The Michelin o’ the Green

If it’s St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland, you can bet a green beer that the market is brisk in paddywhackery: bus tours to haunted castles, special offers on clover-shaped golf club covers and plaques bearing personalized limericks.

In common with almost everyone working in the ever-green field of Irish tourism, John and Sally McKenna rely on paddywhackery. But in their case, they make their living telling visitors how to avoid it.

They are the husband-and-wife publishers of the Bridgestone Irish food guide series. For the last 11 years, they have specialized in directing visitors away from the clover-leaf edition of Ireland and toward the modern country inhabited by the Irish themselves.

For most people, a scheme to eat and travel for a living would remain a pipe dream. However, in 1989, the McKennas were just dotty enough to attempt it.

It was an odd choice for a couple of scant means. Their office was the tiny living room of their home: a damp rented workman’s cottage in Dublin, very much like that featured in “My Left Foot.” Their computer was a used Amstrad borrowed from Sally’s parents. The desk was the dining table, the couch a beanbag.

John had been a barrister, but one so lackluster, he says, that his only phone calls were from Sally reminding him to pick up celeriac on his way home. He followed his uninspired term at the bar, he says, with stabs at rock and film journalism. Here, again, he says he was “stratospherically unsuccessful.”

Sally had trained as a chef, and it was her idea that they produce a food guide to Ireland. To get around the country, they bought a secondhand Renault 4.

“It cost a hundred quid [$150] and had 96,000 miles on the clock. It needed to be hit with a hammer to start it. When we took it to the mechanic, we asked, ‘What do you recommend?’ and he said, ‘Prayer.’ ”

But with that car, a hammer and a bicycle strapped to the roof, the McKennas covered all 32 counties of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. “John would go off on the bicycle to one place, and I would take the car to another, then we would meet back up before doing the same for dinner,” says Sally.

Normally, covering Belfast would have been short work. “After years of peace now, it is hard to remember what a bad year 1989 was for the city,” says John. “The level of bombings and killings was extremely high.”

But they had heard that a new restaurant was opening in the inner city. The owner was a local chef named Paul Rankin, who had only just returned to Ireland after years abroad, including a stint in the Napa Valley. Approaching the new dining room, the McKennas were stunned. Here, not far from an IRA mural illuminated by the sweeping searchlights of patrolling British tanks, was the equivalent of Campanile in a war zone.

“You stepped out of a no-go area into this room,” says John. “It was very white and bright, very chic and Californian, and we said to ourselves: ‘This is going to be a big success, or a big failure.’ ”

Inside, John recalls, the meatballs were made of veal. The venison was not gamey but simply rich and came, they found, from the Guinness estate. Strawberry shortcake was so good that it begged for some fancier name.

Within months, well ahead of other critics, the first McKenna guide was out, and Roscoff had its first rave review. Eventually, the Roscoff became Belfast’s first restaurant to win a Michelin star.

From the start, the McKennas were more intrepid and reflective than established critics. But what made their guide unique in Ireland was including not just restaurants but suppliers.

Inspired by the “Food-Lover’s Guide to France” by American journalist Patricia Wells, the McKennas provided entries on Ireland’s best bars, breweries, distillers, wine shops and food producers. There were notes on open-air markets, on fishmongers, cheese-makers, craft butchers, farm shops, bakeries and pastry shops.

The emphasis was on comestibles, not decor. A ramshackle German-Irish social club in Donegal was praised for the best smoked salmon in the country (the secret, evidently, was the quality of the oak chips from the local coffin maker).

In County Cork, the guide took readers to stalls in open-air markets where farmers sold buttered eggs, a local specialty thought essential to a true Irish breakfast. It also praised a wiry, eccentric American named Bill Hogan, who makes immense wheels of Alpine-style hard cheeses named after the local mountains Gabriel and Desmond.

By 1991, the first edition of the McKenna guide had been so well received that the second one appeared with sponsorship from the Bridgestone tire company. A series of prestigious British food-writing prizes soon followed, including the coveted Glenfiddich and Andre Simon awards.

The work pace doubled as the McKennas began to produce spinoff “100 best” pocket guides to restaurants, hotels and vegetarian places. He wrote these; she edited.

Then there was a television series involving both of them and appearances on commercials for her. John also was producing a weekly food column for the Irish Times.

Somehow they also managed to have three children and build a house overlooking a scenic estuary in County Cork.

The rise of the McKennas in 11 short years was too conspicuous for them not to have collected a few enemies. They are not, for example, popular in County Longford, where the best thing they could find, they joked, was a pet food factory owned by then-Prime Minister Albert Reynolds.

But the claws really came out only last March when, for the second time, they omitted Dublin’s only dining room with two Michelin stars from their “100 best” pocket guide to Irish restaurants.

They had, says Sally, eaten too many disappointing meals at Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud. The last time they wrote about it, they could only sum up that it was a place for “Dublin’s moneyed classes to spend.”

So they stopped writing about it. For them it seemed a discreet solution. But to others, it was provocation.

“Cannonballs flew,” says John, who was even taken to task by a colleague on the opinion pages of the Irish Times. He had committed, accused a fellow journalist, “the culinary equivalent of discussing the European motor car industry and not mentioning Mercedes-Benz.”

The Guilbaud affair even brought Helen Lucy Burke, the grande dame of Irish restaurant critics, out of retirement. Yes, she conceded in the pages of the Irish Sunday Times, Guilbaud was a good place to “relieve rich old moneybags of their loot.” But all the same, John McKenna seemed to be, she said, “in a state of permanent estrus over food.”

“There were some seriously bitchy remarks,” Sally says with a sigh. But John was less bothered. “If food is worth eating, it’s worth fighting about,” he says.

A critical exchange in the old war zone of Belfast, however, passed without anything like the Dubliners’ vitriol. Here, again, the McKennas became disenchanted with a high-profile restaurant, this time with their old favorite, the Roscoff. It was slipping, they thought, as the Rankin family became distracted by its spinoff bakeries and cafes.

“Our reaction changed from saying, ‘This is absolutely the best restaurant in Ireland,’ to, ‘This is not really working anymore,’ ” says Sally.

“He needed a model that was simpler and called for food that was repeatable when he wasn’t at the stove,” says John.

Unlike Guilbaud, Paul Rankin did not launch a war in the media. Rather, he shut the Roscoff. He has only just relaunched it as the more casual restaurant Cayenne.

“I suspect that Paul Rankin has moved to producing the kind of food that he himself likes to eat,” says John. “And Cayenne is great.”

If the McKennas themselves could benefit from a spot of criticism, it is the caution that not only overextended chefs become slap-happy. In one entry in the new 2000 series pocket guide to restaurants, a Japanese restaurateur in Cork is likened to Garbo, Toscanini, Gable, Rubenstein, John Lennon and Jimmy Dean. All in one sentence.

And there is no mention of the food.

But this sort of gush is the exception, not the rule. Return to the main guides--they are far and away better than the “100 best” pocket ones--and no former Beatles are needed to convey the appeal of the hot buttered lobster at Ballymaloe House in County Cork.

But here’s hoping that the McKennas never really get a grip on their excitement. Their guides have a breathless quality for a reason. The McKennas are forever tearing away after something wild: the ever-changing essence of Irish farming, food selling and cookery.

And, in producing these guides, this ebullient couple show real hospitality in inviting visitors to Ireland to join in the chase.