To have an Irish restaurant guide which does not even mention Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is quite an achievement; it is the culinary equivalent of discussing the European motor car industry and not mentioning Mercedes Benz or talking about the First French Empire without allowing the name Napoleon to appear. That it is the best restaurant in Ireland is of course merely my opinion, and it is a humble one, as are all such opinions in this place; but we are not even talking about "the best" - we are talking about whether or not it is in the top 100 restaurants, and apparently it is not. Perfectly extraordinary.
So if it is not in the top 100, where exactly does it fit in? There must be a stage in any purview of the restaurant scene in Ireland in which the acknowledgement that Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud exists becomes inevitable; or maybe not. Maybe, according to whatever criteria are employed in the compilation of the Bridgestone Guide, it is perfectly possible to start at the Epicurean peak of Drimcong and L'Ecrivain and The Red Bank and plummet all the way down to the Salmonella Snackbar, with mouse droppings in every bite and e-coli coated onto every fork, without ever passing Patrick Guilbaud's little place on the way.
Knowledgeable advice
So what is the principle on which such a guide is assembled? What makes it useful to outsiders who come to Ireland and genuinely want knowledgeable advice about where to eat? Should they feel grateful that, although they are staying in the centre of Dublin and are looking for a restaurant with two Michelin stars and have gone to the trouble of buying a restaurant guide for that purpose, the only such restaurant in the Republic is not even mentioned? And should that same principle, by which the very best never gets a passing reference, not be used by all compilers of guides - so that car magazines test-drive Ladas and Morris Marinas and never mention Alfa Romeos or Audis, or that film reviews are dedicated to home videos?
It might be said that Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is not representative of Irish cooking; but the title of the guide which omits that eating place does not declare that it is solely dedicated to promoting Irish culinary traditions, such as they are. The title is 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland; and it is difficult to imagine that all the restaurants listed thrive without hefty dollops of foreign influence.
Derry Clarke's excellent L'Ecrivain, for example, clearly draws inspiration from eastern cuisine as well as that of France. Roscoff's in Belfast I have never visited, but to judge from their television programme and their books the Rankins are clearly influenced heavily by French cuisine. And the Elephant and Castle in Dublin, which is named in the Bridgestone "Classics" section, though heartily welcome for its own distinctive contribution to the capital's cooking, is not in any sense Irish; it is a celebration of American food traditions.
Native tradition
But then what are those? Are they not a fusion of the culinary traditions of the waves of immigrants, mixed with native foodstuff? And is this not the case with all cuisines everywhere? There is no pure and unviolated native tradition anywhere. French cuisine was inspired by Italian cuisine; Italian by Chinese; Chinese by Mongol and Japanese; and so on.
Take an example. Are we really to maintain that these things we call Irish cheeses are in fact native products inspired by native traditions? Or are they largely copies of French, Italian or Swiss cheeses? It is not so long since Veronica Steele made the first Irish farmhouse cheese; since then another dozen or so have emerged, most of them modelled on foreign varieties. Yet we use this slender body of cheese-making as "proof" that our cheeses are the best in the world.
That is the kind of rubbish I used to utter, and it is not good enough. Patriotism is a poor device for judging things. The best cheeses in the world still come from France; and one of the reasons for this is that it is not enough to make a cheese. Like a champagne which must be matured in the right conditions, turned daily and kept at the correct temperature, cheese-making cannot just be left to yeast. It requires skill, care and patience; and something else. Intelligence.
For that is what marks great cuisine out from cooking. It is an affair of the mind. True cuisine requires enormous scholarship, and it is a falsehood and a stupid conceit to suggest that we have a tradition of fine cuisine. We have not. We have noble farmhouse traditions which have been revived and justly praised by Myrtle Allen, whom I adore and who remains one of the giants of Irish food. Our debt to her is enormous.
But that realisation of what we have should not blind us to what we have not. We have not got ancient traditions of haute cuisine; and the cuisine which is emerging in Ireland is largely mimetic. Foreign dishes are hibernicised with Irish ingredients, Irish techniques employed in the preparation of imported foodstuffs. But the body of cuisine, like the language involved, is French.
Enchanting folly
That thing called a meal is separated from merely eating by technology. In the case of cheese, say, the technology came from the Mediterranean. It is not surprising that every language in Northern Europe takes its name for cheese - cais in Irish, kase in German, queso in Spanish - from the Latin, caseus, or from the mould in which it was shaped which gives us the Italian formaggio or the French fromage.
It is no more than an enchanting folly to maintain that the revolution in Irish cheese is reviving lost traditions. They simply were not there. Let us therefore be honest and admit that whatever cuisine there is in Ireland owes its entire existence to the inspiration of outsiders, especially the French; and let us be frank enough to admit that the exclusion of Patrick Guilbaud's restaurant from any good food guide tells us nothing whatever about that restaurant, but tells us a great deal about the usefulness of such a guide. C'est tout.