What is June to you?
Is it a month for fine-dining in public parks?
For outdoor community picnics in blocked-off streets and squares?
Or for eating, with relish, “the inner organs of beasts and fowls… thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes… grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine”?
Street Feast on Dublin's Millenium Bridge, on a sunny June day in 2011 (well, we do get some!)
My mother picked up a catchphrase somewhere and used to repeat it with some regularity, not to mention relish. ‘Chilly for June!’ she’d pipe, with apparent surprise. She liked to say it so much that she’d trot it out in almost any month, but it had most resonance in June of course. Because the truth was – and remains – that June can be a chilly old month. And rainy too. And windy. And… well, you get the picture. Besides you know it all too well. The irony that my mother relished was that it should be chilly for June, but it wasn’t really. It was fairly standard.
My brother moved home from Tahiti. Yesterday. A nice welcome awaited him and his wife, with the drizzle descending as soon as they hit these shores at Rosslare and building up to a full-scale deluge by the time they got to Dublin. Thankfully they left the kids in 26˚C in France. They’re plucking up the courage to bring them here to their new rainy, windy, chilly home.
Of course I could have told them this weekend was going to be particularly rainswept. Sure isn’t it the weekend of Taste of Dublin? Last night I fought umbrella battles with the rest of Dublin’s ‘foodies’, although none of our handheld defences were any match for the trio of five-foot wide brollies I saw being lifted up by the wind and dropped on unsuspecting passersby. As if it wasn’t tricky enough balancing a glass of wine, a plate of food, a map and a brolly without having to fend off such unmanned attacks from the hired furniture.
The crowd seemed resilient enough, willing to be swept along in the human river that lead to the happy bay of Jamie Oliver’s 6.30pm demo. I guess we Irish are used to being dumped on – by the heavens, by the banks & Europe, by world-class football teams – and happy to take what we can get in terms of entertainment, whether that be watching a lovely jubbly cookery demo on soggy grass or singing their hearts out for losing teams on sunny Polish soil.
Jamie Oliver, in sunnier climes
If you do go to Taste of Dublin, pick up one of those raincoats which look like blue, human-sized condoms but were keeping the wearers smugly snug while the rest of us eejits battled with our brollies. And don’t miss Pichet‘s suitably wintry rose veal bolognese with potato gnocchi to warm you up, and their salt caramel ice-cream with toffee popcorn, banana and chocolate mousse, at the risk of cooling back down again.
This year sees lots of restaurants sharing stands, so I’ll be going back on Saturday or Sunday to check out Chapter One’s buns (steamed buns to be precise, with fried chicken, crushed peanuts and coriander, Michelin-star-styley) and 777′s ox tongue taquitos with salsa verde, amongst others.
There’s lots of tents worth squeezing into, and not just for the shelter neither. O’Briens Wines have masterclasses with the likes of Count Guiseppe Rizzardi; the FOOD&WINE Magazine Chef’s Table sees Ross Golden-Bannon interviewing all sorts all weekend, from Prannie Rhatigan on seaweed foraging to Mickael Viljanen from The Greenhouse Restaurant; the Electrolux Inspiration Academy with Lynda Booth’s Dublin Cookery School gives you a chance to get cooking yourself; and the Taste Theatre has lots of the usual suspects doing their thing alongside some less frequently spotted (but no less talented) chefs such as Kevin Thornton and Seamus Commons.
The good news is that this year all of these extras are free once you’ve paid in your cover charge.
If, however, the idea of paying into a public park to pay for food you could go to a restaurant to eat doesn’t sit quite right, you might be more of a Street Feast kinda foodie.
The now-annual National Street Feast Day is back again this Sunday 17th June. The idea is to encourage local friends and neighbours to come together with a hot pot or whatever you’re having for a little local street party. There’s still time to organise one in your area, and loads of ideas on the www.streetfeast.ie website if you fancy doing so. Or you could join in one already taking place, such as the one being hosted by Le Cool Dublin at 2pm, Sunday in Meeting House Square (which I’m guessing will be covered on the day). Check out the map at www.streetfeast.ie/#gotoone to find one near you – just try not to turn up completely empty-handed!
And if you can’t make Sunday, Yestival Bike Fest is having a Street Feast in Fade Street at 1pm tomorrow (Saturday 16th), and Science Gallery’s Hack the City summer programme will finish later this summer with their very own Street Feast.
Street Feast, coming to a laneway, cul-de-sac or square near you
Then again, maybe the idea of eating outdoors on this rain-sodden weekend just doesn’t appeal at all at all. Maybe you’re more of an indoors sort, preferring to curl up with a good book or turn up in a good restaurant. As tomorrow is Bloomsday, you might like to head to The Westin for a little Joyce-inspired indulgence where The Exchange Restaurant is offering a six-course Bloomsday Tasting Menu (€35pp, 6pm–10pm), inspired by the kinds of foods enjoyed by Ulysses’s anti-hero, Leopold Bloom. These include thick giblet soup, potted crubbeens, grilled kidneys and livers on toast and Banbury cake with hot cocoa tea or coffee.
Or, if you’re feeling particularly anti-social or really want to do it on the cheap, you could just stay at home with a packet of Fig Rolls (the mystery of which Bloom himself puzzled over) and download one of the Arts Tonight podcasts from this week’s series, James Joyce: Words and Music. You might even pluck that famously infrequently read tome from your dusty shelves and give it a go. As one of the few Dubliners who has read the book, I’d happily recommend it. Bon appetit!
Leopold Bloom was a man who liked his food...
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