We haven't done our Greedy Awards in a few years. Well, not since our little girl was born in 2016 and our opportunities to eat out were markedly reduced. But we have managed to escape the domestic shackles a lot more over the past 12 months to eat out in Dublin, so we have decided to bring back our Greedy Awards for Dublin. All of these restaurants are listed on Our Dublin Restaurant Guide.
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Best Value : Heron & Grey
Etto and it's new sister restaurant Uno Mas are great value. However, the best value in Dublin may be Heron & Grey with a tasting menu coming in less than similar high end restaurants in Dublin. Their wine pairings are excellent value too.

Best Casual Dining : Uno Mas
Etto, The Old Spot, Michael's and Clanbrassil House are all great casual dining spots, but this year the award goes to the newly opened Uno Mas, which has hit the ground running with top notch Spanish inspired food and wine.

Best Family Dining : Michael's
There is an award for a restaurant where we can bring our 2 year old, Emma, and she can also have a great meal too. She loved the chips and risotto in Pichet and the roast chicken in The Old Spot, but the award goes to Michael's, which has a high-chair, a great children's menu and excellent food for us parents.

Best Service : Heron & Grey
A few places come to mind for this award. In Etto they manage to always look in control in a small space, whilst Mulberry Garden continues to be hospitable and welcoming. This year, though, we think Heron & Grey, which manages to be professional, yet personal and intimate, has the best service,

Best Dish : Veal Sweetbreads @ The Greenhouse
There are 3 dishes that come to mind. Duck with Lavender in Heron & Grey, flan de queso in Uno Mas, but the one that lives strongest in the memory is Veal sweetbreads with sprouts and gnocchetti and the most amazing rich jus in The Greenhouse.

Best Meal : Heron & Grey
There are 3 stand out meals of the year. Glover's Alley offered some delightful dishes. The Greenhouse gave us our dish of the year, but the standout meal was in Heron & Grey, which has continued to meet the high standards that it has set themselves over the last few years.

Best Wine : Uno Mas
Piglet has a very impressive wine list and the wine on offer in Heron & Grey is well selected and sourced. However, it is newcomer Uno Mas that has the wine list which excites us the most. There are a large selection of greats wines for under €40 and a lot of interesting wines made with indigenous grapes.

Best Chef : Damien Grey (Heron & Grey)
We were lucky enough to eat in Heron & Grey twice this year and both meals were excellent, so Damien Grey is an obvious choice for best chef. Damien has developed his own style, cooks with passion and didn't serve us a bad dish across the two meals.

Best Restaurant : Heron & Grey
Heron & Grey, which will soon be relaunched as Liath without Andrew Heron, delighted us on two occasions in 2018. This tiny little space in Blackrock Market, is serving exciting and delicious food. It is difficult to get a reservation, but it is definitely worth the effort.

San Sebastian is somewhat of an annual pilgrimage for us. A place we have got to know pretty well over the last few years, it has become a home away from home. There are some wallet-busting restaurants, such as Arzak, Akalere, Mugaritz and Lasarte. Arzak is a restaurant dear to our hearts and we go here on each of our jaunts to San Sebastian. But you can have a holiday of the most lofty gastronomic heights by just eating in pintxos bars. Below are our recommendations of the best pintxos to be had, roughly ordered with our favourites near the top.

Ganbara
One of the best pintxos bars. Try the omelette and the prawns on a plancha. It is quite small so best to get there early.

Txepetxa
It is all about the anchovies. Just ask for a selection of their best anchovy dishes and savour them. 

​Hidalgo 56
This is worth the short walk away from the old quarter and into Gros. The morcilla volcano is excellent, as is the tomato and anchovy tartare.

Borda Berri
Most of the food on offer is top notch, but the risotto is particularly good.

La vina
Famous for their cheesecakes, which is a must-try, this place is fundamental to any trip to San Sebastian.

Gandarias
High quality pintxos; the txangurro (spider crab) is one of the best around.

Cuchara de San Telmo
This place is always as busy as it is small, so it is important to get there early. The suckling pig is excellent.

​La Cepa
A really good all-rounder with excellent service (they even had a highchair for our little girl). The lamb meatballs are particularity good.

El Tamboril
Right in the middle of the old town, go here to try the deep fried langoustines. 

Goiz Argi
A tiny place, but if you can get in try the prawn bruschetta; they are excellent.

A Fuego Negro
The quality had dropped a bit here on our last visit, but the sweetbreads are good enough to make the visit worthwhile.
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A stroll around the food and drink section of the bookstore used to be pleasurable. Perusing books by skilled chefs, leading cookery writers and food travelogers a delightful way to kill time after lunch on a Saturday afternoon. But no longer, ladies and gentleman. Now the shelves are a veritable stockpile of anger inducing hogwash.

Every second book seems to have some bobblehead on the cover, maybe a model, some sculpted fitness instructor, or just an idiot in yoga pants beaming into the camera. A self-proclaimed guru on nutrition, but in reality just a vainglorious narcissist obsessed with image. The bullshit titles like Eat Yourself Fit or Eat Yourself Beautiful, claim that with the help of their recipes, to use the term generously, you too can be thin, toned, beautiful or fit just like the boastful fool grinning vacuously on the front cover. The soul-sucking, depression-inducing recipes will commonly contain superfoods, which don’t bloody exist, acai berries, wheatgrass, linseeds and other such ingredients that make you want to reach for the nearest shotgun and end the misery. The authors of these cookbooks have no interest in food above perpetuating their own image and these waste-of-paper books are nothing more than publishers using a pretty face to appeal to the vain and the image-obsessed.

If you want to partake in some ephemeral diet fad, then now is a great time to start. A dispiriting profusion of diet books grace the shelves of every bookstore. Some will give you the advice needed to stuff yourself for five days and starve yourself for two. Others may suggest juices that will have you whittling your life away sitting on the porcelain throne for five hours every day. There are hundreds of these books to help people lose weight and squeeze into their bikini for their annual fortnight in the sun. Here is a revolutionary idea: eat what you like in moderation, demonstrating some common feckin’ sense and get off your arse and do some exercise.

If you don’t want to get your culinary inspiration from a professional, or someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the subject, then you can always get it from some arbitrary celebrity. Maybe some out of work z-lister that most people have never heard of, possible one who went on Celebrity Masterchef, or the sportsperson who thinks because they are on a controlled diet it gives them to right to share their meals with the world. Worse yet, get a cookbook from the nauseatingly moronic Gwyneth Paltrow – the actress who believes that water has feelings, had a ‘macrobiotic chapter’ in her life and would ‘rather die’ than let your kids have a cup-a-soup.

