PADDY SNACKERY:Carmel Somers of the Good Things Café in west Cork talks to Marie-Claire Digby
W HAT WAS ONCE a butterfly farm – “on the road to nowhere”, according to its proprietor – is now home to one of Ireland’s unsung food heroes. The Good Things Café, a waterside restaurant and cookery school in Durrus, Co Cork, is where Carmel Somers, a Paris- and London-trained chef, delights Easter and summer holidaymakers with her local, seasonal food, often with a fusion slant, and where, for the rest of the year, she shares her passion and her skills with students on her cookery courses.
Somers, one of eight children, grew up in what she describes as “the typical Irish pub, shop, petrol station” in the village of Caherconlish in Co Limerick. After school at Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, she decided she wanted to learn to cook properly, and at the age of 19 headed for Paris, where she trained and worked with John Desmond, who later set up the restaurant and cookery school on Heir Island in Roaringwater Bay.
A summer spent as an au pair with the De Montault family at their château north of Paris sealed her fate. “Mr De Montault was a director of Veuve Clicquot, so we lived the good life. It was just amazing, and I learned so much about eating, and lifestyle, and also how to cook simply.”
Keen to turn her newfound passion into a career, Somers looked for a job in a restaurant, but, being “neither French nor a man”, she found it difficult to get a position. Finally, she was given a month’s trial at Lous Landes, a restaurant in Paris. “I stayed a year, but I didn’t get paid while I was there. I used to clean someone’s apartment – in the middle of lunch and dinner shifts – in return for accommodation. That’s how I survived.”
Somers gained further experience in Scotland and London, where she worked at Bibendum and at Sally Clarke's, as well as six years cooking with Colin White at his critically acclaimed restaurant, White's, in Cricklade, near Swindon. White's was a local favourite of food writer Jane Grigson, whose book, Good Things, inspired the name that Somers would later choose for her own restaurant.
“After all of that, I got married, had three children, and got divorced,” she says matter-of-factly.
A trip to west Cork for her sister’s wedding gave Somers the idea of moving home. “I flippantly said we might move to Ireland and I could open a cafe. I was thinking of cakes and scones and pots of tea – something romantic. But I knew I had to do something because I had to earn money. I was on my own and living on income support.”
She found the premises that was to become the Good Things Café in November 2001, moved in with her daughters Briony, Ellen and Jill (who are now 17, 13 and 10), and opened for business the following April. “At first I was afraid I’d have no customers, because it’s at the end of nowhere, really.” But Good Things Café is now firmly on the map of Ireland’s culinary treasures, and a destination in its own right.
The restaurant opens for Easter and for a short summer season that begins in June. “Last year we stayed open until the end of September because there were still people about,” Somers says. “We play it by ear at the end.”
The cookery school came into being when Somers was landed with a VAT bill she couldn’t afford to pay, after her first season in business, and had to borrow money from her brother. “So I had to do something. I taught cookery in Bantry for one term, then I thought, ‘I should do this at the Café’.”
The fundraising experiment took off, and Good Things Café, when not open as a restaurant, is now a fully-fledged cookery school, where you can join Somers for anything from a single demonstration class, to an intensive five-and-a-half day course.
It was one of her pupils who provided the spark that became the inspiration for Somers to write her first cookery book, the recently published Eat Good Things Every Day. "I never planned on doing a book. I thought they [her publishers] had sent the e-mail to the wrong person. I said 'no' for a couple of years."
But, seeing her former pupil shopping for food without having planned the meals she was going to cook in advance, without having written a list - and admitting that she probably wouldn’t use half of what she bought – made Somers decide to write a book that would show people how to “plan their meals, shop efficiently and buy just what they needed”.
The result is a meticulously written book that is, as Somers intended, very different from much of what is already available. There are more than 90 recipes, grouped into eight weekly menus, with shopping lists and work plans. It is based on how Somers and her daughters eat, and is a terrific template for feeding a busy family in a cost-effective, seasonal and hassle-free manner.
“When people don’t know the basics, they make it such hard work for themselves. When you haven’t learnt to cook while growing up, you can be quite fearful.” With Somers by your side, in person or in print, cooking is a lot less scary.
Carmel Somers's family favourites
Irish stew with crusted dumplings
Spicy fish stew
Pork chops with Durrus cheese and Marsala
Sprouts with ginger and orange
Coconut chicken with spices
Baked sweet potatoes with chilli and lime butter
Collar of ham with apple juice and juniper
Eat Good Things Every Day
, by Carmel Somers, is published by Atrium (€39)
