Corinna Hardgrave, restaurant critic at The Irish Times, died after an illness earlier this week. She was 64. As Corinna’s most recent editor at The Irish Times, I was lucky enough to accompany her on a couple of her trips into the wild as she conducted restaurant reviews. One was the notoriously hard to book Chubbys in Clontarf, Dublin 3, where she wrote of hijacking my family’s reservation in pursuit of her professional goal. In reality, the evening was a pure pleasure, as everything was with Corinna – planning with her, reading her work, and sitting at the same table while she merrily but always professionally pursued her reviewing alchemy.
My daughter, with us in Chubbys that evening, recalls now how while I was admonishing her for having her elbows on the table, Corinna – who had perfect manners – told her never to worry about how she ate, just about enjoying her food. Enjoyment was the premise by which she lived and kindness to those around her was the natural byproduct of that.
[ Corinna Hardgrave, restaurant critic of The Irish Times, diesOpens in new window ]
For you, the reader, this kindness came in the form of always engaging and entertaining restaurant reviews and other work upon which you could rely fully and without question. Corinna carried her rare and immense skill for getting to a restaurant’s essence within a few hundred words with a characteristic lightness but never without seriousness. Her responsibility to be correct, fair and democratic was always woven through her work in a thread of integrity obvious even to those whose restaurants may have attracted negative reviews.
And there have certainly been those, containing zingers such as: “It is, without a doubt, the worst battered fish I’ve ever had. Anywhere. Ever.” and “It’s a revenue stream with a menu”. Once, there were oysters described as “four steamed lumps, swollen like they have spent too long in a sauna” and pasta “thick enough to give your jaw a workout”.
RM Block
There was never flippancy in words such as this, and there was never an attempt to grab headlines with snappy dismissals of a hospitality team’s hard work – the motivation was always fairness backed by a service to readers who are seeking a positive experience worth their time and money when they eat out.
This desire could also be seen in Corinna’s longer pieces of writing in The Irish Times, such as where she highlighted poor staff conditions or unfairness in the hospitality sector. One example featured former workers in a restaurant reporting feeling “humiliated” and recalling habitually being called unpleasant names by an authority figure.
She was a fierce champion of Irish produce too, always seeking detailed information on a restaurant’s provenance policies before filing a review and calling them out when she was not satisfied – Polish chicken and smoked salmon from Scotland on a Dublin menu were among her most recent shocks.
When the Michelin Guide Ceremony for Britain and Ireland was being held in Dublin earlier this year, she was hugely critical of what she saw as a missed Irish opportunity to use a ready-made platform to promote domestic food and restaurant culture. “And the response? Very little,” she wrote. Improvement on this, and on restaurant provenance, would be a fitting legacy.
If there was a notable chink in Corinna’s fairness armour, it related to truffle oil – “People often ask me what I like to eat, and the answer is, just about everything, as long as it doesn’t come with truffle oil,” she once wrote, restating the position several times over her six years as restaurant critic for The Irish Times. “Dining etiquette should start with one basic law: no more truffle oil, anywhere, ever,” made it very clear, again, late last year.
Five-star reviews were rare across her career – which spanned several Irish titles – demonstrating the care she took in reflecting a restaurant’s whole picture. Two provide fitting bookends for her work in The Irish Times – one from soon after she began here and one from a couple of weeks ago.
“The very first spoonful, a tiny tomato that ruptures into a stream of joy in my mouth is as playful as it is exquisite. It looks like a cherry tomato, but it yields with a bit of pressure, the membrane cracking to release a gazpacho broth so pure, that I am worried that this menu may have peaked too soon,” she wrote at the start of her 2021 review of Chapter One by Mickael Viljanen in Dublin 1. “This lunch is faultless and the level of precision is exceptional,” she concluded, predicting that Viljanen’s cooking would in time attract a third Michelin star.
Early last month, she reviewed Ómós, Cúán Greene’s much-admired restaurant and guest house in Abbeyleix, Co Laois. Again, she found “faultless” cooking.
“What you’re getting at Ómós is the confidence that comes with maturity, an understanding of what to leave out, both in the design of the restaurant and the menu. Some dishes are delicate, others quite robust – the 12 courses paced to balance one another. There’s a signature here, a chef’s imprint with original dishes you won’t find anywhere else,” she wrote. “I’d expect Ómós to go in at one star in the next Michelin Guide but, believe me, it is already cooking at two-star level.”
The huge care that went into writing these reviews was obvious, just as it was across all of Corinna’s insightful canon of articles. Those of us who travelled with her along the way enjoyed every element of the experience, just as much as her thousands of loyal readers did.