Worse than the yoga pant aficionados and the celebrity cookbooks, are those that claim that food, and in some cases their recipes, have medicinal properties. Going beyond the benefits of eating a balanced and healthy diet rich in nutrients, these frauds claim that food can be medicinal, with some even suggesting that they can be used in the place of drugs. This is harmless for most ailments, like trying to relief a cold or a chronic bout of room-clearing flatulence, but one would hope that people don’t believe this homeopathic, pseudoscientific baloney to the point of not seeking professional and competent medical attention for a serious issue, but supposedly natural selection will sooner or later take care of those who do.

This abundance of shit falling off the shelves in your local bookstore is a symptom of a greater problem of the image obsessed, phony foodie brigade and the restaurateurs creating restaurants that are more concerned with impressing on Instagram than on the plate.

Look at some of the most popular, and, laughably in some cases, award winning restaurants in Dublin. Restaurants with a theme that are all style and little substance. A meal last year in a place that feels the need to tell you the source of the waiter’s suits (this set off alarm bells straight away) showcased a restaurant where the food is not nearly as important as the aesthetics of the themed room. It was abundantly clear that the badly prepared, ill conceived food takes a backseat to the décor, lighting and ridiculous pretense.

Being ‘into’ food, or a ‘foodie’, as people like to call themselves, is a fashion statement, it is trendy, it is a status-symbol that tells people you are sophisticated, that you are discerning about your calorie intake. Oh yes people, being a foodie tells anyone who will listen that you are a person of class and worth in society, a person that knows where the best food can be found, and if they are lucky, the chef who creates it.

Except, some of them, it would appear on even a fleeting inspection, are not discerning about their gastronomy at all or not in the least bit sagacious in the matter of dining or restaurant quality either. You only have to look at some of the terrible restaurants that they frequent and the gleefully accepted invitation to the opening of every here-today-gone-tomorrow generic hole. No, there seems to be two concerns for many of the self-declared foodies; image and attention. A depressing photo appeared on our twitter timeline a few months back. It was one of those marketing dining events where all these foodie bloggers met up. But these foodies weren’t sampling some culinary delights, instead the photograph was of a group of people sitting around a table all staring gleefully at their phones. All, most probably, tweeting every thought that came into to their head, trying to snap the best, and first, photo of each morsel of food that passes before them. These are most likely the same people who will tweet a restaurant before going to announce their impending arrival, as if it is in some way an honour, but really in the hope of getting a bit extra attention.

But maybe the biggest absurdity of all effecting the food industry currently is the diner with the coveted food intolerance – a rapidly growing first world problem it would seem. Is there any other industry in which it is fashionable to have something wrong with you? A food allergy is indeed a serious ailment, in many cases it is life threatening. A food intolerance, while not as serious, can still be quite debilitating – painful cramps, vomiting etc. A vague sense of bloating or being tired is not symptomatic of either of these conditions. Yet, now there are thousands of dimwits boasting about the foods they cannot eat. Some even send away kits with a bit of their blood to charlatanic companies who will send them back a list of foods to avoid. What must be missing from their lives that they feel the need to seek attention by claiming to have an ailment. Or maybe, they just like the sense of importance that going into a restaurant and forcing the chef to tailor dishes specially to suit their whim gives them. You can ask any chef and they will tell you some of the more ridiculous claims from diners about food's that they must not eat. Although these hypochondriacs have created a larger market for people with serious allergies; thanks to them coeliac sufferers, people who have a genuine and serious gluten intolerance, have far much choice on their supermarket shelves and are finding restaurants increasingly accommodating to their needs.

Of course, a few silly books, over enthusiastic foodies and themed restaurants are pretty harmless, but when did food stop being about pleasure and start becoming a societal status symbol? Why is what you can’t eat more important than what you enjoy? We would consider our lives to be very much food-centric, but only because great produce and food gives us tremendous joy and makes us happy – this surely is the point.

A couple of years ago we enjoyed an excellent meal in Matthew Orlando's restaurant Amass in Copenhagen. Our lunch was superior than most meals we have enjoyed in the last few years. The seasonal food was prepared with skill, the flavours clear and coherent, the combinations clever, and most impressively of all; the memories lasting. The food was so marvellous that during the meal we asked our server could we upgrade our tasting menu in order to increase the number of courses, even though, after a few days in Copenhagen, our bank balance was rapidly approaching the red. Amass didn't and still doesn't hold a Michelin star.

Last year we had lunch in Alain Ducasse at the beautiful Dorchester Hotel in London. The food was uninspiring; three dull, badly prepared dishes in a meal that was only saved by good wines and splendid cheese. A disappointment then, especially since we enjoyed a superb lunch there a couple of years previous. Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester has 3 Michelin stars.

When we review meals we never mention Michelin. The reason for this is simple; our reviews are of our experiences; Michelin's are of theirs. When we reviewed Amass we didn't complain that it hadn't been awarded a star yet, nor did we suggest it should have one and we certainly didn't predict it would be awarded one in the next publication of the guide. Similarly, anytime we reviewed a meal of a starred restaurant that we were less than enamoured with, we wouldn't complain that it had a star or rant about how Michelin got it wrong. We have given glowing reviews to non-starred restaurants and terrible verdicts on the starred.

Next month the 2017 red guide will be published – this year, for the first time, released with a ceremony in London; maybe an attempt by Michelin to keep up with the marketing hype of the Worlds’ Best Restaurant unveiling held every spring. The announcement of the Michelin guide will almost certainly be met with the same sour grapes, tantrums, conspiracy theories and irrational, pedantic claptrap from some food critics. These pundits seem to deem it just downright unthinkable that there aren't more starred restaurants gracing our small island. It is unfathomable to them that the restaurants they have given glowing reviews to haven't been awarded their supposedly deserved and, often, predicted star.

But is there anything behind these criticisms or is it just hogwash and conjecture? Maybe it is right to add a little bit of perspective and balance to these inevitable criticisms. This is not done to either praise or defend Michelin, but more to just highlight why some of these criticisms might not ring true with logic and evidence.

When the Scandinavian guide was released earlier this year and Amass was still not awarded a star, we might have been the tiniest bit surprised, but we didn’t complain that Michelin had dropped the ball, nor did we think we were wrong for praising the restaurant so highly. We can speak only for the meal that was served to us on that one Saturday afternoon the November before last. How on earth could we know what experience the Michelin inspector had when they visited? Well, obviously we can’t, no one can. For all we know the inspector was served an over-seasoned steaming turd in a urine consommé. Similarly, it is also not inconceivable that a restaurant that was a disappointment for us, like Ducasse in London was last year, might have served up a much more pleasing experience to others.

