Cuisine in County Cork by Andrew Eames

Featured Hotel in County Cork

Castlemartyr

"This luxury hotel is set in a vast estate in County Cork; the house is 17th-century and the castle ruins date back 1,000 years."

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Not far from where Ireland waggles the last of its bony fingers in the Atlantic - 'water and ground in their extremity' according to Seamus Heaney - is a pretty fishing port made famous in the 16th century for its trade in wine and salt, and which plays host to Ireland's premier gourmet celebration.

The Kinsale Food Circle's Festival of Autumn Flavours tries to do for food what the Edinburgh Festival does for the performing arts.

This small sheltered port boasts its own wine museum and a staggering 35 restaurants for its 2,000-odd population, but there's not a greasy spoon or a chippie in sight. Fish landed at the quayside is snapped up for Japanese sushi or Thai fishcakes before you can say 'potnoodle'. The local butcher has re-styled himself 'victualler' and the fishmonger has opened a seafood bar called the Fishy Fishy Café to appease those who, having bought their langoustines, simply cannot wait until they get home before eating them.

A typical Kinsale festival (usually early October) includes the likes of a champagne reception, two black tie balls, street entertainment, historical walks, brewery tours, wine tastings, a jazz seafood brunch, a Guinness & Oyster party and a competition to see who can pull the most perfect pint of the black stuff. In-between whiles festival patrons are encouraged to test as many of the elite Food Circle restaurants whenever (god forbid) they feel peckish.

But you don't just have to be a foodie to have a good time in Kinsale; the streets are so packed with upscale shops selling arts, crafts and curios that it is easier to buy a pair of antique french knickers than a packet of Hobnobs.

In truth, there are plenty of other places besides Kinsale in County Cork where you can to eat well, and not just at festival time.

Firstly there's Cork itself, the former monastic settlement of St Finbarr, now handsomely Georgian and Ireland's third largest city, but still with a small-town atmosphere. Right in the heart of town, with its entrance on Princes St, is the 18th century English Market, which showcases a wonderful display of regional foodstuffs. Here pride of place has to go to the huge display of local seafood from O'Connells, but here too is a Belgian patisserie, a French delicatessen, and a stall selling the ultimate local speciality, tripe and drisheen (blood sausage), which is definitely an acquired taste. If you should want to acquire it, then sitting up in the eaves of the English Market, above all that colour and activity, is the Farmgate restaurant, serving traditional Irish cuisine using the ingredients brought up from downstairs.

Good food in Cork is not necessarily a metropolitan affair. Fine cuisine and fine scenery run hand in hand in Ireland's far corner, particularly where West Cork's fingers of land frame inlets of calm water rich with cormorants, seals, and mussel farms. This is an intensely local land of small farmers and fishermen and the ingredients are all immediately to hand - the Bantry Bay mussels and scallops, the farm-made cheeses, the lamb from the valleys and wild salmon from the Blackwater river - and oftentimes they are prepared simply, without fuss.

At Annie's, for example, in Ballydehob, the menu adheres firmly to simple principles such as roast rack of lamb and prime sirloin steak, but the place is so popular you need to book weeks in advance to get in. This is partly because the restaurant itself is so tiny that Annie has to give her customers the menu and send them for a pre-dinner pint of the black stuff in a very old-fashioned pub-cum-grocery store run by two elderly spinsters over the road. The spinsters will be very curious to know who you are and where you come from, so the aperitif is a cultural experience in itself.

But there are fancier restaurants here too, some of them the creation of the many Europeans who have made homes in County Cork, bringing a flood of flageolet beans and sundried tomatoes to where the sun don't shine.

One of the best is Blair's Cove, a former farm by the small village of Durrus, where French and Belgian chefs work wonders with local ingredients. The high-beamed restaurant has been converted from a former barn with candelabra on the grand piano and wonderful sea views out over Dunmanus Bay to the Sheep's Head peninsular. The starters are presented as a smorgasbord and main dishes are cooked over an open fire. Once you've eaten all you can there's no need to climb back into the car to do battle with narrow, sheep-filled lanes; the restaurant's Belgian/German owners have created sophisticated apartments and self-catering cottages out of the outbuildings, and you can rent them on a per day basis.

By far the most cosmopolitan of the West Cork peninsulas is Mizen Head, with the village of Schull as the main centre. Over the years a selection of art and crafts shops, delicatessens, cafes and restaurants have found their niche on Schull's short main street. Typical of these innovators is Adele's delightfully retro tea shop on the high street, which manages to serve both cakes and ale - where the ale is a weissbier from Munich and all the cakes are homemade. You can lunch here on a salami and salad ciabatta or Tuscan bean stew.

The quality of Adele's and Schull's other food outlets have prompted respected food writers Sally and John McKenna, who happen to live locally, to nominate the village as the food capital of Ireland. Kinsale, of course, doesn't agree.

Mizen Head's scenery gets better the further south you go, with several fine beaches and views out to the Fastnet Rock. The Mizen Head Visitor Centre, a sort of Irish Land's End, has a few interesting odds and ends in old lighthouse buildings, but its position across a giant chasm is wonderfully melodramatic. And while you're down at this end, stop off for a drink and a seafood chowder at O'Sullivans on the quay in Crookhaven, Ireland's most south-westerly village. The landlord speaks fluent French and right next door is a Breton seafood restaurant.

The coast and peninsulars of West Cork haven't always been a centre for fine living. In fact, there's plenty of evidence of starvation if you look for it. The great potato famine, the cause of so much emigration, laid waste to whole villages and the map is thick with cillin (famine burial grounds). But tourism has led a revival and multi-coloured paintpots have transformed many a high street.

Further inland, the castles and manor houses in the pastoral setting of the Blackwater Valley have had a new lease of life too, particularly with the likes of Jeremy Irons and David Putnam buying them up and moving in. But some of the traditional families are still in residence, aristocratic hosts who graciously receive paying guests and sit them down to dinner amongst the family silver.

The O'Callaghans at Longueville House, for example, look across the valley towards the ruin of their former family seat - destroyed by Oliver Cromwell. Their new (18th century) mansion is now a Relais & Chateaux hotel run by the latest generation, William, a chef who works his ingredients very hard.

But my personal favourite was Ballyvolane, a six bedroomed Italianate house with a lovely formal walled garden with dovecote behind, and its own fishing lakes in front. Ballyvolane is the home of the slightly eccentric Jeremy and Merrie Green, the latter a mad keen fisherwoman who regularly arranges access to a large salmon beat on the Blackwater for her guests. In their house I sat down for dinner of medallions of lamb at a long polished table under the family portraits, and made conversation with fellow guests. On the night I was there they were toasting the health of a French aristocrat, who spent three months of every year in West Cork. Which is possibly the best commendation of the local food of all.