62 SAVEUR.COMto build a village from scratch,
one with a schoolhouse and cobblestone streets.
There’s a type of person who, after leaving art school, after
failing as a tailor and working with at-risk youths, moves to
Dingle and, with virtually no kitchen experience, opens not
just a restaurant but an ambitious restaurant with menus com-
posed only of food grown or caught on the peninsula and in
surrounding waters.
There is a type of person who gives up a successful career in
the metropolis of Dublin and moves to Dingle to become a poet.
And there’s a type of person who abandons New York to bring
his young family to Dingle, to make ice cream from what is argu-
ably some of the best milk in the world.
This last ty pe, Seán Murphy of Murphy ’s Ice Cream, says,
“There’s a type of person who wants to go to a place at the end
of the world, where the weather’s not that good, but who appre-
ciates the deep culture, the landscape. There’s a type of person
who wants that, and appreciates food. There’s a sense of touch-
ing something alive and real here.”
Such is the strange, ineluctable allure of place.I’D TRAVELED TO DINGLE simply because a friend
who loves food told me, “I’ve just been to the most amazing
food town.” To which I said, “I thought you were in Ireland.”
To which she replied, “Yup—and it’s so beautiful.”
Dingle’s not easy to get to—a four-and-a-half-hour drive
from Dublin, or a Dublin-to-Kerry flight followed by an hour’s
drive along narrow roads, slowing for hairpin turns through
half a dozen one-pub towns. The roads are so narrow that the
passenger-side mirror regularly brushes the hedgerows and the
festive red, fuchsia, and orange montbretia wildflowers. Lambs,
marked with spray paint to distinguish the farmer, bleat and
graze all around. Beyond the emerald pastures, sparkling blue
bays and mountains.
Ireland, of course, was the country so dependent on the potato
for food that when the crop failed country wide in the mid 1800s,
millions left and millions starved to death. A country once so
devoid of culinar y ambition that aspiring chefs in the 1980s were
told to leave. Martin Bealin, a Dingle chef, recalls his cooking-
school instructors’ advice: “There’s no future here.”
But here is present-day Dingle, population 2,000, roughly
four short blocks and, in the words of one traveler, “on the roadto nowhere but itself.” Today it is home to three dozen restau-
rants, a score of pubs selling craft beers and whiskeys, a culinary
school, and a distillery—a town that hosts one of the country’s
best-known food festivals, which welcomes more than 10,000
people from across Ireland each fall.
How, in this culinarily impoverished countr y, did such a place
come to be?
Because it drew a certain type of person. Many of them, actu-
ally. Starting with one Sir David Lean.
By all accounts, the story of Dingle’s rise to culinary distinc-
tion began when the Lawrence of Arabia director built a stone
village on the side of a mountain to serve as the set for his movie
Ryan’s Daughter. The film’s Academy Award–winning cinema-
tography of blue waters crashing against sheer cliffs and green
pastures and vast pure beaches was so improbably beautiful
that a wave of tourists followed. At the time, the early 1970s, it
was said that Dingle contained 52 pubs and not a single place
to eat. A few years after the movie’s release, Johnny and Stella
Doyle opened Doyle’s, showcasing the pristine seafood caught
off the Dingle coast.
Lean was not the last Holly wood titan to scout this remote
peninsula: Ron Howard directed Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
in Far and Away here in 1992. And J.J. Abrams chose Skellig
Michael, an island off the Dingle coast and site of a Christian
monastery dating to the Dark Ages whose beehive-shaped, stone
buildings remain intact, to convey that remotest of places, Luke
Sky walker’s hidden retreat. The next
Star Wars is being filmed here, too.
Doyle’s and the wave of forward-
thinking, tourist-pleasing restaurants
that followed did away with the cab-
bage and boiled meats of the past and
began looking instead to this fertile
peninsula’s fabulous seafood, exqui-
site dairy products, and beautiful
sheep that graze all over it.
Martin Bealin and his wife, Nuala
Cassidy, opened their restaurant,
Global Village, in 1997. It’s now the
city’s primary anchor of extraordinary cooking.
“I was searching the world, searching for the perfect place,
the perfect cuisine,” Bealin, who grew up outside Dublin, said,
seated in his sma ll restaurant before ser v ice. “I’d have been quite
happy to move to Australia and live there. And I came back here
and realized this was it—it was right here. Ireland was the per-
fect place to be a chef. What about that?”
By the time his restaurant was established, it had become
clear to him that not only was the seafood excellent, the mack-
erel and John Dory and turbot and lobster and mussels—“the
boxes of stunning fish I get in through that door every evening,
it ’s as good a quality as any where I’ve worked in the world”—
but also the produce that could be grown in this temperate
climate turned out to be far more diverse than cabbages and
potatoes. “Lettuce and asparagus and onions,” he said. “It
jumps out of the ground.”
All the cattle and lambs grazing on the hillsides are grass-THERE’S
A TYPE OF
PERSON WHO
TRAVELS
TO THE DINGLE
PENINSULA
Opposite (clockwise
from top left): Richard
Sheehy, a fisherman
who supplies crab and
lobster to local restau-
rants; Curran’s pub,
where Robert Mitchum
warily regards the
regulars; scenic views
from Conor Pass; the
lunch rush at Ashe’s
Restaurant, which has
been open since 1849.