Danette O'Connell's restaurant is aptly named, for an evening in Urglin Glebe, just outside Carlow town on the road to Hackettstown, is truly a feast.
Not merely for the appetite - though the cooking is indisputably delicious, perhaps the best food to be found for very many miles around - but indeed for all the senses. O'Connell and her partner, David Milne, are both musicians, so the soundtrack for the evening ranged, on the night we ate, from Telemann played on the baroque violin by Moya Homburger to Miles Davis's immortal Kind of Blue, and one selection elided seamlessly and bewitchingly into the next.
David Milne's service is apposite and commanding, setting the relaxed tone and tenor of the house right from the moment you walk through the door and are offered a menu, tied neatly into a scroll with a little ribbon. And, while you agonise over what to order, there are other distractions in the sitting room which show what an idiosyncratic pair we are dealing with here: Elliott Erwitt's book of photographs of dogs, for example, or the hilarious "biography" of P.D.Q. Bach. Even before you get to the cooking, Danette's is casting its spell.
If the surroundings and the soundtrack are uncliched, so is the cooking. O'Connell is, like many of the best cooks, untrained, a fact which seems to me to create chefs who cook the food they love, rather than food they have been shown how to cook. She loves Mexican food, so there are chilli relenos as starters - a roasted pepper filled with Parma ham, goats' cheese and a puree of sun-dried tomatoes, dusted with corn meal and fried - and margarita sorbets, and machaca tacos, where twice cooked, shredded beef is served in a crisp corn tortilla with salsa fresca. She likes vegetarian cooking, so there may be a lentil tart served with a red pepper sauce, and she also likes rich flavours, as you will find in dishes such as quail with a Stilton, raisin and mushroom stuffing with a mango, orange and noble taminga (a dessert wine) sauce, or barbary duck with a soy and honey glaze, or pork cooked on rosemary skewers with an orange and mustard sauce.
Three of us chose the three different starters - the chilli releno, smoked chicken salad with marinated cucumbers, and filo pastry with ricotta cheese and pesto filling - to begin. All were served with salad, and it is worth pointing out that O'Connell goes to the bother - and I suspect it is a lot of bother - to source her vegetables from Penny Lange, of Kiltegan, in Co Wicklow, one of the country's finest organic/bio-dynamic growers, which means that the leaves, and the vegetables which accompanied our main courses, were superlative. If the leaves were fabulous, they were only fitting company for my chilli releno, which was doggone divine, the red pepper sweet, the filling light and precise, the corn batter crisp and contrasting, the combination of the flavours with the salad leaves creating a perfect starter dish. I cannot report on how good the smoked chicken was, as it as eaten so speedily and the plate cleared with such determination that no one else got a look in, but the filo with ricotta and pesto, the sort of dish which in lesser hands could be worthy rather than wonderful, was spot on, perfectly judged and interesting.
All these dishes showed confident judgement rather than the cooking-by-rote we find so often, and just as there is enviable discrimination with the soundtrack and the surroundings in Danette's Feast, so our entire meal showed a cook with true discrimination. Little margarita sorbets were a knockout - head-achingly cold, the texture just edging towards granular, the shock of alcohol invogorating - and a soup of Hokkaido pumpkin, carrot and apple was serene and winter-warming.
I stayed with the Mexican theme for the main course, ordering the machaca tacos, where a pair of tortillas with shredded beef are topped with guacamole, and served with salsa and salad. The idea of finely shredding or pounding beef goes all the way back to the days of beef jerky, when in order to preserve the meat it was cut into thin slices, sprinkled with lime juice and salt, and then hung up to dry. The dried meat was then pounded into shreds and the term machaco comes from the Spanish verb machacar - to pound.
Frankly, the etymology of the dish was pretty much the last thing on my mind as I ate this brilliant meld of spicy beef, cool dressings and salsas. This is the kind of cooking which shows how correct and clean and sinuous the flavours need to be to create Mexican food at its best.
Fresh brill, with a garnish of wild smoked salmon and a lemon butter and dill sauce, is as close as O'Connell gets to classic cooking - though there is also fillet steak with a smoked bacon, mushroom and wine sauce for those who want a Saturday Night Special - and here the cook had simply left well alone, allowing the freshness and vigour of a fine piece of fish to speak for itself. Barbary duck with soy and honey glaze is cooked medium-rare and comes with stir-fried shredded cabbage, and was almost the standout dish, the meat quite exemplary in texture and flavour.
A side dish of vegetables was a winter cornucopia - lovely steamed potatoes, creamy potato gratin, leeks, a little red cabbage, carrots, curly kale - all marvellously, brightly flavourful, as was a shared dish of salad leaves.
As with the starters, we each chose one of the three desserts - chocolate truffle cake with pecan praline and a passion fruit coulis; caramelised lemon tart; and pear slices poached in brandy and amaretto syrup, served with caramelised baked custard.
This last was my own choice, and it was stunning: a fan of perfectly cooked pear with a pillow of crunchy-gooey baked custard at the centre, and the sweetness and directness of the flavours was nothing less than perfect. But then the truffle cake was equally to-die-for (chocolate lovers would walk a country mile for this masterpiece) and the caramelised lemon tart was sherbetty, sharp and yielding. Dynamic desserts.
There wasn't a single off-beat note in our entire dinner, and I was reminded of the words of a friend who once ate here and who, afterwards, described Danette's Feast as "a little treasure". A treasure it is, a veritable treasure.
Danette's Feast, Urglin Glebe, Carlow, Co Carlow tel; (0503) 40817. Open 7pm-9.30pm Wed-Sat dinner, Sun lunch 1pm-2.30pm. Dinner £26.50. (To find Urglin Glebe, turn left at the Braun factory and take the Hackettstown road, then after 2 miles turn left at the Burma filling station, and the house is just a little further along on the left).