In the last few years in Dublin there was one decision that Michelin made that really vexed the some of the Irish food critics: not awarding a star to The GreenHouse until last year. To many of our esteemed professional gourmands The GreenHouse has been, since the day it opened, the pinnacle of the Dublin restaurant scene and it was just downright “breath-taking” that Michelin didn’t agree with them. Apparently, Michelin was slow to pick up on this great restaurant and when realising their mistake, they didn’t want to lose face by awarding the star the following year and so waited for a few more guides before finally making amends for the error of their ways.

Ignoring the fact that The GreenHouse did seem to change their culinary style in the year preceding the award of their star, the obviously foolish complaint here is that “I think the restaurant is great and gave it a glowing review, so I am outraged that Michelin doesn’t agree”. Unless you were at the table with the Michelin Inspector, on each occasion that he or she visited, which probably wasn’t on opening night, and personally sampled all of their dishes then you really have no right to comment on whether Michelin came to the right or wrong decision. If a friend ate out at a restaurant you loved and was to tell you, for example, that the beef was overcooked and the cod under-seasoned, would you tell them they were wrong? Would you say, “no it wasn’t because I ate there and everything was perfect”? You probably wouldn’t, and certainly shouldn’t.

One of the reasons spouted for the oversight of Michelin not to award more stars in Ireland is that their inspectors don’t spend enough time here and when they bother make the trip over they only concentrate on certain areas. Hasn't it even been claimed, without any supporting evidence, that Chapter One would have earned their star earlier if it had been on the south side of the Liffey. Is the charge here that the inspectors couldn't be bothered traipsing the one mile across our expansive city or that they didn't like the image of the north-side. Imagine the meeting at Michelin HQ where it was decided “The food in Chapter One deserves a star, but we can’t have our readers suffering the indignity of Dublin’s north-side”. But, joking aside, is there any indication that Michelin doesn’t pay enough attention to Ireland? Probably not. There are more Michelin stars outside Dublin than in, and bib gourmands have been awarded to places in the most obscure parts of the country over the last few years. Michelin’s Twitter followers will see that they have shown up all over the place in Ireland this year. So as feckin’ hilarious as the jokes about Michelin not putting their tyres to good use in Ireland are, there doesn’t seem to be a reason to think this holds water.

Taking Thornton’s star away last year was met with incredulity from many in the press – as if it was bloody audacious of Michelin to take a star off a chef who has held one for so long, suggesting they have some sort of sinister motive for taking this action. Maybe it would be wise to stop and think for a minute that maybe, just maybe, the food just wasn’t up to scratch when the Michelin inspector visited and that is the only reason that Michelin took this decision. Many people complaining about this probably haven’t eaten in Thornton’s, a restaurant that managed to delight and disappoint us in the last couple of years, since 2005.

Michelin prefers a very high server-to-diner ratio, white tablecloths, formal attire, stiff sommeliers and other classical French formalities. That is the opinion of many at least, but again it is worth looking for the evidence. There are a very many 3-star restaurants around the world that don’t have stiff white tablecloths. Some prominent 3-star restaurants come to mind instantly; Troisgrois in Roanne, Saison in San Francisco, Chef’s table at Brooklyn Fare in New York has counter service. Tom Kerridge’s 2-star pub The Hand & Flowers might have quite superb food, but the service and dining room are far removed from the old-fashioned image of fine dining that many think Michelin still prefer. The same would be said for April Bloomfield’s The Spotted Pig in Manhattan – another pub-style joint where the most popular dish is a burger.

Michelin is a French guide, with their roots in formal French fine dining and all the bells and whistles that come with it, but good food comes in many packages these days, from the classical to the contemporary, from the formal to the easy-going and there has been an obvious effort to stay current in recent years. Barafina, a reservation-free, counter service, tapas bar in London was awarded a star in 2014. For just a few euro, and after ticking boxes on a form-based menu, you can enjoy dumplings in the 1-star Tim Ho Wan, a rudimentary dim sum joint in Hong Kong.

Two years back we jumped into a cab outside our hotel in Singapore and asked the driver to take us to a hawker centre in Chinatown. He took us to the Chinatown Complex on Smith Street. We went inside, upstairs to the food court and joined the longest queue. The very, very long line of people was for a stall called Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice & Noodle. For hardly any money at all we enjoyed three delicious dishes; a dumpling soup, char siew noodle and chicken rice. This tiny stall was awarded a Michelin star in the first Singapore publication of the guide this year.

Dress codes are thankfully a thing of the past for many restaurants now. We have even been sat in 2 and 3-star restaurants, great places such as Arzak, Noma, Cellar de Can Roca, and seen fellow diners in runners, and even the odd tracksuit. Even in Paris, places like the tremendous 1-star Le Chateaubriand is as informal a dining room as you can get.

So maybe there isn’t much truth to this common perception of Michelin being an antiquated guide. Or maybe there is, but it is something that Michelin are making strides to address.

If some of the Irish restaurants that have been overlooked by Michelin were in France they would have been awarded the star they so richly deserved. This is an accusation that has been bandied around by our friends in the media many times. What they are saying is that Michelin gives preferential treatment to French restaurants. That it is somehow easier to get a Michelin star if your restaurant was in Paris, or Lyon, or Marseille, than it would be Dublin. Whilst it is a fact that there are currently only 4 Michelin starred establishments in Dublin, compared to 100 in Paris, that has to be taken in the context of the two cities. There are approximately 2000 restaurants in Dublin, compared to around 14000 in Paris but pertinently, and let’s be fair here, Paris has a much richer and deeper food heritage and culture than our fair city. Marseille a city with around the same number of restaurants as Dublin has only 7 restaurants with a Michelin star. Lyon, the gastronomy obsessed belly of France, has only 18 eateries with coveted stars out of nearly 3000 restaurants, whereas Galway, with less than 400 restaurants, has a higher percentage with 2 Michelin starred restaurants. There are twice as many starred restaurants in Tokyo than in Paris, so the Japanese probably don’t feel too hard done by.

You may hear people say that a meal in a shunned Irish restaurant was better than a meal in a Michelin star restaurant in France. That might well be the case, but are they really saying that there aren’t restaurants in France who they would deem to be overlooked by Michelin too? Are they saying they have never had a bad meal in a Michelin starred restaurant in Ireland? We have certainly had some great meals in starless establishments in France.

