We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our customers and suppliers a very happy and peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year. Thanks to your help and support, Market Lane has continued to go from strength to strength, in a difficult economic climate.
Your loyalty means a lot to us and we look forward to offering you more of your favourite dishes, as well as some new and exciting dishes, in 2012.
The new Market Lane menu includes a first for us – fish pie. It’s a popular dish, but we’ve never had a dish like it before. Still, it fits in with the Market Lane motto, to serve down to earth food with a twist.
The fish we use for our fish pie changes according to what’s in season. At the moment, it’s filled with cod, pollock and whiting, a smorgasbord of fish. We source the fish from our main fish supplier, Ballycotton Seafood, which is based in the English Market.
To give an extra flavour, we add a lightly spiced tomato sauce to the fish and mix in lemongrass, tomatoes, ginger and flageolet beans. We then top it with a soft golden mash. It comes with garden peas on the side. We serve it in lovely French oven proof dishes and it looks yummy leaving the kitchen.
We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the reaction from our customers and we’re hoping our fish pie will become a fixture on the menu. If you’re looking for a warming winter dish that’s easy on the stomach and healthy too, then look no further.
As part of our new menu, we’ve introduced a classic Christmas dish – game pie. Game pie has featured on our menu in some form or another for the past three winters. This year, our game pie is a mix of pheasant, venison and wild boar, topped with herb mash and served with seasonal root vegetables and braised red cabbage.
Game is always in plentiful supply at this time of year, so we’re guaranteed a good flow of quality meat. We source it from game suppliers in Clare and from Premier Game, a company run by Paul Fletcher in Skeheenarinky in Co Tipperary.
Game has a strong flavour and it can be an acquired taste, so we cook it slowly to balance out the flavour. It’s a nice introduction to game for people who haven’t tried it before and want to add new tastes to their palate. And the game connoisseurs will be satisfied too.
The root vegetables and red cabbage add texture and variety to the dish. Their sweet flavour contrasts nicely with the flavour of the meat. This makes the game pie a more rounded dish which doesn’t just rely on the meat for its flavour.
Customers love our game pie because it tastes a little bit different and because it’s a hearty winter dish that satisfies even the biggest appetite. It’s ideal comfort food for a cold winter’s night and will leave you with a warm, contented glow.
We’ve a bit of exciting news for you this week. Market Lane’s Head Chef Keith O’Flynn is part of a line-up of well-known chefs giving Masterchef-style cookery demonstrations at Cork Institute of Technology. And it’s all in a good cause.
Keith is also Head Chef at our sister restaurant The Castle Cafe, located in the CIT Observatory at Blackrock Castle in Cork. Because of that link, he was approached to be part of the series of charity cookery demonstrations, which will run every Wednesday until December 7th.
Keith will be manning the CIT kitchen on Wednesday November 30th and he will be showing people clever ways to use lesser-known cuts of meat. Each chef cooks for a charity of their choice and Keith’s charity is Marymount Hospice, a cause close to his heart.
During his demonstration, Keith will be sharing a few tricks of the trade that will encourage people to be a bit more adventurous, especially with seldom-used cuts of meat like pork neck and chump of lamb. Chump of lamb is really tender when sliced thinly. People will also be able to make their own gravies and stocks for soup and stews.
Food is something we can all relate to. We all love it and we’re all interested in finding out more about how to cook it. So it’ll be worth braving the elements on a cold November night to get the inside track from a master of the trade. And knowing you’re supporting a good cause will add an extra warm glow.
All fish dishes have to start somewhere. Our fish dishes start like this.
We prepare our fish with care in the Market Lane Kitchen
And end like this.
Beautifully dressed shellfish
We’ve plenty of treats for seafood lovers. Come along and enjoy seared tuna stake, tempura of monkfish, or classic salmon.
These days, people don’t want a big, heavy lunch. They want a light, refreshing meal that won’t sit on their stomach for the rest of the day and that makes them feel healthy. That’s why we’ve added some inventive salads to our menu.
