“Whatever Jenny McNally has, I use. I’m not looking for anyone else.” It’s a statement of utter fidelity from Kevin Burke, chef patron at Library Street in Dublin 2, and it echoes across the top restaurants, buzziest wine bars and most conscientious cafes of the capital.
McNally co-owns and runs the 99-acre McNally Family Farm in North Dublin with her husband Pat and their five children. She has spent her life farming and the last 30 years building her family’s reputation as a stand-alone organic grower. Not only do chefs use McNally produce, but they develop their menus around it.
“Everything that she produces is always just perfect, delicious,” Burke says. “The flavour of something as simple as a carrot from her is 20-fold compared to what you’d get from a regular produce supplier. It’s hard to believe unless you taste them side by side.”
In London, where Burke worked as head chef at Michelin-starred The Ninth restaurant until 2019, it was standard for every kitchen to have its own particular organic vegetable supplier, so it was a jolt when he moved back to Dublin to find that wasn’t commonplace here. It was through a friend, chef Hugh Higgins, that Burke was introduced to Jenny McNally, and he has used her produce ever since.
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“There’s something about her,” Burke says. “She’s no-nonsense, passionate, and she’s never taking the easy route. We work hard enough in the restaurant every single day to make things perfect, and she’s doing it on the exact same level – the exact same.”
McNally’s is not a household name, but as multiple chefs tell me, everyone working in hospitality knows who they are. Eat your way around most interesting spots in the capital, and their produce will be on your plate. It might be at Frank’s Wine Bar, where chef David Bradshaw’s take on Gascon Piperade is a chicken garnish with McNally’s small courgettes and green peppers, or at Kevin O’Donnell’s Michelin Star-tipped Comet, where McNally’s oxheart tomatoes are smoked and served with a tomato and vodka sauce, or at Paul McNamara’s Uno Mas, where he uses their beans, tomatoes and potatoes to make Fasolokia, a kind of vegetable stew. And if you’re ever fortunate enough to swing an invite to one of these chefs’ homes, you’ll find McNally’s produce served up at their kitchen tables too.
“I am McNally’s number one fan,” Paul McNamara says. “My wife discovered McNally’s at a market close to our home, and we’ve been using their veg at home for over 15 years now. It’s the best organic veg I’ve ever used. When you get really good quality fresh veg, it is easy to cook them and make them taste nice, because the work has already been done when growing them.”
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Keen to see what inspires such ardent devotion in Dublin’s chefs, I follow the culinary pilgrimage to the horticultural heartland of North Dublin on a bright autumn morning. Turning off the M1 at Balbriggan and down a narrow lane hedged with hawthorn trees heaving with crimson haws and the last fruiting blackberries of the season, I arrive at McNally’s farm.
From its front facade, a small gravel car park, and two 19th-century barn buildings converted into a cafe and a shop, there is little to alert the casual customer that this is where some of the most serious chefs in the country come to shop for their eateries – and for themselves. Nothing, that is, until Cúán Greene – the Noma-educated chef and proprietor of Ómós, the soon-to-open restaurant in Co Laois backed by tech billionaire John Collison – arrives to collect his order.
A fastidious member of the New Nordic movement, which prioritises sourcing local, seasonal ingredients and working with native plants that have been overlooked or disregarded, Greene is a longtime supporter of McNally’s. He calls them master growers and agrees to do a follow-up interview about his use of their produce.
Things take a turn when I admit I am the one who, while waiting for Jenny McNally to arrive, bought the few remaining slices of sourdough focaccia from the farm shop. I naively laugh when Greene says there won’t be an interview now, unaware that my emails will go unanswered in the coming days.
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From the back of the farm shop, McNally emerges with her long hair pulled back, wearing a McNally’s branded fleece and sturdy boots. We sit down at a picnic bench in front of the shop, and she takes it slow, bringing each leg over the seat to rest on the ground. The work she does, the work she loves, has taken a toll on her body over the decades. “For a long time, it was just Pat and me doing everything. We are both in our 60s, and it should be a time,” she says, “that we are slowing down, taking a step back, selling a few salad leaves – but we are busier than ever.“
While the McNally farmland has been in Pat’s family since the 1960s, McNally’s as it is now began 30 years ago when the couple, with five small children, had reached breaking point.
“The supermarkets were demanding that we have a cold store and a refrigerated delivery van,” McNally says. “They also wanted all the courgettes to be the same size, and the beans topped and tailed, to match the ones being imported from Kenya.
“We had all five kids around the table helping to top and tail, and I said, ‘This is ridiculous. How is this going to work out?’ We can’t build a cold store, we haven’t got a refrigerator van, and we drive an old Volvo. This isn’t going to work.”
Someone suggested cutting out the supermarkets and selling directly to consumers at the Temple Bar Food Market. After a few weeks of deliberation, the couple took a risk and packed up their Volvo with potatoes, cauliflower, swedes, mangetout, courgettes and French beans. “We arrived home with £80 in cash and a few lone potatoes rolling around in the boot.
“That changed our lives,” she says. “Our farming friends didn’t understand it at all; they thought we were mad to sell directly, but it was the start of everything.”