Maybe Michelin does have a soft-spot for the old world classical French chefs. Some, like Paul Bocuse, have had 3 Michelin stars for half a century without changing the menu for twenty years. When Alan Ducasse at the Dorchester was awarded 3-stars, just two years after opening, it was met with scepticism by many chefs in London, who didn’t feel it was deserved. However, in last year’s guide, they did take the third star off Le Relais Bernard Loiseau, Alan Ducaisse’s Le Meurice in Paris and L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon went from 2 to 1-star. So who really knows if they are kinder to the French culinary establishment?

There are a couple of the more vocal critics of the Michelin Guide in Ireland who, before complaining that their favourite restaurants haven’t been awarded a star, might do well to ask themselves if it is plausible that the Michelin inspectors might possess more knowledge or expertise than themselves. If you find yourself disagreeing with Michelin’s decision on many restaurants they include or omit, then maybe, as crazy as it might sound, they actually might be the ones who are more informed. After all the inspectors are, apparently, well trained, experienced and are required to eat out around the world regularly.

If Michelin inspectors aren’t a better judge of a meal, then maybe they have a better process of judging a restaurant than the average tabloid critic. It is possible there is something in the anonymous inspector, who isn’t known to everyone in the restaurant, who goes back to check for consistency, maybe they might just have a better angle on the restaurant’s true performance? This method is certainly at odds with the critic writing in your Sunday supplement who will review a restaurant once, usual very soon after it opens, but will never issue a reassessment, even though the restaurant may have changed head chef or their style. These reviews become irrelevant very quickly.

Some of the criticism Michelin attracts is brought on by their, seemingly deliberate, lack of transparency of their methods. How often they actually visit a restaurant? Apparently before the awarding or a new or additional star they will do several visits, but after that they might visit less often, but this is just rumour. Are there certain criteria for the awarding of a star or a bib gourmand? Maybe if they were a bit more open about their processes and the reason for awarding or taking away a star, they might not open themselves up for so much ridicule. 

So, in the era of social media, real-time reviewing, critics, bloggers and blaggers why is a guide by a French tyre company still so relevant? Some chefs certainly pay it far too much respect. It can be cringeworthily frustrating when a talented chef is cooking with the sole aim of winning a Michelin star, usually resulting in food that is an over-engineered, derivative collection of soulless dishes. Michelin claims that they don’t like to see this and prefer a chef cooking with their own identity. It is paid too much attention to by some diners who diligently follow the guide for all their meals and don’t look beyond it or develop their own opinions, analogous to the wine enthusiasts who will only drink wines with 90+ Parker points.

One obvious reason it is taken so seriously by restaurateurs is that a Michelin star puts bums on seats and money in the tills, but maybe the guide is still relevant, flawed as it might be, because of the absence of a worthy competitor? Imagine you are a traveller going to a new city. You probably won’t know which local critics are credible, if they even exist. You could use Tripadvisor, which many do, but you would probably have more luck going to a psychic. The AA guide is just daft really. The World’s Best 50 is a just a short list of the very top places.  There are some major cities where the Michelin guide isn’t the only show in town, The New York Times, for example, is revered more than the famous French book.

We do reference the Michelin guide whilst travelling, not so much for our blow out, budget busting, meals, as these are places we are already aware of and have booked well in advance, but more often for the bib gourmand restaurants. When we travel we tend to go to a whole range of restaurants on all ends of the spectrum. Along with the knockout meals, we will look for the best market stalls, street food and occasionally cook for ourselves if renting our accommodation. But for the every-day lunch or dinner we will, quite often, look up the local Bib Gourmands. ETTO, in Dublin, a restaurant we eat in regularly, is the perfect example of a bib gourmand. Excellent produce, cooked well, resulting in tasty, flavoursome, no-fuss and affordable food. 

If a restaurant we frequent were to be awarded a star we would be happy for them, but it wouldn’t increase our enjoyment of a meal there. If our favourite starred restaurant was to suffer a loss, we would be disappointed for the whole team, but it wouldn’t stop us going back. A restaurant having or not having Michelin stars has no effect on our enjoyment of the meal. So, who cares if you don’t agree with Michelin? Why does it matter? Michelin’s guide is their view and they are entitled to it. If you don’t like it, or you think they are outdated, or irrelevant, then just ignore it!

As people are voting for the Irish Times Best Shop, we thought we would write up a small piece on our favourite shops. Below are some of the places we do our food and drink shopping... 

It is hard to find a decent butcher in Dublin. Most are going the way of pre-packed, pre-marinated generic offerings, sourcing their meat from the same couple of factories. Very few are building relationships with farmers to source the best, free-range, organic when possible, antibiotic free meat – an animal who has a nice life before meeting its demise for our gastronomic pleasure. When we moved to South Dublin we tried a couple of local butchers and were left dejected. In Stillorgan a butcher told us that it wasn’t possible and would be ‘too expensive’ to get us in some beef cheeks. In Stepaside a butcher confidently informed us that he could not get us venison because it wasn’t in season – this was mid-November! Thankfully there are a couple of butchers we know of that are bucking the trend of mediocrity and preserving this declining craft.

Dunnes of Donnybrook is one we used to visit very frequently when we lived in the area, but still try to drop in when possible. Any request we have made has been met with enthusiasm – even getting us in pig’s cheeks (with head attached) without hesitation. They also stock a great selection of game when in season – something that very few butchers are doing. We have family in North Country Dublin so sometimes when we are out that way we will drop into Higgins in Sutton. Used by many restaurants Higgins sources great meat, some even from their own farm – their beef is particularly prized. Again they are willing to source you whatever you want – veal sweetbreads were ordered in for us quickly and cheaply.

Our Saturday morning ritual usually starts with a trip to Glasthule for some breakfast and this is where we also start our shopping. Cavistons is typically our first stop for, among other things, fish. The lack of good fishmongers in Ireland is both disheartening and perplexing. It would be easy to forget we are small island surrounded by fertile waters and the sight of the plethora of frozen fish in the supermarket is despairing. We are forced to limit our fresh fish meals to the weekend, because there is just nowhere for us to buy fresh fish midweek near our home or work. We should have fishmongers all over the city. Cavistons have a vast selection and it’s very reasonably priced. They also stock a good selection of organic fruit and vegetables and their cheeses aren’t bad either.

The Quay Fish Shop in Dun Laoghaire is worth a stop for your aquatic needs too. A tiny shack-like shop right down the end of the peer stocking a small selection of fresh-from-the-sea fare.

