64 SAVEUR.COMfed, not because that’s the trend but because, well, why would
a farmer feed them anything else? Look at the grass grow-
ing every where. It is self-evident. To claim that your meat is
grass-fed, or that the butter came from grass-fed cows, sim-
ply sounds ridiculous here.
Because it has become an eating destination, you can travel
2,000 miles from New York City to sit in Curran’s, one of the
most picturesque and pleasurable pubs in the town, only to
listen to four young travelers discussing stops on the Port Wash-
ing ton line of the Long Island Railroad. Then again, you might
also strike up a conversation with a woman named Dairena Ní
Chinnéide, the aforementioned type of person who quit her
job as a television producer in Dublin and moved to Dingle to
write poetry, working in her native Irish tongue and trans-
lating the work into English. Nine volumes of it, plus short
stories and radio plays.
When asked, “Why Dingle?” Chinnéide replied, “What can
I say? It’s just magic.”
A few doors up from Curran’s, Kennedy’s sells County Kerry’s
most limited local microbrew, made by Adrienne Heslin, the
first female microbrewer in the country who is also a publican
(and a sculptor). She crafts her beer with local waters and fla-
vors it with local flora: elderflowers, rose hips, blackberries,
black currants, and, occasionally, tree bark.
“The idea is to put the geography of here into the bottle,” she
told me as I downed her fabulous porter, one of nine beers she
makes, at her Brick’s Pub on the opposite side of the peninsula.
From here, it’s just a few minutes’ drive to Sophie Seel’s
small organic farm and garden, exploding with vegetables.
Seel created the garden exclusively to serve Bealin’s restau-
rant. And she grows beautiful lettuces, favas, peas, corn, and
chiles for one of the town’s, if not the country’s, most unlikely
chefs, Kevin Murphy.
“I HAD A TWO-WEEK STAGE before I even k new what
a stage was,” said Kevin Murphy (not to be confused with Seán
or Kieran Murphy, the ice cream makers, or Mark Murphy, who
runs the Dingle Cookery School). A distinction must be made, and
it’s one that Murphy has tired of, as it’s been addressed often in
Irish media: his lack of formal training. I’ve been writing about
chefs for more than 20 years, and I’ve met scores who have had
no forma l training. W hat this has a lways meant, though, is that
rather than going to culinary school, they worked their way up
through a series of kitchens until they knew enough and had
developed the skills and knowledge to open their own place.
Murphy didn’t even do this. Pretty much all he had learned
was what he’d been able to pull from books and his two weeks
as a stagiaire—and not at a Michelin-starred restaurant, but the
restaurant of his uncle’s brother-in-law three hours away. That
brief apprenticeship, plus years of cooking out of books at home
and for his friends on beaches and in the mountains, was all he
figured he needed to open an uncommonly ambitious restau-
rant, Idás, which aims, he says, “to put this peninsula on a plate.”
Murphy, now 40, opened Idás in June 2014. Word of mouth
spread so quickly that within 10 months a Michelin critic paid
a visit and included it in the influential guide of recommended
restaurants. “I didn’t rea lly k now what that meant,” he said. “It ’s
just what one guy thinks. I care more about what I think.” Mar-
tin Bealin knew that this was cause for celebration—and he left
his restaurant to find Kevin and congratulate him in person.
I can best describe Murphy’s approach through a single dish,
the first of an eight-course tasting menu: A dashi-like broth made
from local seaweed, mushrooms, scurvy grass, and marsh sam-