In 1998, the McNallys applied for and were awarded organic certification. It differentiated them from other growers, and by showing up to the market every week without fail, they proved their reliability to their customers.
From the beginning, McNally was adamant they would never sell anything imported, so they began experimenting with different greens and different vegetables, responding to what customers were looking for.
“We had these Italians living in Ireland who were really missing the bitter leaves that they can get at home, so we started looking at seed catalogues, and we began growing collard greens, chard, dandelion leaves,” she says.
Almost everything McNally’s sells is harvested the day before it is sold, she says, as we walk through the propagating polytunnel, one of 54 erected across the farm.
“We have a growing climate very similar to Japan. Anything they can grow there, we can grow here. We grow mizuna leaves, a Japanese mustard green and komatsuna, for tender greens.”
McNally continues to point out different varieties as we pass by thousands of tiny leafy greens sprouting in hundreds of propagating trays. “Spinach, chard, winter purslane...” she pauses here in front of the little heart-shaped leaves. “There’s another name for winter purslane, actually; miner’s lettuce. It was known as that because it’s so high in vitamin C that miners used it to ward off scurvy during the Gold Rush.”
Winter purslane deteriorates so quickly once picked that it is rarely sold commercially, but McNally’s can do what others can’t. Everything they sell is grown within metres of their farm shop, or within several miles of their market stalls. Every week of the year, they sell from Naomh Olaf in Leopardstown on a Friday and Temple Bar and Glasnevin on a Saturday.
Walk into any supermarket in Ireland and it is almost impossible to tell what time of the year it is. As consumers, we expect to be able to buy tomatoes at Christmas and carrots in the summer. We’ve become so accustomed to a constant supply, we don’t blink at blackberries imported from Portugal, tomatoes from the Netherlands, or swedes from Chile. Our domestic horticulture sector has contracted as our shopping baskets are 83 per cent full of imported fruit and vegetables.
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McNally’s is an education in why local seasonal food, where the quality of the soil is the top priority, has a naturally enhanced flavour profile. “Carrots taste better in the winter, because they’ve got that little bit of cold before you start eating them,” McNally says. “And I know you can get tomatoes in December, but there is just no flavour, because you need sunshine to help them ripen.”
She plucks a cherry tomato straight from a towering vine and hands it to me. Almost out of season in Ireland, it is a last gasp burst of sunshine flavour that won’t come around again until next year.
It sounds distressing for McNally to see customers at market stalls throwing produce around, not willing to see or understand the labour that has gone into each tomato, each potato, each carrot.
“It hurts,” McNally says. “I just think, have a bit of respect for the amount of work we’ve put in and have respect for that particular vegetable, which absolutely looks amazing. Maybe not to your eyes, but it’s still amazing. And the flavour, it’s fantastic.”
Although supplying restaurants was never Jenny McNally’s intention, that sector now makes up roughly 10 per cent of the farm’s trade. It could be more, but McNally’s are discerning about who they work with.
“It started with people buying from us at market stalls,” McNally says, “we didn’t know they were chefs, we just thought they were nice guys and they liked the veg, but all of a sudden they were asking if we would be interested in supplying.” McNally’s initial reaction was no, they had no delivery route, and it wasn’t what they built their business on.
But when Michelle Darmody of the Cake Cafe on Camden Street asked for a kilo of mixed leaves a week, McNally agreed, doing the mental calculations of the work an extra kilo a week would entail. “All of a sudden it went up to three kilos, and now we do at least 80-90 kilos just of leaves a week for the restaurant trade.”
As McNally’s has grown, the restaurant scene in Ireland has changed. It’s no longer chic to have a menu of exotic or imported ingredients; people are interested in provenance and how a chef can take something perceived as mundane and make it spectacular.
Part of the attraction for chefs to work with McNally’s is the diversity of what they grow, making it possible for the chefs they supply to work truly seasonally.
“September to February can get a bit tricky and a long stint of using a lot of the same ingredients, but it’s fun to tap into the creative juices,” says Andrew Kelly, head chef at Notions bistro and wine bar on Francis Street. “But their quality is consistently amazing, and they grow plants you can’t get anywhere else. Currently, we have a Hokkaido pumpkin dish on the menu. It’s a beautiful pumpkin, and McNally’s grows it amazingly. We prep the pumpkin in three different ways - pureed, pickled, roasted - and serve it with scallops and kale from McNally’s farm.”
Although McNally continues to be the face of the farm, she is keen to stress that the reason it has been able to grow and expand is that Sarah, Aoife, Niamh, Stephan and Patrick, the five McNally children who once sat topping and tailing beans after school, have all returned to work on the farm in different roles. Sarah and Aoife run the cafe, Niamh runs the shop, and Stephan and Patrick are constantly researching, bringing new growing techniques to the farm and introducing agroforestry.
It is a true family enterprise, where only the family are trusted to harvest, and a McNally is always there behind the market stall table to answer questions, or watch in horror as people scrunch tomatoes.
At a time when we never have to know who grew the food on our plates, McNally’s is a reminder of what’s possible – that even in a capital city, it’s possible to know the name and the story of the woman, her husband and their children, who have laboured so we can eat well.
