Articles > Vitali's Ireland: Last Breakfast at Bewley's

It did feel like the end of an era – a cross between a funeral and a banquet. On its last morning, Bewley’s Café in Grafton Street was packed with grieving customers. They turned up in their hundreds to vote with their feet (and stomachs) against the closure of this famous 164-year-old Dublin institution. The staff, in their familiar black skullcaps, were serving two types of Irish breakfast – “large” and “small” – while trying to suppress tears: sausages, bacon and scrambled eggs were bound to taste saltier than usual. A little old lady, who had worked at Bewley’s for 55 years, was sobbing openly at an impromptu guest-book stand, to which the sullen-faced patrons were queuing patiently to record their last tributes.

The café’s interior looked grand, if somewhat tired. It reminded me of the famous Café New York in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. Only the latter was not in danger of closing down – either because Budapest rents were still a fraction of Dublin’s, or due to the fact that Hungary had not introduced a total smoking ban as yet.

But, most likely, Café New York – unlike Bewley’s – was thriving due to the persistently Central European ways of the Hungarians, who do not agonise over spending an hour or three sipping one cup of coffee before ordering a succulent goulash (as opposed to the unwholesome “Irish breakfast”), followed by a generous slice of Napoleon cake (as opposed to a stale scone or a sticky bun). “Irish easting habits are changing,” a representative of Campbell Bewley Group Ltd told me in Bewley’s on that morning of mourning. “They don’t seem to want this sort of food any more…”

It was then – during my first (and last) breakfast at Bewley’s – that I ate my first (and, most probably, my last) white Irish pudding. Two of them actually… On the way to the office, I popped into a souvenir shop in Nassau Street. On one of the shelves, a glossy volume of “traditional Irish recipes” was displayed next to a book on the history of the Great Famine.

“A man, whose stomach is full, will never understand the one who is starving,” according to a Russian proverb. To paraphrase it, a hungry person is unlikely to be tempted by a cholesterol-free low-calorie fare, no matter how holistic.

My Soviet childhood “eating habits” were moulded by long hours of queuing for such staples as bread, milk and butter. The coveted foods were rationed per capita (that was why my parents always took me with them), and I remember burying my little “capita” – mouth first – into a freshly purchased (after six hours of queuing) slice of butter that I was entrusted to carry. An aspiring little glutton, I couldn’t care less about gluten (to be honest, I had no idea it existed). Yes, our Soviet diet – just like the post-Famine Irish one – was not “holistic” at all. Whatever food we could get hold of was good for us, whatever we couldn’t – was unhealthy.

True, we didn’t have the crubeens, but we had salo – pure pork lard to be consumed with bread and/or potatoes. We didn’t eat nettle soup (only during World War II, according my granny), but the countryside folk would routinely gobble up flies that fell into their plates of borsch (beetroot soup) and call them “meat” (I saw them doing so on numerous occasions). So it didn’t surprise me at all when I read in “The Encyclopaedia of Ireland” that the post-famine 20th century Irish diet “became increasingly reliant on refined white bread, spread or fried with lard or taken with cheap factory-made jams” and that such “nutritionally poor simple carbohydrate diet would compound the levels of ill health and endemic disease of urban Ireland.” Incidentally, I left Russia on the very day the first McDonald’s was opened in Moscow. The queue to it stretched for over seven miles along the snow…

Taste buds die last – years after nostalgia and several days after Hope itself. And although unlimited western choice, strenuous exercise and a three-year-long tempestuous relationship with a health-conscious English woman have radically changed my eating habits, I still find certain East European foods – so full of fat and starch that one can put on a couple of kilos by simply staring at them – extremely appealing, if no longer irresistible. Contrary to a recent TV-coined cliché, we are not always what we eat – sometimes we are what we don’t, albeit would love to.

At the same time, I remain fairly indifferent to such vein-clogging “western” creations as Australian “hamburger with the lot” and “four-n-twenty pie”, Scottish “battered Mars bar” and “Irish pudding” – black or white (two of the latter, consumed at Bewley’s for the purposes of research, do not count).

During my two odd months in Ireland, it was only once that I was exposed to a “traditional” Irish dinner fare of beef, butter and potatoes (it was deep in the country, and my generous Irish hosts kept asking whether I was allergic to butter, for I ate it sparingly whereas they – literally – swallowed it by spoonfuls). This is if not to count occasional raids on a fast-food takeaway shop in Pearse Street, with an unlikely name “Lido” (no matter how hard I looked, I was unable to find a swimming pool inside it), on the evenings when I am either too tired or simply can’t be bothered to cook. It is open until late and is always full of hungry Dubliners, grabbing parcels of fat-oozing hot carbs, wrapped in oily, cholesterol-soaked paper.

How true is it then that the closure of Bewley’s was, to an extent, caused by the change in Irish eating habits? And are these habits changing indeed? In search of answers, I drove to Co Clare to catch up with Ian Smulders – a good acquaintance of mine whom I came to call “healthfood crusader”.