For our wine needs we stay in this area and head to 64 Wine. It is possible to get decent wine in a lot of shops these days, even in supermarkets, but you have to know what you are looking for. If you are not careful you could be bringing home mass produced, heavily marketed plonk and it is rare that you will find an interesting selection. The wine in 64 is refreshingly different. Stocking a compelling collection, including many smaller and up-and-coming winemakers, the wines here have been sourced based on their quality by knowledgeable proprietor Gerard Maguire, who is always happy to make a recommendation.  The coffee is good in 64 Wine too.

Roy Fox in Donnybrook is a nice little shop for fruit and vegetables. Split between two small rooms it stocks some quality seasonal produce as well as some from further afield. It also has a decent pantry section to pick up some pulses, grains, spices, oils and Asian ingredients.

Speaking of which, we cook a lot of Asian food at home and thankfully it is getting easier to pick up the required ingredients – even supermarkets are starting to stock a better selection. There are two shops we usually go to for all things Oriental. The Asian Market on Drury Street is the obvious one that everyone knows about. We don’t go here often, but when we do we tend to stock up. Mostly now, because it is closer, we shop in Ingredients in Stillorgan. A smaller, but less chaotic and more organised, store that is great for spices, rice and most staples for the days when we cook some Chinese or Thai.

Sheridans Cheesemongers on South Anne Street is a great place. It is tiny, probably too small for its popularity, but stocks a great cheese selection, both top Irish and continental cheeses.

These aren't the only places we shop, but they are the best and those that we will try to get to as often as we can. We are always on the look out for more though...

Cavistons
Address: 58/59 Glasthule Rd, Glenageary, Co. Dublin
Phone: (01) 280 9120
Web: http://cavistons.com/

Dunnes Of Donnybrook
Address: 53 Main Street, Donnybrook, Dublin 4
Phone: (01) 283 9679

Higgins Butchers
Address: 2 Sutton Cross, Dublin
Phone: (01) 839 0090
Web: http://www.higginsbutchers.ie/

64 Wine
Address: 64 Glasthule Rd, Glenageary, Dublin
Phone: (01) 280 5664
Web: http://www.64wine.ie/

The Quay Fish Shop
Address: Traders Wharf, Dún Laoghaire
Phone: (01) 280 5936
Web: http://www.thequayfishshop.ie/

Roy Fox:
Address: 49 Main St, Donnybrook, Co. Dublin
Phone: (01) 269 2892

Sheridan’s Cheesemongers
Address: 11 South Anne Street, Dublin 2
Phone: (01) 679 3143
Web: http://sheridanscheesemongers.com/

Asia Market
Address:  18 Drury St, Dublin 2
Phone: (01) 677 9764
Web: http://www.asiamarket.ie/

Ingredients
Address: 5 Old Dublin Rd, Stillorgan
Phone: (01) 210 8080
Web: http://ingredients.ie/

Some cities in Europe we know we will return to again and again. In fact, there are far too many falling into this category and we are adding more each year. Barcelona is one such city.

On the tourist hell hole that is Las Rambles, past the drunks, the hen parties, the touts peddling their tat, the terrible generic restaurants serving a pre-packed paella type concoction to the culinary naive who think they are eating a local meal, you will find one of the finest food markets in the world: La Boqueria.

La Boqueria is one of those chaotic, giant markets where it is easy to lose your bearings whilst walking in the midst of its narrow corridors. Like all the best food markets, the noise, the crowds, the smells, the stalls after stalls of fantastic products are intoxicating. Near the centre you will find the circle of fishmongers selling the most amazing and freshest fruits of the sea. Just to walk around and watch them fillet, skin and bone fish with perfectionist ease is a sight that does not get tiring. Working outwards you will find fruit and vegetables displayed in vivid colour; stalls of butchers selling every part of the beast, mounds of tripe around every corner; Iberico ham being thinly sliced off the bone. But, there is one thing that puts La Boqueria at the top of the league tables of foods markets: the tapas bars, making it not only a great place to shop, but a great place to eat. You can trawl the market, stopping to eat some jamon, baby squid, croquettas, patatas bravas, stewed meatballs and all the typical tapas of the region.

It really is a marvellous place, but will it continue to be? La Boqueria is in the midst of the tourist district and this is unusual for a food market. This has always been the case of course and it has long had to suffer the fanny-pack crowd pointing at exotic ingredients (“oh my god Brandine that fish is looking at me”), but tourists are now finding more and more ways to disgruntle the locals. Travelling is easier and cheaper than ever, so maybe there is just more of these vexatious wanderers, but now they have bloody selfie sticks, cameras on their phones and can even broadcast a live video account to their loved-ones back home whilst walking around.

Thankfully we don’t know anyone who has a selfie stick. We would sort of prefer not to know anyone who has one. The type of person who might have one of these apparatuses of vainglory; someone so morbidly self-absorbed, that they must have their pouting head in every picture, well this type of person is someone we would be happy to go without in our lives. Are these the same sort of people who tweet every dish from the table during every meal? Maybe they are the same narcissists who tweet the restaurant before their meal so the restaurant knows to prepare for their arrival? Whoever they are, it would be super if they would just stay at home. What was I saying? Oh yeah, La Boqueria is now suffering from this plague of bobbleheads. Just walking around is a chore as one must dodge these protruding appendages every two feet and pirouette around the kneeling traveller doing their best impression of Annie Leibovitz.

Why is this a problem? Doesn't tourism help the market thrive? Well yes some tourists, like us, do buy some of the markets great produce and some, also like us, stop at the tapas bars to indulge on the local delights. Thankfully there are still plenty of this type of adventurer, but the market will only continue to thrive if the locals keep coming every day and the cracks are starting to show as more and more stalls are selling juices and fruit cups, mostly to tourists who want to claim that they bought something in this famous market. For a local it must be tempting to go instead to Saint Antoni Market, which is around one kilometre away and whilst it does not have the grandeur of La Boqueria, it doesn't suffer from the same onslaught of posers and path-blockers.

No matter what happens to this great food hall and regardless of how growing tourism continues to dilute the old quarter of Barcelona, turning it more and more into a sort of sad tourist strip, there is one man to bring us back to Barcelona again and again. That man is chef Albert Adria.

Sometimes patronisingly referred to by journalists as Ferran Adria’s little brother, with whom he worked with for 23 years in elBulli, Albert runs a handful of hugely successful restaurants based around the Avenue del Parallel. We have written here before about two of Adria’s places: Bodega 1900 and Tickets, so we won’t go through the food again now, only to say that we returned to both recently and the experience was as good as, if not better, than our visit last year. On the space that was occupied by 41 Degrees, a short lived restaurant in which Adria served 41 courses, Tickets has been expanded and developed a dessert room. This is Willie Wonka type space where one goes at the end of their meal for their sweet courses. This isn't just a more efficient way to turn tables in the main dining room, but also changes the mood of the guest to something more a kin to child like wonder. It worked on us at least, we had five desserts.

