Caroline Byrne

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Now that she has been appointed Secretary-General of Eurotoques Ireland, it is worth repeating a story about the skill set possessed by Caroline Byrne.
Several years ago, we asked her if she could scoot down to Stradbally, on her own, and select the best food stalls at Electric Picnic.
Off she went, toured the entire, enormous campus of the festival, found the best guys in a single day, quickly arranged an award ceremony, wrote and delivered a speech announcing and congratulating the winners, handed out the prizes, and wrote the press release, before heading back home to Dublin. For a normal person, that would have been completely impossible – impossible even to imagine, never mind to execute in a single day. But Caroline Byrne takes that sort of mission impossible in her stride, and she can do it solo.
She is a critic, in the old-fashioned way: master the brief, analyse the quality, assess the implications, reward the effort, organise the show. No ego gets in the way of this process, whether she is judging a wine, or figuring out why a restaurant works, or doesn't work. By her mid-twenties, she was already a player, part of The Taste Council; formerly editor of Shelflife magazine (she knows how the business works); a contributor to Food & Wine magazine even when she was fresh out of Trinity College. The broad and challenging brief of Eurotoques is just the right terrain for her skills.