Half-Flemish and half-Irish, he was born near Dublin, to where his father – a Belgian pacifist – fled during Word War II. A multi-lingual hedonist and a heavy smoker in his youth, Ian had tried a number of occupations: a seaman, a fire-fighter, a truck-driver – until he was diagnosed with throat cancer in the early 1990s. Having little trust in medical profession (like most Irish people, it has to be said), he refused surgery and decided to fight the disease on his own – by giving up smoking and going on a strict health food diet.

“Healthy foods were all but unknown in Ireland then,” he told me at his house on the fringes of the Burren, where we were having a plentiful (and, no doubt, healthy) dinner, cooked by his partner Rena – also a hardened health-food enthusiast. “You could buy Die Welt and Le Figaro almost everywhere, but for love or money you couldn’t get a fresh pepper…”

It was then that he decided to open a new business – bulk-buying healthy organic products and supplying them to Irish retailers.

He started with organic coffee. With his Dutch business partner Eric, they discovered small coffee-growing co-operatives in Bolivia and began importing pungent and aromatic “Illimani Arabica” to Ireland, where coffee-culture was still rudimentary. While doing so, they made sure they stuck by the rules of fair trade.

“We tried to respect the producers’ life-style letting them grow coffee and sell it themselves rather than exploiting them. We believe that food is a basic human right and not a mass-manufactured commodity,” he said biting into a chunk of homemade organic Nan bread. “And we’ve never paid a penny for advertising – only through word of mouth…”

People’s mouths (read taste buds) indeed proved to be Ian’s best PR agents. His coffee venture became a success, and soon he was also dealing in cheeses, fruit juices, cereals, vegetables, etc – all organic and all bought from independent (mostly Irish) producers and distributed via Irish health-food shops, the number of which kept growing by the year.

As for his cancer, it was soon gone – defeated by Ian’s determination and his new healthy life-style.

“There’s a holistic revolution happening in Ireland at the moment,” he said from behind the wheel of his car the following morning. We were going to Ennis to meet some of his clients.

Ennis was the only place I had visited so far where “Celtic Tiger Ireland” didn’t seem just an abstraction: the town did look and feel dynamic, prosperous and truly European. It was also rather “alternative”, if you know what I mean…

We visited all three existing Ennis health-food shops – quite a lot for a relatively small Irish town. In the busy “Meanwell Wholefoods”, specialising in breads and gluten-free products, I was fascinated to see on sale not just “organic hemp-sprouted bread”, but organic cotton bags and clothes, also made of hemp. John, the shop-owner, was proudly sporting a pair of hemp pants, and I was tempted to ask him what it felt like to be wearing these “hallucinogenic” trousers.

“With the decline of the church in Ireland, people are in need of a new spirituality without a middleman,” sad Clare, co-owner of “Sacred Arts” store. “And a good new spirit requires good new food…”

“People in this country only just started to realise that there’s such a thing as diet,” echoed Carmel, the proprietor of the freshly opened “Carmel’s Health Store”. It looked like the “holistic revolution” that Ian was talking about was indeed happening in Ireland. Well, in Ennis, at least, it was…

Several months ago, Ian started running an “organic and slow food” Sunday market in Banoque, Co Limerick. He found the spot – a disused farm building with a patch of land around it - “purely by intuition” and invited local “slow food” manufacturers to sell their produce there.

It was at the Banoque market that I did my week’s shopping before returning to Dublin. I stocked up on freshly baked tomato-and-garlic bread, herb-and-olive cheeses, vegetables, organic fruit-juices and so on. Having tried all the products before buying, I made sure they were not only healthy, but also tasty. Just like by simply staring at a piece of salo (see above) one could put on weight, I felt I was getting healthier and fitter by simply buying the gorgeous-looking wholesome foods and stacking them up in the boot of my hired car.

On the way back, I stopped in the town of Roscrea, Co Tipperary to have a look at St Cronan’s Roman Catholic church and, if I was lucky, to have a drink of water. On the outside wall of a public toilet shed right behind the church, there were two signs: “Drinking Water”, with no tap underneath, and “Holy Water”, with a tap firmly in place – a classic example of Hobson’s choice. The “Holy Water” had a distinct aftertaste of rust.

I thought that those two signs, with just one tap, could serve as a good metaphor for the Irish dietary (and spiritual) scene of the not-so-distant past: the alternative was there, but only on paper. In reality, people had to use the only “tap”, made available to them by those in power and by their own prejudice – historically motivated and therefore deeply rooted in their psyche.

It was high time to install a second tap under the illusionary “Drinking Water” sign. And from the time spent with Ian, I was able to conclude that the healthy source of natural, if not particularly “Holy”, “drinking water” was already being put in place in some parts of Ireland.

The closure of Bewley’s was indeed the end of an era. But it could also signify a new beginning on the scene of Ireland’s lifestyle. At any rate, with my car boot stuffed with yummy organic products, I knew I could easily resist the blinking lights of “Lido” for at least a week.

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