Forget Meat and Potatoes, Ireland’s Seafood Era Is Upon Us and It’s Delicious

If you love seafood, Ireland is one of the best places in the world to enjoy the fishy side of the menu. Astonishingly, this has not always been the case. You’d figure that, with its thousands of miles of coastline and its prime position as one of the North Atlantic’s richest fishing grounds, this island nation would be a venerable bastion of seafood cookery. Instead, the Irish have traditionally looked landward for their ingredients: beef and butter from Kerry cattle and heaping plates of bacon and cabbage.

My own ancestors, the Pattersons of County Down, were forced to emigrate during the potato famine, when the lumpers they’d come to rely on turned to mush in the fields. Surrounded by the cold, clean waters of a bounteous sea, the Irish, bless them, had chosen to muddle through on a diet of coddle (a pork sausage stew), soda bread, and Guinness.

In the past decade, though, a new cohort of chefs has turned to the rivers, oceans, and shorelines for inspiration, blending Irish traditions with influences from western Europe and Asia, while charting their own course at a time of well-founded concerns about overfishing. Eager to experience this sea change firsthand, I charted a cross-country adventure that would take me from the center of Dublin to winding country roads, with plenty of time built in to explore Ireland’s stunning coastline.

I begin the journey with a visit to The Seafood Cafe, in the boisterous Temple Bar neighborhood, to sample chef Niall Sabongi’s impressive raw bar and savor a bowl of chowder with surf clams and haddock, and a whole brown crab whose shell had been filled with a sherry-rich sauce.

All grand stuff, as the Irish say. But to really taste the best, I know I have to take a proper road trip along the intricately carved shorelines of the south and west of Ireland. I start by riding a DART commuter train to Howth, a harbor town that fills with crowds of day-trippers on weekends. At the outdoor terrace of King Sitric Seafood Bar & Accommodation, I have a view over the breakers toward Ireland’s Eye, an island uninhabited save for thousands of cormorants, gulls, and peregrine falcons.

Owner Declan MacManus, whose parents opened the restaurant-guesthouse in 1971, lays out a lunch that sets the tone for meals to come. It starts with freshly shucked oysters, their briny sweetness complemented by splashes of mignonette. Next, a bowl of meaty mussels swimming in a creamy, garlicky broth of white wine and leeks. To finish, I polish off an order of Dublin Bay prawns, snowy white and tender under the tooth and dripping with butter.

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“We’ve designed our whole menu around not serving cod,” MacManus tells me. It’s a sore point for the nation: Irish fishermen are allocated just a fraction of the quotas in their coastal waters, giving industrial-size trawlers from other countries the lion’s share of the access to many overfished species. The good news for visitors is that most fresh-caught seafood in Ireland is sure to come from small-scale, low-impact fisheries. MacManus points to a pier across the road, where the captains of day boats and wooden-framed curraghs supply him with spiny lobster, mackerel, brown crab, and wreck-caught pollock.

In Galway, a two-and-a-half-hour drive due west of Dublin, I meet JP McMahon, the rogue scholar of Irish cuisine, in the kitchen of his Michelin-starred restaurant Aniar. Author of The Irish Cookbook, an encyclopedic look at Irish cuisine, McMahon has his own theories about the long-standing Irish aversion to seafood. In more churchgoing days, he explains, meat was forbidden during Lent and on Fridays, making the eating of fish a penance rather than a pleasure. Those who had the good sense to gather nutritious kelp, mussels, and whelks were scorned by city dwellers for eating bia bocht, Irish for “the food of the poor.”

“My grandparents lived in Dublin,” he recalls. “I don’t think I ever saw fish in their house. When we did get fish at home, we were always told to be careful of the bones, or we might choke and die. I remember thinking, ‘Why am I going to eat this thing? I’ll just have a fish finger or a piece of chicken because it’s safer.’”

Aniar’s 24-course tasting menu takes diners back to a time before Captain Birds Eye frozen fillets — and even before the arrival of the potato — to ancient traditions of coastal foraging, river angling, and sea fishing. McMahon advocates for freshwater species, like pollan, a clean-tasting lake fish similar to herring and unique to Ireland, and eels from Lough Neagh, the nation’s largest lake.

McMahon has called for seaweed to become the “national vegetable of Ireland,” and on a kitchen counter, he gives me an impromptu tasting of pickled dillisk, chewy and umami-rich, and rock samphire, a vivid green succulent that snaps wetly when you bite it. Using a bulbous tea infuser, he sprinkles powdered sea truffle, an algae just as fragrant as its terrestrial namesake, over razor clams that have been diced, boiled in hard cider, and returned to the shell.

For McMahon and many other chefs, a great modern tragedy is the near disappearance of wild salmon from Irish rivers. However, Ireland is one place where it’s worth seeking out aquaculture-raised salmon. The farms on the western coast tend to be mom-and-pop operations that follow guidelines that strictly limit the use of hormones and antibiotics. And the smokehouse tradition, maintained by Hederman in County Cork, Duncannon Smokehouse in County Wexford, and Burren Smokehouse in County Clare, which calls for salted fillets to be slow-cooked over oak shavings or beechwood for half a day, makes for fish worth the long detour.

At Moran’s Oyster Cottage, a half-hour drive south of Galway, young William Moran hand-cuts a fillet of smoked salmon for me at the bar, arranging the translucent slices on a plate, alongside a half dozen oysters gathered from the nearby 700-acre Clarenbridge oyster bed, and sets me up with a glass of Guinness. Moran tells me he’s part of the seventh generation of his family to occupy this thatched-roof cottage, which has stood on the northern shore of the Kilcolgan River for 300 years.

