The healing shall begin in earnest with the return of the ever-splendid Street Feast community project, bringing together neighbourhoods for a shared meal. Picture by Shane O'Neill, Coalesce.

Street Feast is a most commendable community project created by the redoubtable Sam Bishop. It is an annual nationwide day of local lunches organised by and then shared by the citizens of neighbourhoods and communities in which they take place, aided by Street Feast’s provision of their Street Feast Pack for each host when they register, including bunting, invitations, posters, and all the information needed to have a brilliant Street Feast. Street Feast, like so many other public gatherings, had to put its head under the metaphorical covers during Covid-19 but, more than most others, this is an especially welcome return, an opportunity to break bread with neighbours, young and old, in your local community, estate, or road, one of the most profoundly connecting and important of all human practices. Ninety-six per cent of Street Feast participants in 2019 said their sense of belonging to the neighbourhood increased after that feast and 97% said their neighbourhood was friendlier after the event. Registration is open and organisers are aiming for 1,200 feasts with 100,000 people participating around the country on Sunday, June 26.

The Menu recently returned to his old ‘alma mater’, The Quay Co-op Healthy Food Shop and Restaurant on Sullivan’s Quay, in Cork city, for an evening of celebration to mark the iconic Leeside institution’s 40th birthday and where he once cooked up a storm or at least a mild squall. That this former hotbed of radicalism, where many believed the devil’s own work was practiced when it first opened in 1982, in an entirely different, conservative Ireland still manacled to the church, is now viewed as a familiar and beloved part of the city’s psycho-geography, speaks wonderful volumes of how far this country has come from those dark days. Happy Birthday, Quay Co-op!

The English Market’s start-up stall, a fully-fitted out food trading unit, is once more available for a local budding food entrepreneur to get an early taste of commercial activity, a splendid showcase for any edible endeavour, and a successful debut would put a food business in prime position for consideration should a permanent stall become available. Applications are invited from businesses trading for five years or less, who can also demonstrate a commitment to sustainable food practices.

The Menu is very sad indeed that he shall this year be away for the return of one of his old favourites, The West Waterford Festival of Food (June 10-12), covered here several weeks ago but highly recommends another last-minute perusal of the programme to see if there are any few tickets to be snaffled up for remaining events, or simply roll into lovely Dungarvan bright and early on the Sunday morning and spend the day immersed in the legendary food market that takes over the entire square.

It is the beginning of June, six months from December, when The Menu usually unveils his annual food awards, The Munchies, universally acknowledged as an ever splendid list of epicurean excellence only short of a bit of universal acknowledgement, and he already knows what his Food Product of the Year will be, Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms’ latest release from the ‘lab’, Shiitake Bites, which The Menu believes to be the culinary equivalent of crack cocaine….

Greetings, says The Menu, for he has returned having had to pause to sample yet more Shiitake Bites on foot of writing that first paragraph which had him near drowning in his own drool before he was halfway through for, as he was saying, they are highly, highly addictive.

Shiitake Bites are BMM’s own superb Irish grown shiitake mushrooms subjected to the appliance of proprietors Dr Lucy Deegan and Mark Cribben’s science, using their years of experience as food scientists to apply a comparatively new technology, ‘vacuum frying’ (frying in a pressurised environment, as if were frying chips in a pressure cooker— The Menu knows you will never be stupid enough to attempt this at home), which prevents burning or browning, resulting in a crispy snack that renders anaemic all other competitors in the crispy fried snack market.

What’s more, the primary ingredient being one of nature’s true superfoods, even when it gets the ‘snack food’ treatment, it still contains 15g of fibre in every 54g pack, nearly half the RDA and only 20% fat, less than half the fat of regular crisps. All well and good, says you, but what do they taste like?

A raw mushroom has gentle ‘meaty’ tug that is unique to itself as befits an organism that is neither plant nor animal but from the entirely separate and truly fascinating fungi kingdom, but the Shiitake Bite, now devoid of all moisture, yet utterly unlike a leathery dehydrated mushroom, are as light as 2.5 goose feathers (The Menu’s own robust ‘science’) and gentle pressure under tooth has them imploding into powdery shards as if they were savoury meringues, a most delightful textural experience.

But meringues, savoury or otherwise, never tasted like this. There are two flavours: ‘pinch of salt’ and ‘pinch of black pepper’. Rather underwhelming, says you again, you tricky customer. Aha, replies The Menu, that’s because all the real flavour is contained in what is possibly nature’s greatest of all natural flavour bombs, the fungal umami of mushroom, in this case, the shiitake, an especially vigorous example of same.

The snack food and flavour generating industry has expended millions, in its quest for the ultimate flavour, Deegan and Cribben simply let nature do the heavy lifting, applied a little science and packaged the results. The Menu issues fair warning: once opened, self-discipline and will power vanish in an instant; and they’ll make for a true showstopper at your next soirée.

The Menu recommends their consumption with a nice Beaujolais. Or a good crisp ale. Or a drop of the craythur. Or with a glass of sparkling water and Richmount Elderflower cordial. Or … look, The Menu recommends their consumption, full stop.

Read More20 great places to enjoy an outdoor dish or drink in Cork

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