The Menu: Dublin's Big Grill Festival is set to be a delectable BBQ firestarter

Irish Examiner

4 days ago

Fifteen years ago, I interviewed a barbecue pitmaster from Tennessee who'd wound up living just outside Clonakilty. My then-experience of live fire cooking was minimal, potentially lethal.
So, it was fascinating to meet someone of a similar vintage, with plenty of similarities in our comparatively comfortable upbringings as white, 'first world' westerners, albeit separated by Atlantic Ocean and occasional continent.
Yet, he was mostly reared on food cooked over live fire, as our ancestors did for millennia, this entirely primitive practice a fundamental part of his otherwise contemporary childhood.
Standing in spiteful grey rain at the back door of his rented rural Irish bungalow, he slugged on a beer, shoved the half-full can up a chicken's arse and perched the bird on its aluminium throne in a bog- standard kettle barbecue — 'beer-butt chicken'.
He threw a steak directly onto hot coals, cooking it 'caveman style'. This was all done with the detached nonchalance that comes from habits ingrained over a lifetime, as if he were throwing a TV dinner into the microwave.
Growing up, Christmas turkey would be cooked outdoors in a barbecue pit as snow fell and the thermometer dropped below zero.
He subsequently opened a decent little barbecue restaurant in Clon but it didn't last. I suspected he was a man in Ireland before his time, especially in light of the extraordinary live fire cooking at this year's Big Grill BBQ & Food Festival (August 14-17) in Dublin's Herbert Park.
I recently wrote of another Irish barbecue festival, Smokin' Soul's Feast of Fire, in Co Wexford, a huge and deserved success just weeks ago.
While fine food was to be had in abundance at Feast of Fire, it is much more of a technical deep dive for the committed barbecue heads hellbent on bolstering their knowledge.
Big Grill is a broader church, targeting a wider audience, reflecting its roots. Founder Andy Noonan started out staging dance music events. While living in the Dublin Mountains, he began hosting live fire cookouts for friends.
His first barbecue outlet, Fowl Play, followed and he founded Big Grill in 2014; the organic nature of its evolution has seen it grow into a world-class barbecue festival.
A regular on the world live fire cooking circuit, the ever-affable Noonan recognises the best way to connect with a stranger is to befriend them over food — and barbecue is a quintessential communal eating experience.
It's how he packs the Big Grill roster each year with smokin' superstars; they always love it, spreading the gospel among peers.
This year's lineup includes John Bates of Interstellar BBQ, in Austin, Texas, cooking his iconic dish, peach tea-glazed pork belly, and Ali Clem, of La Barbecue, also in Austin, cooking an old-school Texas brisket and coleslaw.
Both restaurants were among the first barbecue spots to receive Michelin recognition.
But Michelin is an irrelevance in that state, where Texas Monthly BBQ reigns supreme. When editor Daniel Vaughn compiles his annual top 50, it can turn barbecue outlets into multi-million dollar enterprises.
Vaughn, too, has succumbed to the Big Grill's charms, his contacts further burnishing Noonan's bill, along with homegrown heroes such as Reyna Mediterranean Grill, Chiya and Achara.
Sure, you'll find all the Irish live fire fanatics in abundance at Big Grill as well, keen to learn from these magnificent practitioners, with plenty of demo action on the programme.
The bulk of the crowd, though, will be there to eat superb food, get a bit squiffy (with 10 craft breweries, wine bars, and cocktail bars all vying to fill glasses) and then cut a rug on the dancefloor, DJs and bands furnishing the tunes, while the kids, faces painted, mainline ice cream.
Even if the sun doesn't shine, it will be one of the parties of the year.
Table talk
The recently opened Goleen Harbour Eco-village is on course to become a great Irish hospitality success story, especially if they keep up their current run of incredible pop-ups, recently featuring Caitlin Ruth and Gautham Iyer.
Next up is a pair of dinners that you'll be hard-pressed to choose between, so best opt for both.
The Glass Curtain @ Goleen Harbour (Aug 24) sees the Cork restaurant hit the road to deliver a family-style sharing menu, including snacks, bread, starters, main course and dessert.
Epi Rogan (formerly of The Glass Curtain and Paradiso) will be helping out before her own pop-up the following night (Aug 25), when The Glass Curtain crew will return the favour, with this fabulous foraging chef celebrating late summer with a wild and foraged menu, including preserved pickles and fermented ingredients from the hedgerows, forests and fields.
If you've got your Oasis or Robbie Williams tickets for later this month, then the canny gig-goer will rock up to the Croke Park Hotel alongside the venue, for one of their exclusive all-you-can-eat pre-concert barbecues, at €50pp.
The latest in Sheen Falls Lodge's Four Hands Dinner Series (Sept 5), sees Andrew Walsh, Chef patron of the restaurant Cure Singapore, collaborate with the hotel's head executive head chef, Mark Treacy, on an exclusive six-courser in the Falls Restaurant, with wine pairings available.
Donadea Farm's premium Wagyu beef-burgers
Today's special
Sticking with the barbecue theme, my own little mini-fest saw me firing up my grill despite a rather heavy downpour, but barbecue was the only way to go when sampling Donadea Farm's superb wagyu beef burgers, part of a range of premium meats from the Doyle family's herd, in Co Kildare.
As they only retail premium steak cuts, all the other high quality parts of the animal, including flank and brisket, go into humongous burgers and sausages, that relish a good grilling to render wagyu's renowned fat, then dripping down on to the hot charcoal to add sublime smokey flavours to extraordinarily good meat.