WHEN I read about that newly Michelin-starred restaurant in Galway being a “terroir-based” establishment, I was forced – not for the first time – to look up the expression and remind myself what exactly it meant. Then I remembered why I always forget: because explanations of “terroir” often start with a claim that it has “no equivalent in English”.
But I checked my Collins-Robert French dictionary anyway. And, au contraire, it did give an English translation, declaring baldly that the word meant “soil” – nothing more or less. That would mean the Galway restaurant was “soil-based”. Which I supposed was fair enough. It would describe both the building (I hope), and many of the menu ingredients, at least before they’re washed.
Clearly, however, the term was meant to convey a bit more than that. So I kept digging and learned again that it originally applied mainly to French wine, where it still refers to the combined effect of geography, soil, grape variety, climate, local traditions, etc, that make each of the country’s multifarious vineyards unique.
Hence the best definition I’ve found so far – applicable to food and wine alike – is that terroir means “the taste of a place”. And it’s a ragingly popular concept now, from Grenoble to Galway. Yet I’m always a bit sceptical about it. Because even around Grenoble, the supposed authenticity of regional cuisines is not always as deep-dyed as it lets on.
In his fascinating book, The Discovery of France, Graham Robb writes that as recently as the 19th century, most of France was still a gourmet’s nightmare. Even the most basic of foodstuffs there could be a disappointing experience. “For tourists who ventured beyond Paris,” suggests Robb, “the true taste of France was stale bread”.
Rather than arising naturally from their terroirs, he claims, it was from Paris that many famously “provincial” dishes first reached the provinces. He quotes a scene from an 1880 novel set in remote Bourbonnais, where a family is shocked to see their visiting Parisian relatives collecting frogs from a pond with a view to eating them.
Frogs’ legs are of course a classic French peasant’s dish. Despite which, the novelist, a peasant himself, admitted: “Since no one knew how to prepare them, the [Paris] nephew was forced to cook them himself.” But getting back to the newly-starred restaurant – Aniar – I was intrigued to know what the taste of Galway (other than fish and chips from McDonagh’s of Shop Street) might involve. So I looked up their sample menu. And although an impressive thing in itself, I’m still not much wiser.
It’s a rather minimalist work, listing the ingredients of the dishes and little else. Thus one main course is “wild brill, celeriac, celery, clams, lovage”, for example; another “lamb loin belly, onion, swede, ramson, parsley root”.
Clearly, all the dishes are guaranteed free of verbs, prepositions, unnecessary adjectives, and words like “jus”, which is very welcome. And I take the point that the ingredients are fresh and locally produced. But if that’s all “terroir-based” means, could they not just say it in English? Or would the Michelin people have disapproved?
WHATEVER ELSE they may be, the folk-rock band Mumford Sons are not terroir-based. From London themselves, they play music closer in style to Oklahoma. In fact their reinvention as “banjo-toting Dust Bowl refugees” has attracted some scorn from their critics. None of whom appeared to have infiltrated the adoring crowd in Toner’s Pub in Dublin on Thursday, where I saw them performing as part of A**h*r’s Day.
The latter event has itself attracted widespread criticism: much of it also on the grounds of inauthenticity. To the existing resentment about how a marketing wheeze managed to be taken seriously overnight as a real festival was this year added anger at some of the ingredients: namely that all the headline acts were imported from Britain at the expense of local, organically-grown products.
On the plus side, Diageo has wisely pulled back on some of the event’s earlier excesses: most notably the 17:59 toast, which appeared designed to ensure that customers were already drunk by 7pm. Even so, the pubs were still crowded early. By tea-time in Dublin on Thursday, it already felt like St Patrick’s Day, which is not a good thing in my experience.
Still, you can complain all you like about the power of the evil geniuses in Diageo’s marketing department. But the fact is that they have been able to tap into a well of genuine pride that exists in their main product here, and that seems to extend even to people who don’t drink it.
Guinness is, after all, one of those very few Irish brands that has global recognition. And it is undoubtedly terroir-based. A fact even James Joyce recognised, when he had Joe Hynes ordering a round of drinks in another Dublin pub in 1904. “Give it a name, citizen, says Joe. Wine of the country, says he.”