Bourbon Glazed Corned Beef: Recipe #14

Plus, my favorite restaurants in greater Ireland.

While your corned beef is glazing away (recipe below at bottom), I have some good reading for you. Yesterday we talked all things Dublin.

Today, how about Greater Ireland? Good, let’s do it.

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Greater Ireland: For the Food Geek on a Mission 

Breakfast at Ballymaloe House, East

Legendary Chef Myrtle Allen – the Alice Waters of Irish food – opened Ballymaloe House fifty years ago. Though Allen passed away in 2018, the world famous restaurant remains excellent, with cooking as local and seasonal as you can get. Enjoy their breakfasts featuring two butters – Jersey milk and West Cork farm – and porridge, made with Macroom Mill oats and served with jersey cream and brown sugar. It’s a lesson in how to make something simple into something sensational.

The English Market, Cork

Farmers’ markets have enjoyed spectacular success in Ireland during the last decade, but Cork’s English Market remains one of the great visitor experiences. Scores of food stalls are staffed by the most amusing vendors and mongers, and when you have shopped to your heart’s content, head upstairs to the Farmgate Café and eat the produce of the market, cooked to simple perfection.

Kai, Galway

No other city in Ireland has a character like Galway, and no Galway restaurant has a character like Jess and David Murphy’s Kai. All the best foods of Ireland’s West Coast are here – Connemara hill lamb; Brady’s dry-aged beef; Toonsbridge fresh buffalo milk mozzarella; Connemara fish and shellfish.

Brown’s Restaurant, Derry, Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland’s maiden city is the start and end point of the Wild Atlantic Way, a 2,500 kilometer coastal drive that winds from Donegal to Kinsale. The good news for anyone starting the drive is that chef Ian Orr, in Brown’s Restaurant in the city’s Waterside district, is cooking at the top of his game right now, showcasing the superb pastured meats and Atlantic fish of the region.

 Aimsir, Co Kildare

Chef Jordan Bailey captains the open kitchen, while his wife runs the dining room team. The former chef at the three-star Maaemo in Norway, Bailey has a profound understanding of Nordic flavors, lots of fermentation going on and a jewel of a tasting menu.

Aniar, Galway

The whole tone of this place is about the natural world. Wood and stone front the décor and the menu features ingredients from Ireland’s Atlantic Coast. Menus are determined once the day’s ingredients have arrived. Cooks often serve their dishes here and while, the food is serious, the mood is casual

Bastion, Co Cork

Paul McDonald is in the kitchen and his wife Helen runs the place. There is a bar bisecting the restaurant so nothing hushed about Bastion where all the local seafood is what you should focus on.

Campagne, Kilkenny

Garret Byre and partner Brid Hannon oversee this sleek modern luxurious restaurant highlighting the best of Irish ingredients, magically devoid of modernist plating. I love the proper old school plating style where the food is the focus and the only thing that matters are the perfect flavors.

Chestnut, Co Cork

Take a globe trotting chef and his partner, let them transform a beat up old pub into something warm and romantic and you have the 18 seat Chestnut. The menu champions all things County Cork from the turf-smoked butter right through to the final course. There is one menu, no subs, period. That’s confidence and I love it.

Eipic, Belfast

Eipic is chef Michael Deane’s most ambitious and accomplished restaurant and its FUN. you make your way there by walking through one of Deane’s other restaurants, Love Fish, into an intimate and casual setting where the focus is 100% on the tasting menus. Seasonal, local, foraged, modernist, creative and always very smart cookery dominates. Think mushroom tarts with truffles and brown butter or grilled mackerel with the soy/mirin treatment paired with apple and cucumber.

House, Co Waterford

Sure it’s a hotel restaurant. Who cares? The food is spectacular with an emphasis on seafood. The menu is a celebration of all things local, often foraged by the team. Very clean food, with minimal ingredients, the menu kicks off with some small snacks (crisp potatoes with smoked roe) including the famous Guinness and treacle bread, and then a banger of eight courses that change often. Hopefully you get the butter poached turbot with duck egg sauce. Oh, did I forget to tell you that the hotel is set into a cliff and the dining room overlooks the sea with floor-to-ceiling windows? Yup.

Ichigo Ichie, Cork

Chef-owner Takashi Miyazaki oversees a modern, almost post-steampunk dining room with an omakase menu that changes every 6 weeks blending Japanese techniques with Irish ingredients. As you would expect the fish and shellfish is superb and stunningly arranged on handmade pottery, brought to the table by the chef and his team, paired with sakes if you so desire. A wild and thrilling experience if you love Japanese food as much as I do.

Lady Helen, Co Kilkenny

The house sits on a 1,500 acre estate, a pillar of Georgian architecture with original stuccowork, hand-carved marble fireplaces, mind blowing bedrooms all tricked out in the period style. The restaurant defines luxury, with both rooms overlooking the River Nore. All that said, there is nothing stuffy about the place. Many ingredients come from the estate, the rest from the county and the tasting menu from Chef John Kelly is sublime. Scallops in a beurre blanc with seaweed, local lobster with carrots, artichokes, yuzu and miso, pigeon with cherries. Stunning.

Loam, Galway

The chef-owner Enda McEvoy was one of the first chefs in Ireland to go all-green and all-local, so every ingredient is sourced from nearby farmers and fishermen. The menus are all nose-to-tail and leaf-to-root in approach, and the food is simple and spectacular. The open kitchen provides plenty of energy to the almost industrial accented room. Local eel is smoked and served with tomatoes and cucumbers, cabbage is roasted with oysters and kelp, lamb is braised with turnips and beans, simple confident food.

The Muddlers Club, Belfast

Who wouldn’t love a hidden restaurant in the Cathedral Quarter named after a 200-year-old secret society? Chef Gareth McCaughey’s cooking is modern, and yet he loves playing with old-school classics. The roasted duck comes with ponzu, but the cod is adorned with sauce Américaine. Local Antrim beef arrives with carrot, short rib and bone marrow, nothing pretentious to see here. The staff is young, the place is fun and the food is tip top.

The Oak Room, Co Limerick

The restaurant sits in the 1830s Adare Manor with all the elegance you can imagine, and the insane Irish hospitality is heartfelt. In summer, there is a glass-enclosed terrace with views of the 850-acre grounds. Chef Michael Tweedie champions top ingredients from Ireland’s artisan producers, and he keeps it very simple, just 3 or 4 components. Wine geeks will rejoice here. The cellar is top notch.

OX, Belfast

Chef Stephen Toman runs a modern eatery with a casual atmosphere and simple dining room. There is a wine cave with snack boards, a dining room with menus changing at breakneck pace, with meal sets at lunch and tasting menus built from a list of seasonal ingredients in the evening. The menu shows a team passionately devoted to vegetables (onion galette with carrot and pine nuts), but don’t miss the salt cured halibut with buttermilk and almonds if it’s on the menu.

Not traveling to Ireland anytime soon? Bring the Emerald Isle home with this modern update on a traditional dish.

Corned Beef with Bourbon-Molasses Glaze

This recipe is one of my favorites, the sticky bourbon-molasses glaze gives the meat an irresistible touch of sweetness that balances out the brine. Brining your own corned beef at home is easy, all you need is the right equipment and time, about 7 to 10 days—therefore thinking ahead is imperative. Beyond the pink salt, which can be found at a butcher shop or on Amazon, you probably have the spices in your cabinets already. If you buy a pre-brined brisket from the grocery store, skip the first step.

For an easy side dish, simmer vegetables like cabbage, potatoes, potatoes and carrots in the poaching broth while you glaze the corned beef.

Ingredients