Bar. "I want to celebrate Eden in Dublin because it's 10 years old; but by next year, the gardens at Bellinter will have developed so it will be symbiotic. All my herbs will come from Bellinter, and the potatoes, anything I can grow in fact. I want the two restaurants to feed off each other, for the chef at Bellinter to say 'you've got to try this . . .' and vice versa. It will be an extension of how we create the menus already, by all sitting around and talking about what might work."
Walsh has just completed a cookery book which will be published next year. "It's all about sharing my love of food," she says. "It's about the idea that good food is great fun, and that we can make amazing things with simple Irish ingredients."
Bellinter, she says, is about great food, and about relaxing. "If I was going there for the weekend, I'd want to get there and curl up on my first night and have a pint of Guinness or a cocktail. I'd want to have bar food - a dozen oysters or a plate of chips with garlic mayonnaise. It doesn't matter which - they're both on the menu. Then on Saturday I'd have a lie-in, then a big, long walk up the hill of Tara, or horse riding - there's lots of stuff like that available. Then I'd come home, do the beautification thing, and have a gorgeous dinner in Eden."
So is she a perfectionist, I ask? "Not really," she replies before remarking that the mashed potato we're eating has been served in the wrong dish. Mashed potato is a big favourite with Walsh. "Peel the spuds, cover with cold salted water, bring to the boil slowly, boil slowly (this slowness is very important) then remove from the heat, drain and cover with a cloth so that they steam for a while. Mash the potatoes, and then warm your butter, cream, milk, white pepper and salt in a separate pan. Add to the potatoes, then mash again."
Even though she left Eden (for a while) to concentrate on Café Bar Deli and Mackerel, the Temple Bar restaurant is still her first love. "There's a lot of me in there," she agrees. "In the week before Bellinter opened, when it was all so stressful, I found myself wandering into Eden in town at half seven in the morning and making myself a cup of tea and rummaging in the kitchen for brown bread for toast and honey. It's my centering place. Eden is in my heart, and I'd never have left Eden without chef Mick Durkin coming in. It's his kitchen now. The other day I was in at seven, and then Mick arrived and we had endless cups of tea and talked about food: 'I'd do that . . . Oh no, I wouldn't do that . . . What do you think of that . . . ?' I couldn't have left Eden if I didn't have him."
Walsh's enthusiasm for food is contagious. It's also in her blood. Her mother, Oige, is a "great cook" and her grandmother Ellie Rayel ran "the best butcher's shop in Dingle", with the result that Walsh was one of the few girls in her school who knew how to butcher a cow and slice up all the different cuts of meat.
"People say we don't have a food culture in Ireland," she says. "But we do; we just forgot about it. While we celebrate our music, our literature, our drama and our pubs, we just didn't celebrate our food - until recently. But we have such great things here: oysters, dillisk seaweed, our spuds and turnips. Our meat is up there, too.
"I remember picking periwinkles with a pin on the beach at home. We'd be sent down to the seashore with a needle, and that's like having snails with garlic butter in France, or sushi in Japan. Then there's the mackerel," she adds. "We'd go out in a boat and catch them, clean them on the beach and be eating them less than two hours later. You cannot beat that anywhere in the world."
So will Walsh's family Christmas at home be like? "There are five kids, and five grandkids in the family," she says. "And because my father married the girl-next-door, my Mum, there's also a large extended family living nearby. We might be 36 for dinner, so I try to make it down to Dingle as early as possible on Christmas Eve to get stuck into the cooking.
"We'll start with a buffet of local seafood - oysters, smoked salmon, smoked mackerel pâté. We'll have that in the sittingroom with homemade brown bread and a glass of something. Then for dinner, it will be smoked ham, turkey, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, mashed and roast spuds, stuffing, and Brussels sprouts."
So how do you cook the perfect Brussels sprouts at Christmas? "Simple," Walsh says. "Cut a cross in the base, and boil them quickly. They don't take very long, so don't overcook them." Alternatively, she suggests, parboil your sprouts, then shred them and sauté them in sesame oil with strips of bacon and some sesame seeds. And what about the stuffing? "Make loads of it," she replies. "Because it's so nice to have cold in sandwiches later." After the main course comes "plum pudding, brandy butter, cream, custard, sherry trifle, mince pies, brown-bread ice-cream, chocolates, and, just in case anyone's feeling like something light, fresh fruit salad."
I remark that people still cater for Christmas as if the shops are going to be shut for a week and they're going to be snowed in, but Walsh points out that the great thing is that for the next three days, you don't need to cook anything, or go anywhere. Somehow, however, I can't imagine her staying out of the kitchen for that long.
Eden, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, 01-6705372, www.edenrestaurant.ie; Bellinter House, 046-9030900, www.bellinterhouse.com