Kay Harte

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We were once part of a group which included several prominent French chefs who were invited to lunch at Kay Harte's Farmgate Café in the English Market, in Cork city. The chefs were the sort who liked to say of each other: “He's got two stars!’, and “He's got three stars!”. Kay Harte served this: potato, thyme and wild garlic soup; whiting with champ; tripe and drisheen; English Market corned beef; apple tart; Milleens cheese; bread and butter pudding. The chefs didn't get it. They wanted theatrics – two star theatrics; three-star theatrics – and what was served to them by this modest woman was nothing less than culture.

They got, in short, what everyone who comes to the Farmgate gets: simplicity; a narrative; a food culture of whispers and maternalism. They were fed, looked after, minded. Ms Harte opened the Farmgate in 1994, and today does what she started to do back then. That's what the Cork cooking women do: they do what they know, and it doesn't matter to them who is eating in their restaurant, for every customer gets their best. Ms Harte learned to cook from her mother, so she cooks just like her mother, a line unbroken and maintained, a lineage that transcends chefs with their stars, a homage to the foods of her county, her city, her market. Oh, and Kay had picked the wild garlic herself that morning, stopping her car at the side of the road to snip those tassellated, preening fronds.

 

The Farmgate Cafe, English Market, Princes Street, Cork, County Cork
021 427 8134
www.farmgate.ie