Mercy Fenton's name will be pre-eminent among the chefs you are going to be hearing a lot more about over the coming years, so it's appropriate that we begin with her.
Fenton has taken charge of the stoves at Cork's smart new brasserie, Jacob's on the Mall, the old Turkish bath-house of the city which lay idle for decades.
She has returned to her native city - she hails from Fermoy - after several years spent winning awards in England, and latterly working for restaurateur, Stephen Bull. January is always a dangerous time to make predictions, but predicting that Mercy Fenton will scoop culinary prizes in Ireland in the future is the closest thing to a safe bet which you will get in the food business.
Her work marries feminine intuition with a cutting-edge technique. The highest praise I can pay her is, in the food world, one of the simplest: her work provokes the appetite.
For my main course at lunchtime, I ordered roast haddock, with champ, bacon and thyme. The champ was serene and buttery, the fish was roasted to perfection, there was some good fresh cabbage and a thymey lamb jus, and a little oven-dried tomato was an appropriate garnish. As I was finishing the dish, I thought: I would like to eat this all over again. The entire dish was so cleverly composed, so light, that it didn't sate the appetite, but instead provoked it with each and every bite. That is the hallmark of great cooking, where flavour and control and lightness are married so expertly that you are confronted with food which is its own complete universe.
Despite feeling slightly self-conscious about this reaction (where does culinary inquiry end and gluttony begin?), I nevertheless confided it to my wife, who was happily finishing a cracking dish of flat bread, marinated chicken and carrot salad. "When I tasted it, I wanted to order the dish straight away," she said.
That is the merit, the power, of Fenton's cooking. You want to order everything on the menu not just to eat it, but because you want to see what Fenton does with it, what twist and concentration she brings to the ingredient. Her work is so refreshing, so pure, that I suspect among her many customers will be just about every chef in the country, keen to see what she does with her dishes.
With grilled polenta, for example, which is served with flat mushrooms, garlic and parsley, she manages to offer perfectly grilled polenta, which is still wonderfully gooey inside. How does she do this? We speculated that there might be some deep-frying involved, for we had never eaten grilled polenta with such a splendid texture. After a short period of pondering, however, you simply give up and eat up, rapturous at the cleverness and complexity of such a simple dish.
If her food is clever, it is also earthy. My starter of smoked chicken breast with a walnut and parsley pesto, also had some salad leaves and a little tomato concasse. What I liked about this was the ruddiness of the flavours, the way the directness of the smoked chicken worked with the punchy pesto.
Once again, Fenton was creating dishes which are provocative for the appetite - "rigorous" was the term my wife used - and what we also admired was the fact that she didn't use any of those traditional chef's knockout punches - cream, butter, rich olive oil - to achieve the effect she wanted.
And yet there is nothing austere about this cooking: it is food to fall in love with, like the lovely meld of an onion and cider soup, a serene winter bowlful, or the well-judged balance of a mixed leaf salad with pear, Parmesan and toasted pine nuts, or the flat bread and chicken salad, where the marinated chicken had notes of yogurt and coriander and the sauce was sweetish like a chilli jam, and the flatbread was a home-made tortilla.
Desserts strike an equally sharp balance. Date and butterscotch pudding was a spongy column with glamorous sweetness and a rich sticky sauce, while a chocolate and hazelnut tart used the nuts as the pastry base and was light and well composed, though the respective ice creams with the desserts - vanilla and cinnamon - weren't as well rendered as everything else. An espresso, of Lavazza coffee, was fine.
Service is still finding its feet in Jacob's, although in David Riordan, the room manager, the owners have found a talent as assured as Mercy Fenton's is in the kitchen. The room is comfortable, and beautifully lit thanks to the high wooden ceiling. Prices are decent, and Jacob's on the Mall is nothing less than a taste of true excitement.
Jacob's on the Mall, 30a South Mall, Cork, Co Cork tel: 021 251530. Open 12.30 p.m. - 2.30 p.m., 6.30 p.m.10 p.m. Mon- Sat. Major cards.