YOU can eat lunch or dinner in Cafe Paradiso, a modest room on Cork's Western Road where Denis Cotter and his partner, Bridget Healy, have been squeezing out sparks for the last three years. Chilled beetroot soup with cucumber and scallions; broad beans in basil and lemon; sushi of carrot, scallion and rocket with wasabi, pickles and a dipping sauce; courgette and sweet potato tortilla with avocado salsa and polenta on spiced greens; potato and rocket cakes with a stew of butterbeans and vegetables with herbs, olives and goat's cheese; roasted sweet peppers with a caper and pine nut stuffing on wilted chard with a mustard cream.
Gorgeous food with gameball flavours, in a room which manages to make you feel as invigorated and, indeed, youthful, as the cooking. You could pay the modest bill and head home happy, and it might only be sometime later that the realisation will strike you. No meat. No fowl. No fish.
Cafe Paradiso is a vegetarian restaurant, but you might never know it. Its cuisine is a million miles away from the self denying, meat substitute style of vegetarian cooking as you can possibly get. No dodgy veggie rissoles and burgers here, no fraudulent shepherd's pie, no stodgy nut loaf. Mr Cotter's cooking is, instead, a modern, multi cultural embrace of styles and ingredients, which he harmonises in expert fashion. Meat is not on the agenda. It doesn't need to be.
Like any good cook, Denis Cotter is endlessly self critical, endlessly hungry to develop. "My cooking is now evolving on its own path," he says. "What I do now makes my work three years ago seem pubescent and childishly inventive. Well, to me anyway.
He is too hard on himself, of course, but out of this critical acumen has evolved not only the country's best vegetarian restaurant, but a very personal and creative style of cooking, a style which is complete, and logical, which is what makes Cafe Paradiso so special.
These two recipes are a fine example of his work, and a fine example of where the future direction of vegetarian cookery in Ireland lies.