This year we added in another of Adria’s eateries, Nino Viejo. Here Adria has created the flavours of Mexican street food and in typical Adria style it manages to serve really accomplished food in a fun and informal setting. This is what is so special about Adria’s restaurants; he has managed to create a collection of intoxicating, relaxed and colloquial restaurants, but all with fantastically talented kitchen teams. Make no mistake, the dining room, the setting, the ambience are all a key to the success of this empire and play a big part in the experience, but they are secondary to the fantastically delicious food.

Albert Adria is one of the industries greatest talents and is recognized as such by many industry luminaries that worked alongside him in elBulli. In his restaurants he has managed to create sublime menus showing a combination of great skill and childlike imagination that very few chefs possess, but you never get the sense he is trying to show off. He doesn't want you to leave thinking about him or go home remarking about what a talent he is and what a privilege it is to eat his food. Instead Adria wants his guests to leave after having a great and fun experience. Technique and innovation, although evident, is not important, instead the flavours, the spirit and the heart of the restaurant is what Adria manages to convey to his guest.

There are a few common themes running through his establishments. The service is always friendly, jovial, a little bit cheeky at times and extremely hospitable. There is no pomp and circumstance, certainly no stuffiness and, in the case of Bodega 1900 and Tickets, this keeps a sense of a more typical tapas bar. In all his restaurants you can chose not to order off the menu, but instead let your server pick out their favourite dishes for you. At any time, you can ask for more dishes, or decide that you are done, or ready for some dessert. Not knowing what is coming next, or even how many courses are yet to come, only adds to the fun and intrigue of the experience.

This summer Adria will open his latest, and his last, restaurant in Barcelona. Enigma will be Adria moving further away from the elBulli, even dropping the spherified  olives which are the opening act in most of his current restaurants, and he states that it will be his most ambitious project to date. We will be booking a visit to Barcelona to eat here as soon as we can get a table.

Albert Adria’s stands in no one else’s shadow and to suggest so is to be disrespectful to one of the worlds’ greatest chefs and restaurateurs. He alone is one of the primary reasons we will return to Barcelona over and over again.

This time of year we are finalising our holiday plans for the year ahead. A nice thing to do you might imagine - a pleasant way of spending an evening deciding where we want to go, drawing up an itinerary, booking hotels, apartments, travel and restaurants. The problem is our list of options stretches too many pages and our annual leave entitlements, which our employers selfishly insist that we cannot exceed, seems minuscule in comparison. Not to mention our bank account balance which incredulously has no regard for the lifestyle that we would like to live. Our savings account doesn't offer much help either. It seemed, at the time we set it up at least, as a great way of demonstrating fiscal responsibility and securing a nice future, but has since become a small, dusty repository that we fall back on when we figure the next restaurant we visit won’t accept our old xtra-vision card.

Ok, deciding where to spend our annual leave and our cash is still a nice problem to have and to complain would be to take a very first world, privileged, problem and petulantly believe that this in some way is something to stress about. But it does make us think about a couple of things. Why is it so difficult for the gourmand traveller to decide on a destination? And, why are we more than happy to spend all our money on food and travel, instead of investing in things like, say, a pension or a property – those things that society tell you are really quite important.

Well the first question is easy enough to answer; there are just too many great food destinations around the world and to leave any of them out is difficult. If we go to New York we get to revisit Eleven Madison Park, maybe take in a lunch in at Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin, David Chang’s places have been on our must-do list for a while, we could check out the developing scene happening in Brooklyn, not forgetting to grab a great burger. But if we go to NYC, we might have to leave out London, a city with a list of restaurants we need to visit that just continues to grow. A trip to an Italian coastal town, eating some spaghetti vongole while watching the boats come and go is definitely in order – the amazing memories of last year’s trip to the island of Ischia are calling us back. Singapore’s hawker centres, with its mix of Asian cuisines, are always a personal favourite and hard to resist. It has been four years since we fell in love with the chaos and noise of Hanoi’s old quarter and the taste of an authentic pho. What about a fish amok in the tragic, yet inspiring city of Phnom Penh? A real curry in a beach shack in Thailand, a country we have travelled to many times, is always tempting.

And these are just places we have been before! Sadly we have never been to Japan, but we must go soon – it bothers us that we haven’t been there yet. And then there is Peru. A bit difficult and expensive to get to, Lima, now one of the world’s gastronomic hotspots, but no doubt it would be worth it. Eastern Europe has an interesting and burgeoning culinary landscape that we are yet to explore, so another one for our unrealistic and ever growing bucket list.

We are really quite fickle too. We decide on the destination, pick the hotel, the restaurants, only to change our mind completely within hours. This year we had decided to spend a week in Sestri Levante on the Italian west coast. We were excited about it, looking forward to it, but then we watched a show about San Sebastian, a city we are absolutely besotted with, and it was the lure of a simple anchovy and olive pintxo and the meltingly beautiful cocochas (hake throat), these simple but amazing bites of food, that made us ditch our Italian plans and settle for a week in the Basque country. We still haven't booked this yet so this plan might change any minute.

Our next holiday is going to be a good one though and this is one we actually booked before we could change our minds. Starting in Cologne to eat at Vendome, we then travel down through eastern France and eventually end up in Barcelona. A holiday that will combine our passion for food with our love of wine, the aim is to come home with a much greater knowledge of both. A few days in beautiful Alsacian town of Colmar , a region we don’t know much about, will allow us to sample some local French-Germanic delights such as choucroute or tarte flambée and glug down some Gewürztraminer or Riesling. Dijon next and day trips to the likes of Beaune gives us the chance explore the vineyards of Burgundy. On to Lyon and a meal at Paul Bocuse, surely a rite of passage for every gastronomic enthusiast. All this before heading to Barcelona, because, well who doesn't love Barcelona. We will be returning to Albert Adria’s Bodega 1900 and Tickets and spending mornings shopping in the Boqueria Market.

