28 FEBRUARY 2020
OBSESSIONS
McMahon stops to chat with a couple from Texas who had
dined at his flagship restaurant, Aniar, the night before, making
their way through its eight-course tasting menu with lamb neck
cooked sous vide and roast beets served on twigs. The Michelin-
starred restaurant has run at a loss since it opened in 2011, sur-
viving on a mix of tourist traffic and the subsidizing support of
his thriving tapas bar, Cava, and its sibling, Tartare, a natural
wine bar and café up the street.
Locals have been slow to embrace Aniar’s ambitious modern
Irish cooking, heavily influenced by New Nordic cuisine, with
abstract compositions featuring foraged wild ingredients like
meadowsweet, sea radish, and kelp.
“In Ireland, generally the best chefs all go abroad,” says
McMahon. “We haven’t matured enough as a food culture to
keep them here.” For more than a decade, he’s tackled the
Sisyphean task of trying to change that.
In the spring of 2012 he launched the Gal-
way Food Festival, which drew as many as
70,000 visitors in 2018. For the past five
years, his Food on the Edge symposium has
brought some of the top chefs in the world
to western Ireland, introducing culinary
heavy hitters like Albert Adrià, Sean Brock,
and Massimo Bottura to the edible treasures
of the Emerald Isle.
“I’d been invited to a few chef sympo-
siums around the world,” he says. “I suppose
I thought, why don’t we have something
like this in Ireland? We have great produce,
great hospitality. Why wouldn’t people
come?”
McMahon, who also pens a weekly cook-
ing column in the Irish Times newspaper,
is an unlikely, and largely accidental, food crusader. He’s ex-
plored writing—poetry, plays—and academia—Irish literature,
French philosophy, art history—always supporting his interests
by working in restaurants.
“Given a different set of circumstances, I could have easily
just finished a PhD in art history and written books and prob-
ably set up a symposium in art history,” he says. “But food kept
calling me back.”
In his spare time, McMahon has been pursuing a PhD in
drama and theater studies. “Irish Food. A Play,” an experimental
show he wrote and produced in conjunction
with his coursework, features live lobsters
let loose among the actors, including one
that’s answered like a telephone. “I wanted
to play around with the question of putting
food on stage,” he says.
That academic background served him
well on his latest big project, The Irish
Cookbook, his monumental tome on Irish
cuisine out from Phaidon this month. He
scoured archives and interviewed family
members, collecting classic recipes along
with esoteric ones: There are recipes using
seaweed, his favorite unsung ingredient (see
his Seafood-and-Seaweed Chowder on p.
30). He scattered in his own “wild food” creations “to represent
Irish food now.” And he unearthed historic dishes from both
the aristocratic and peasant ends of the spectrum. From what
he calls the “big house” tradition, he found pickled pigeons
with “loads of spices.” He considered the influence of Spanish
traders who plied Galway’s port in the 16th century on the Irish
practice of salting ling, a cod-like fish.
“I love the complexity of history,” he says. “People would say
Irish food is not spiced, but the Normans brought spices here.
Irish food is a melting pot of so many different influences.”
“I’d been invited to a
few chef symposiums
around the world. I
suppose I thought,
why don’t we have
something like this in
Ireland? We have great
produce, great hos-
pitality. Why wouldn’t
people come?”
photography by CAITLIN BENSEL
FOOD STYLING: EMILY NABORS HALL; PROP STYLING: CLAIRE SPOLLEN
