Gautham Iyer might just be Ireland’s most zen chef if a recent Facebook post is anything to go by. It is a simple samosa photograph with an extraordinary caption. This is the “32,000th samosa I have hand rolled since opening. No life line on my palm anymore just the grain of the [rolling] pin.” J Alfred Prufrock measured life out in coffee spoons. This is a chef who measures his in triangular, overstuffed cushions of nutty spice, rolling out just under 35 a day if my sums are right.
The home of this handmade food is Iyer's on Pope's Quay in Cork city. The small cafe will be open three years this month. And Iyer's is vegetarian. I'm loath to even mention it at this stage because it makes the cafe sound earnest and dull in this goodbye stodge, hello salad time of self-denial. It is neither.
A January detox feels a lot like our winter weather: unpleasantly cold and wet. At this time of year chilly green juice is as enticing as a lounge on a lilo in the north Atlantic. I want heat in my bones, like the sunshine that’s warming my back through the front of this tiny quayside place. So pass the spice, nuttiness and warmth. The decor is simple, like the menu, biscuit terracotta colours and lots of pale wood.
The chalkboard menu lists lots of street food staples you might find in southern India. There is plenty of friendly explanation like the fact that the uttapam is a pancake like a dosa but the batter is fermented for longer, so it is spongier. A sucker for a bit of house fermentation, I am ordering it on my next visit.
A romp through the menu (with something in a bag to take home) will not take you much over €20, which is a steal for food as good as what is on offer here. Restaurants in this price bracket (and higher) frequently have their food made far away where labour is cheaper and blast-frozen for shipment. Hands up if your house dumplings are sourced in the freezer aisle of a well-known specialist supermarket. Trust me: you’d be surprised. There are many kitchens where the knife skills involve slitting of bags in order to warm up their contents before serving.
All of this makes the freshness of everything that’s sold at Iyer’s at fast-food prices so brilliant and worth the small schlep down the quiet stretch of Pope’s Quay. There are popcorn-sized nuggets of cauliflower, the crumbly texture of this hero vegetable still firm rather than waterlogged after a life in the freezer. These cauliflower pakoras are delicately cloaked in a crisp batter with a sweet-and-sour chutney on one side and a minty, spiced sauce on the other so you can dabble with depths of fiery flavours that still retain separate notes, rather than blowtorching your mouth with one blast of heat.
I have a yolk-yellow drink they call a mango misty to hand, to spread like sunny balm over everything. The menu tells me it’s vegan. My taste buds tell me it’s utterly lovely, a blend of mango and coconut so thick it is almost spoonable.
There’s a samosa chaat, parcels of vegetables with their spice and warmth smothered in a chickpea curry with red onion and rice puffs, sprinkled on top like a savoury breakfast cereal to add airy crunch to all the soft mealiness of this deeply satisfying dish.
There are pomegranate seeds, fresh, silky leaves of coriander and a green chilli sliced if you want to have the full flaming mouth feel to the dish. My only regret is that I haven’t brought a gang so I can steal morsels of other dishes from their plates. So I take a portion of jeera rice with sesame and a pistachio kulfi for the road.
I make it all the way out onto the street and a few doors down to sit on the sun- warmed granite steps of the Dominican friary to eat creamy kulfi. Since my visit, Iyer’s has taken seasonal ingredients such as Brussels sprouts and turned them into luscious lollipops in a battered crust. So they mix it up with what’s available.
Michael Pollan's book Cooked ends with an interview with a Korean kimchi cook who describes the importance of what she calls the hand taste. Pollan wonders if it's a mistranslation but concludes that hand taste is real: it's "the care and thought and idiosyncrasy that that person has put into the work of preparing it". The hand taste is love. Love is what goes into handmade food. Thank you, Gautham Iyer.
More power to your elbow.