It was his grandfather who turned the pub into a restaurant, and over the years, the Morans have baked brown bread and shucked oysters for the likes of Paul Newman and poet Seamus Heaney, a frequent customer, whose handwritten tribute to oysters hangs framed on a wall. The smoke-infused salmon melts on my tongue, but it is the gigas oysters, firm-fleshed and round-shelled, that leave my palate, in the words of Heaney, “hung with starlight.”

If Moran’s is proof that, even in its meat-and-potato days, Ireland retained what chef McMahon calls “secret pockets of seafood love,” then Solas Tapas Dingle on the Dingle Peninsula shows that today’s chefs have found a way to inflect high-quality Irish ingredients with subtle European accents. Some of chef Nicky Foley’s first cooking experiences were on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, and his 32-seat restaurant feels like a Costa Brava beach cabana, magically set down amid the brightly painted façades of a tiny North Atlantic fishing town.

Somehow, as I eat a breaded croquette the size of a duck egg that yields a squirt of molten chowder, it all makes sense. Spain and Ireland, both Catholic, seafaring nations, have a shared history that predates English colonization in Ireland. The dock where we can see the day boat that brought in the spiny lobster on today’s menu, Foley points out, is where Spanish wine was imported into Ireland in the 16th century.

My next stop isn’t where I expected to find Ireland’s most innovative seafood cooking. Cork is a handsome but slow-paced city, home to English Market, full of stalls retailing black pudding, corned crubeens (boiled pig’s trotters), and buttered eggs. In the center of Cork, which is formed by an island in the River Lee, chef Aishling Moore has turned the kitchen of her restaurant, Goldie, into a hub for fin-to-gill eating. Taking a page from Australia’s fish butcher Josh Niland, Moore buys whole fish and sets her large kitchen staff to work curing the roe and slicing, pin-boning, and aging the meat.

“What we’re trying to do is coax people into eating more species and more parts of the fish,” says Moore. Ireland’s appetite for cod, and lately ling (cod’s skinnier cousin), has decimated stocks, but Moore seeks out flavorful species once called “trash fish”: megrim, gurnard, and forkbeard, as well as shellfish like whelks, limpets, and cockles. “We’re using livers. We’re using throats, cheeks, and roe. The one prerequisite is that it’s delicious.” The goal is sustainability: both in the species she selects and by using all parts of the fish to avoid waste, a philosophy Moore outlines in her recent cookbook, Whole Catch.

That night, I sit at Goldie’s bar and enjoy a quartet of fried nuggets, made from offcuts of fish and seasoned with Taiwanese spices, followed by a small plate of brill, cured in salt and sugar and served like pastrami, with a Reuben dressing. The main course is pan-fried plaice, dressed with Moore’s take on Café de Paris butter. She brainstorms with her staff for ideas from their travels and her own globe-trotting in Europe and Southeast Asia, drawing from a pantry that includes Shaoxing wine, crème fraîche, and togarashi. In such standout dishes as crab madame and mussels with creamed watercress and cider, you taste a cosmopolitan Irish cuisine, happily rooted in its island fastness but open to the wider world.

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My road trip ends in County Waterford, at Beach House. A sinuous road along the plunging cliffsides of the Copper Coast brings me to Tramore, an old-fashioned seaside resort town that has lately become a food lover’s destination. (Don’t miss the fresh-baked seaweed sourdough and ancient-grain scones at Seagull Bakery.) On the lower floor of a cream-colored Victorian home, a handwritten menu lays out the catch of the day, accompanied by brown butter, salsa verde, or aioli.

Chef Peter Hogan and his wife, Jumoke Akintola, decided to make a go of it in Hogan’s hometown of Tramore after launching Fish Shop in Dublin, a cult destination for its wine list and unique take on fish-and-chips. Says Hogan: “We use a little potato flour, some beer, and baking powder and cook it very fast.” The resulting fillet has a tempuralike crunch that shines in their playfully named Fillet o’ Fish Shop Sandwich.

Hogan is on a first-name basis with the day-boat skippers at nearby Kilmore Quay. Today, they’ve brought in brill, plaice, red mullet, and John Dory, as well as a barnacle-encrusted brown crab, which Hogan hoists from a bucket for me to admire. Taking a long look, he says, in thoughtful wonderment: “We do genuinely have stunning seafood here in Ireland.”

Where to stay in Ireland

The Tannery Restaurant, Townhouse, and Cookery School (Dungarvan)

Chef Paul Flynn, author of the cookbook-memoir Butter Boy, has made the historic waterfront heart of Dungarvan into a culinary destination. The Tannery guests can stay in one of 14 cozy rooms in a renovated town house next to Flynn’s cooking school, then walk around the corner to the former leatherworks to dine on one of Ireland’s outstanding seafood mixed grills. Rooms from $215

The Fitzwilliam Hotel (Dublin)

A former city-center movie theater completely transformed by the late design icon Terence Conran, The Fitzwilliam is quirky and elegant, with an impossible-to-beat location overlooking St. Stephen’s Green and a short block from Grafton Street, one of Dublin’s main shopping drags. Some guest rooms overlook the park and have features like four-poster beds and stand-alone bathtubs. Rooms from $249

The Montenotte (Cork)

A sprawling, modern resort hotel, The Montenotte’s hillside perch offers panoramic views over the River Lee, which cradles the historic heart of Cork. The rooms are large, plus there’s a spa, a full fitness center, and even a luxuriously appointed Art Deco cinema that screens movies every night. Rooms from $220

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