So there is a plethora of reasons to spend all our hard-earned money on food and travel. But would we be better off spending it on what are, supposedly, more sensible things. The answer, for us at least, is absolutely not. For us life is about experiences, not possessions. It is about enjoying ourselves with the knowledge that you only get one life and when it’s over, it’s over. There are no do-overs.  
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We don’t own a property. We currently rent a small one-bedroom apartment in south Dublin. Let us be clear, the reason we don’t own a property is not because we don’t want to, it is just because we prefer to spend our cash on enjoying ourselves. If we had saved for a deposit over the last few years we would not have had the amazing holidays, the unforgettable meals, and the blissful experiences that we feel very lucky to have had. But people don’t care about this. No, instead we get asked a lot about when we are going to buy a house. “Are you looking?” seems to be a common greeting for us now, replacing the conventional “how are you?”. We have even been asked, despite being together for 13 years, and living together for 11, when are we going to settle down. To say this gets a little bit irritating is an understatement. What is the obsession with owning property in Ireland anyway? Maybe it's a hangover from the time when Irish people were under the thumb of British landlords and owning a property was much needed security or maybe it is because of the lack of decent rental laws in Ireland. Whatever the reason, there surely must be, for us at least, more to life.

We could, like some are willing to do, buy more affordable house by moving out to the country and commuting in and out of Dublin each day. Sure, we might have to sit in traffic on a motorway, or on a packed train (if the driver bothered showing up), to and from work each day, but this just gives us more time to think about our three bed semi. Oh, it doesn't matter that our new house is in a place we have no interest in living as by the time we get home we would be so tired from the commute we would just go straight to bed. And think of the money we would save not eating out very often as the nearest decent restaurant is fifty miles away. Each to their own, but this appeals to us around as much as a barb wire enema.

A pension on the other hand is something that might be in our interest to get organised. Simply because it might ensure a delicious retirement. It would be quite disappointing to finally get out of the rat race only to not have enough money to enjoy ourselves. Wouldn't it be nice to retire to the south of France? Maybe a place near a decent, yet affordable, winery and a great little brasserie down the road. Yes, a pension might be a very good idea indeed. Note to selves…. organise a pension!

We feel privileged to have such a passion in our lives. Our happiest memories are with a knife and fork, or chopsticks, in hand or traversing a foreign bustling food market. The first time we tasted real Thai food; indulgent potato dauphinoise in a bistro in Bordeaux; an unforgettable multi course tasting in Noma, Arzak, Osteria Francescana, Eleven Madison Park; the wonder of The Fat Duck; the simple brilliance of Koffmans; a crepe from a street stall in Paris; the pintxos bars in San Sebastian; tapas at the boqueria market. These are just a few of the brilliant memories and times that food has given off in the last few years.

Food has also been there for us in bad times, helping us deal with everyday stresses and picking us up after a bad day or week in work. Not long ago we travelled to Copenhagen just hours after receiving some terrible news about the health of a family member. We considered not going at all, but figured this would not help anything. So we went, sure that it would prove to be impossible to get much, if any, pleasure from it. We woke up on our first morning, after a night of broken sleep, and with little else on our mind we sulked around a cold and rainy Copenhagen. We arrived at Noma for lunch and for the next 3 hours we were transported away from our troubles, taken in by the amazing food and intoxicating atmosphere. It was the best meal of our lives and for this brief time we were happy and content. We left and soon after we returned the reality, but our spirits had been uplifted and we fully appreciated the power that food has to bring joy to our lives and help us get through bad times.

For us there is no possession, no house, no nice car, that could go close to bringing us the same experiences that food has. Sure, it would be better for our wallets if this love was for, say, books or bird watching, but ours is for food and travel. We will always try to explore the world, to eat the best food we can afford and experience as much as we can. So if tomorrow, we are walking along the pavement and, in typical Acme style, an anvil or piano falls from a window above, our last thought will be that we enjoyed the ride as best we could.

For two years we have, usually whilst slurping down a glass of wine, jotted down some semi-literate restaurant reviews on this site. Since then we have built up a loyal readership of around, at a guess, 5 people. We tried to write honest and fair reviews, free from any bias, self-promotion or agenda, and we think we did achieve this, in fact this was the easy part because we don’t care for any of these things. We tried to write short reviews, without the unnecessary bullshit that many reviews consist of, that captured our experience of eating there and we think we more or less, especially with some of our later stuff, achieved that. We tried to write reviews that people wanted to read and, in truth, this is where we fell down a bit. This is important apparently, who knew?

We can now see why many professional restaurant critics fill up their reviews with benign and irrelevant drivel. Anything from the weather, the history of the building that the restaurant occupies, their mood, the dress sense of their dining companion, that rash that just won’t clear. Anything, anything at all it seems that will make that word count rise. Somewhere in the midst of all this they just might mention the restaurant and the food. It is easy to pour scorn on these reviews and the scribes that produce them, we have and will continue to do so, but in the defence of these expert gourmands you have to remember that many have been doing this for years and there are only so many ways you can describe food before you start repeating yourself and every review starts to feel the same. Delicious, moreish, subtle, balanced, whatever…

It is easy to write a review of a truly great restaurant, a one off, a chef doing something unique, a place that gets you excited, but most critics plod around the country eating in the latest generic opening getting served the same old, didn’t I eat this somewhere else before?, fare. This is why the next time you open your newspaper to get the verdict on the latest restaurant opening, you may first have to skim past the critic’s ramblings about, well whatever happened to enter their head. There are reviews that we really enjoyed writing, but in the main writing reviews can very easily get a bit boring.

We think anonymous restaurant reviews are the best way of doing it, but doubt it would actually be possible for a professional critic to maintain anonymity. We never mentioned to one person, not even friends or family, about TGC. We have, as a result of the amount we frequent restaurants in Dublin, become on friendly terms with a few people in the industry and it was extremely irritating having to watch what we said, being careful not to mention other recent meals, holidays or anything that may tell people who we are.
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This will never be a problem for the amateur food blogger. The chances of the person we are talking to actually having read our reviews is, in all likelihood, small and even if they had, the chances of them caring, is smaller still. But it would probably be impossible for a professional restaurant critic to actually remain anonymous. It is only a matter of time before someone finds out. There are some critics, not in Ireland, who still, even after years of doing it, claim to be anonymous, but you would have to wonder if they really are. Michelin inspectors supposedly slip in and out of restaurants without being recognised, but there are restaurant managers who know who they are, or at least, how to spot them. We guessed once that the guy sitting on the opposite side of dining room was Michelin inspector, there was just something about this respectable, observant man dining alone that just gave that impression. On the way out we said to the restaurant manager, “bet you that guy was a Michelin inspector!”, only to have him respond without hesitation, “yep, he was”.

