You could parcel up Áine Maguire’s turf-smoked butter and despatch it to far-flung expats with the following instructions: “Add one hot salty spud (preferably floury) to make one flavour portal back to the old sod.” It’s bog butter made beautiful, a taste of how Ireland smells.
I’m a bit sceptical when the butter arrives first. The circle and triangle of pale creamy butter on parchment are a little too solid. It needs some work with the knife to soften it down, and it doesn’t pong of smoke, turf or otherwise. But then, slathered on soda bread, it hits: creamy white wisps from a small slumped fire, the heart-string twang of edible memory.
We’re in The Idle Wall in Westport, a place I’ve been looking forward to visiting since I first interviewed chef Maguire about her plans to leave the big smoke and head home to take over what used to be called the Quay Cottage.
The restaurant sits with its thick walls and stone porch like a gingerbread house designed by Fáilte Ireland. The Idle Wall looks out on the water next to the huge high wall of Westport House. There’s nothing idle about the stony perimeter around the big house. It is a workout wall that has forced us on a wide and hilly arc of a walk to get here.
Suitably hungry, we’re directed to our table with that most Mayo of nods, the upward flick of the chin in a general thereabouts direction. Service is quirky and sometimes haphazard. There’s a touch of Julie Walter’s Mrs Overalls about some of it.
It’s a beautiful place, slightly grander than I pictured thanks to the high vaulted timber ceiling, which is like an upturned boat above our heads. We’re sitting in what I presume is the original cottage. Its window shutters are painted permanently open and scalloped half nets hang in the front window. Tables are partitioned with chunky bits of boat, like someone assembled them from a shipwreck. On the wall is the gorgeous curve of the back of a boat.
There is another similar room with the bar and then a larger extension again. It’s a cottage that has sprouted and spread its new footprint extending further back than the original building.
Menu guff usually leaves me cold, but here the prose works, particularly the description of the oysters, which are farmed virtually outside the front door: “We love the flavour . . . not too sweet not too salty. This is not an accident.” It is the result of two two rivers washing water down on them “from the surrounding land and mountains to mix with the waters of Clew Bay”. I’m sold.
The juicy ivory globules come in their shells on a birds’ nest of bladderwrack. Call me suggestible, but there is a river water softness to their brine. A plate of smoked Donegal mackerel was recommended to us by the next table. Its smoke is offset sweetly with tangy onion and clots of subtle horseradish cream.
The “signature dish” of lamb and clams comes more beautifully presented than the name suggests. There are small towers of lamb shoulder so slow cooked that your pulse virtually slows down as you chew. The clams are big bruisers, clams with abs but not rubbery ones.
Goose-fat roasted potatoes are the perfect marriage of crunch and fluff, and the bog butter turns them into some of the best spuds I’ve eaten in any restaurant.
There’s a classic hake mornay, china-white chunks of fish marooned in cheesy cream with a perfect level of mustard warmth. Vegetables, served in hotel-style side dishes, are green beans thick as fingers, which taste beany in an old-fashioned way – like they were grown in a vegetable patch illustrated by Beatrix Potter.
Dessert is simple and gorgeous: a silky Cuinneog buttermilk panna cotta, speckled with Sauternes-soaked apple and bee pollen. Chocolate truffles are the only letdown; they each taste the same and are as melty to handle as balls of butter.
The Idle Wall is a splendid thing: a beautiful place surrounded by a larder of world-class ingredients. Many places can claim the same, but the key to what makes this restaurant work is the homecoming of a talented chef who knows when to tweak those ingredients – and when to just let them alone to sing.
Dinner for two with a bottle of wine came to €118.
THE IDLE WALL RESTAURANT, The Quay, Westport, Co Mayo, 098-50692
Facilities: Fine.
Food provenance: Extensive, from those oysters to Kilmeena mussels, Reek View farm vegetables and Gabhair Árann feta.
Vegetarian options: Good
Music: Vintage pop
Wheelchair access: Yes
THE VERDICT: 8/10. Brilliant ingredients, beautiful cooking served in a delightful place.
WILD THINGS
I still have a bottle of elderflower syrup in the fridge like a memory of summer. If I was a truly dedicated forager, I would have been back out in the hedgerows gathering elderberries for wine in the past weeks. But that hasn't happened.
If you’ve also missed that boat, the Slow Food Ireland Wild Foods Festival at Brooklodge and Macreddin Village, near Aughrim, Co Wicklow, promises to fill the gaps in your wild food larder. They expect to have a least one stall of mulled elderberry wine at the Wild Foods Street Market, which takes place on the weekend of November 12th-13th from noon-7pm.
