Italian cooking, the cooking of the meres and the mommas. Simple food, food from the heart and the hearth. The daubes and the stews, the vegetable cookery and the pasta dishes. Food without complication or pretention. But it didn't happen here. Instead of simple, logical food as the staples of our restaurants - poached chicken with plenty of barley, with the broth to pour over some mash, boiled ham and cabbage, good stews which take a day to cook and five minutes to gobble up, we got male egos and pretentious French "restaurant" cooking. We got the hotel dining-room and the maitre d' and stuff we didn't understand, and then we got fast food and pub food and, now that we have at last got true Irish cooking, it once again has little to do with the food we were reared on, the food of our mothers.
Of course, there have been some exceptions. Maura Foley, of Packie's in Kenmare, for example, cooks like someone who makes little distinction between the domestic kitchen and the professional kitchen, and, here and there in the country houses we find good, true food, the sort of comfort grub we relish and love. But, of all such good maternal cooks, I think there is no one like the mother and daughter team of Nancy Byrne and Anne Gernon, of Brocka-on-the-Water.
The Water is the lovely lakeshore of Lough Derg, in Tipperary, and the restaurant itself is just outside Ballinderry, where you turn off that meandering road which runs between Portumna and Puckane and then on into Nenagh. The restaurant is just like a domestic house, albeit one which has been turned into a restaurant. All the tables are differently decorated, and the china looks much like some of the pieces you would put on your own table. The atmosphere is stylishly domestic. Anne and Nancy cook, while Anne's husband Anthony works the floor. Their food has that element of intuition and command you might have imagined had vanished. As one of the friends with who I had dinner remarked, "Brocka is an example of the perfection of domestic cooking".
They use the Tipperary cheese Cooleeney to make a delightful croquette, paired with a fine, spicy chutney. They have locally smoked salmon trout and mackerel which they confect into an aptly-judged salad with a sundried tomato dressing, and they make a bowl of spinach and garden vegetable soup which is so effervescent with fresh green flavours that it just about takes your breath away.
The problem with such unpretentious, appetite-assuaging cooking is that you tend to crave more of the same comfort. Choices included ribbons of chicken with root ginger and honey, and baked stuffed sole fillet with a chervil and lemon cream but on the night that was in it, all of us simply craved beef, so we ordered two panfried sirloin steaks gaelic style, and I chose beef fillet with fresh horseradish and a black pepper cream. The spuds were lovely and floury, the vegetables crisp and garden fresh, and the other four or five tables were filled with folk having just as good a time as we were.
This is food which almost makes the critic redundant, for it's there, not to be admired and judged, just to be enjoyed. Of course Anne and Nancy are good cooks. Of course they run a lovely place. Of course, you wind up thinking, as you nibble some farmhouse cheeses, or lovely desserts of stuffed pears with marzipan and a butterscotch sauce or homemade chocolate cake or some ice cream with raspberries and kirsch, that it may be your favourite restaurant in the country. For what else can you do with this food but fall in love with it?
Brocka-on-the-Water, Ballin derry, Nenagh, Co Tipperary tel: (067) 22038 Open 7 p.m.10 p.m. Mon-Sat. Dinner £24. No credit cards.