Our salads go far beyond the stables of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. We add a Mediterranean flavour with feta cheese salad and seafood lovers will enjoy a salad with lemon sole goujons. People with bigger appetites can tuck into our hearty beef salad. You can also order salad as a side portion.
Only the freshes vegetables go into MArket Lane salads
We produce our salads with the minimum of fuss. We have enough experience to know what works in a salad. But we also like stumbling across unusual ingredients and adding them to our menu. Every so often, a supplier will knock on our door and alert us to an exciting new product we never knew existed.
People quickly get bored with the same food, so we change our salad choice every eight weeks. Even if we keep a salad on the menu, we change the ingredients so it tastes fresh and new.
Our main vegetable supplier, Keelings, supplies most of the ingredients for our salads. But at the moment, the ingredients for the four salads on our menu come from a total of nine suppliers, so we can source fresh ingredients from a wide pool.
Our salads aren’t just weak copies of other dishes on the menu. They’re signature dishes in their own right, varied, fresh and light on your pocket. And they’ll leave you wanting more.
When you’re choosing wine to drink with your meal, it’s always interesting to find out where it comes from and more and more people are curious about wines. Many of the wines you see on the Market Lane wine list come from one major supplier, Woods Wines.
Set up by Tony and Dualta Woods in 1998, Woods Wines specialises in supplying wines to the Irish catering industries. Tony and Dualta source the wines themselves from small, family-run vineyards all over the world.
Most of the wines they supply come from France, with a fair sprinkling of Spanish and Argentinean wines thrown in. Mont Auriol Sauvignon Blanc is popular and a new wine called Celestia from Spain is also proving a hit with the customers. The wines arrive at Market Lane once a week. If you order a house wine, generally, it will be from Woods Wines.
Drinking a wine that matches the food really enhances a meal. Like the Market Lane menu, the wines from Woods Wines are tailored to the seasons, lighter wines for summer, comforting red wines to go with winter comfort food. And their recommendations are 100% reliable.
Dualta was a recent contestant on Masterchef, so it’s clear that he’s passionate about food and wine. It is this passion and expertise that has helped Woods Wine become our biggest wine supplier. But above all, it is the relationship that Woods Wines has created that makes them a favourite with us. We know that if we’re ever short of wine, Dualta or Tony will come and deliver it personally. That’s the sort of reliability money can’t buy.
Ask people what their favourite part of a meal is and nine times out of 10, they’ll say dessert. Dessert really does make life sweeter. It’s a reward for a job well done. It lifts our spirits. It’s a chance to forget about worries and waistlines and cut loose.
Maybe your ideal dessert features chocolate. Maybe you like gooey confections covered in dollops of cream. Maybe you like comforting stodge that reminds you of childhood. Or you prefer something refreshing, with a fruity tang. Whatever your taste, you’ll find a dessert that fits on our dessert menu.
It’s common for restaurants to buy in their desserts. And it certainly saves a lot of money and labour. But early on, we decided to make our desserts in house, because we want to have control over how our desserts look and taste. The only dessert we don’t make ourselves is the ice cream, which comes from Leadmore and from Baldwin’s in Waterford.
So we make our desserts in two large ‘combi’ ovens. The bar and the kitchen staff work closely together to ensure that the desserts are made to perfection. The dessert is put together in the kitchen and the bar adds the finishing touches. The bar and kitchen are in constant communication to make sure that they have the right amount of ingredients.
Two pastry chefs are in charge of making the desserts and they’re helped by three commis chefs. They work in the upstairs kitchen, making desserts for Market Lane and for Castle Cafe, our sister restaurant. They have huge amounts of raw ingredients to deal with every day, so they must be calm and precise in all their actions.
Chocolate Cups - round off your meal without the guilt
We change our dessert menu every three months to keep it fresh. But if there’s a real favourite, it’ll stick around for longer. Our banoffee has been on the menu since Market Lane began. We’ll be dropping it soon and we know it’ll be sadly missed. But it’s making way for other delicious dishes, which we hope will become your new favourites.
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