It may be very difficult to achieve, but in theory being anonymous must be the best way of writing fair, impartial, unbiased reviews that are not serving any self-interest or boosting one’s ego. A known professional critic might not get comped meals (most restaurants wouldn’t be so brazen), they may not even get a free extra course or glass of champagne, but they would more than likely be given the best table, get the most conscientious servers, their food would get some extra attention before being allowed off the pass. All of this makes it difficult to think that the reviews they write are based on the experience of the regular guy off the street.
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How long does a restaurant review stay relevant anyway? Well, some are not even relevant to begin with. Going to a restaurant on opening night, or even in the opening weeks, might give a sense of what a restaurant is aiming to be, but one must expect improvement and development. Pointing out and criticising faults in the food or service in the opening weeks of a restaurant, unless published with a promise to revisit and update the review at a later date, is puerile and unfair.

Mulberry Garden, a very nice neighbourhood restaurant in Donnybrook, with a small brigade and an ever changing menu, is a perfect example of how a review can quickly become irrelevant. Most professional critics reviewed it when it first opened when John Wyer was at the stoves. Year or so later Tom Doyle comes in, the food changes, rendering all previous reviews pretty irrelevant. A couple of years later Doyle moves on and the food changes again. Now you can argue that most reviews are timestamped and it is up to the reader to weed out anything that is not current, but that isn’t really going happen. On twitter you will regularly see critics recommending a restaurant based on reviews that are now more or less useless due to their age. If you are going to recommend a restaurant shouldn’t you make an effort to ensure that the endorsement is based on a review that is still relevant? There is a reason Michelin will revisit restaurants each year and a starred restaurant at least a couple of times of year.

This is another reason that we are not going to bother with reviews of Irish restaurants and our ratings table anymore. We felt obliged to revisit restaurants that we put on it and quite frankly we could not be bothered visiting a few of them again. We visited Chapter One three times in the last few years and each time and we never enjoyed it. We have just never had a good experience there; the food has always been, let’s say, flawed, the service was poor and we don’t like the dining room, so why would we bother part with another few hundred euro just to leave bewildered once again. Yes, we know most people love this place, but we would much rather just eat at home. There are other restaurants we would love to visit again this year, but not sure we have the time or the cash to do it.

When we read over old reviews, we are happy with some of them, mostly the ones we wrote this year, but some, the earlier ones in particular, we wish we could do over. We had fun writing them, but we are going to change our site a bit now. We will keep it for some food related ramblings, maybe tales from our travels or musings on some of the really great restaurants we eat in around the world. Instead of an Irish restaurant ratings and reviews we will simply list our favourite restaurants that we eat in around Ireland and a few words on why. We will keep the world list so we can chronicle our travels. Thanks for reading…

 After putting out our shortlist last week, which you can see here, we have finally agreed on the winners of the The Greedy Awards 2015. Oh and a big thank you for reading our ramblings over the last year.
 
Best Service
Ireland: Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, Dublin
World: Noma, Copenhagen
 
Mulberry Garden and Campagne both have a charming and hospitable front of house team, but Restaurant Patrick Guildbaud adds a fantastic attention to detail. Restaurant Gordon Ramsay and Lasarte both had flawless service, but Noma has this plus a personal touch that manages to keep a slight neighbourhood feel to it.
  
Best Value
Ireland: Forest Avenue, Dublin
World: Le Chateaubriand. Paris
 
Amuse’s lunch menu is particularly good value, as is Loam’s dinner menu, but Forest Avenue felt like a bargain for the quality of food. El Cellar de Can Roca is built on generosity, and has some great wines for a very reasonable price, that makes you feel that the price is more than worth it. Relae is one of the best priced meals in a very expensive city, but €70 for the standard of food in Le Chateaubriand in Paris is just superb.
 
Best Casual Dining
Ireland: ETTO, Dublin
World: Bodega 1900, Barcelona
 
Pichet and Soder+KO both serve excellent food, but ETTO matches great no nonsense cookery with a charm and friendliness at an excellent price. Cantinando on the island of Ischia is a tiny place with a tiny menu, serving some great local food cooked with passion. Cocottes by Christian Constant in Paris is great value and quite delicious, but Albert Adria’s Bodega 1900 could be easily included in the best restaurant category it is that good.
 
Best Wine
Ireland: Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, Dublin
World: El Cellar de Can Roca, Girona
 
The wine pairings in both Forest Avenue and Loam were well matched, but Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, whist being a bit harder on the pocket, served some exquisite wines. Le Chateaubriand served some very interesting and unusual wines that were nearly as good as the food. Arzak and El Cellar de Can Roca showed that you can still go to of the world’s top restaurant and get a great local wine for a very low price.
 
Best Meal
Ireland: Aniar, Galway
World: Noma, Copenhagen
 
Loam, L’Ecrivain and Amuse all served up some great meals this year and would be worthy winners, but the ten course tasting menu in Aniar was the best and most polished meal we had in Ireland this year. We have been very lucky to eat in some amazing restaurants abroad this year, but for the second year in a row Noma delivered an almost flawless meal and gets the vote again, despite some stiff competition from the brilliant Osteria Fransescana, Arzak, L’Arpege and The Clove Club.
 
Best Dish
Ireland: Quail, Fermented Barley and Black Pudding, L’Ecrivain
World: Abstract of Asparagus, Prosciutto and Peas Tagliolini, Osteria Francescana
 
It was extremely hard to pick a shortlist for this one, never mind pick a winner, but we just thought if you could only have two dishes again, which two would we pick. The quail, barley and black pudding in L’Ecrivain was superb whilst the tagliolini in Osteria Francescana​ was complex but perfectly balanced.
 
Best Chef
Ireland: Conor Dempsey, Amuse
World: Rene Redzepi, Noma
 
This was the hardest category to pick a winner in Ireland, with all four chefs cooking some great food this year. But the nod goes to Conor Dempsey who is cooking some interesting food, balancing and combining big flavours, while showing some excellent meat and fish cookery. He has progressed Amuse impressively in 2015. Rene Redzepi, still with a hands on influence in Noma, has never let the restaurant rest on its laurels and still managing to run a kitchen that produced the best meal of 2015 for us.
 
Best Restaurant
Ireland: Aniar, Galway
World: Noma, Copenhagen
 
Again another difficult decision for Ireland, but at the end of the day Aniar served us up our best meal in Ireland this year and we think if we had to go one of the restaurants tonight for dinner Aniar would be it. We sometimes get criticised for our praise of Noma, mostly by people who have never actually eaten there, but for us they get everything right, from the stunning food, to the service, the staff and the dining room – if we could have one last ever meal it would be in Noma.

​​We have been lucky enough to have eaten some fantastic meals in 2015, both at home and abroad. For our end of year Greedy Awards, we have been looking back at our meals this year and have drawn up the shortlist below. The winners will be from this list.