Archive for 'Cork'
Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
Posted on June 29, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Family, Food, Restaurants, Reviews.
A last minute decision to pop down here for Sunday lunch turned out to be a total success. Fantastic seafood in a relaxed atmosphere with serene views of Clonakilty Bay. If they could just do something about parking, it would be perfect.
I’ve eaten in Deasy’s once before and thoroughly enjoyed it. For some reason they popped into my head this morning and I hopped into the car with four of the five monsters to see if they were still doing Sunday Lunch. The usual crawl to Clon ensued followed by the twisty road to Ring.
I knew the parking had been bad but time had dulled my memory. It’s brutal. Four spaces in front of the pub and then you have to travel a few hundred yards to find a roadside spot. Fine as an adult, a total pain (and dangerous) if you have kids. I had to circle three times before parking. Just in case, I ran down and discovered that they didn’t open for lunch until 1. So we headed over to the newly revamped playground in Clon. This looks great but now seems much more oriented towards older kids. My middle-uns were scared to climb the ladders to the slides.
Back we trotted to Ring and luckily one of the four spaces was free and we parked right at the door. It was still pretty quiet at 1pm but people arrived bit by bit over the following hour. We were seated towards the back which made sense from a safety perspective. The staff and owner were very friendly throughout. The lack of a baby-seat was a bit of a pain but not the end of the world. After seeing the usual stroppiness of our four demons, they gave us some crayons and colouring sheets which calmed everyone down.
The menu is a big step above what you’d expect from a rural Irish pub. The three course lunch menu is €30 and looks great value to me. However, as our family meals are all about speed, I went straight to the main courses. Initially I was concerned that there was nothing very child-friendly on the menu but then I copped myself on and realised they should be eating the same stuff as me.
So I ordered three half portions of Monkfish and Fennel Risotto with puttanesca salsa for them and a Hake with Lemon Butter and Swiss Chard for me. They arrived reasonably quickly on adult stopwatches but an eternity in kid-time. I tried to explain “cooking on demand” to the kids but failed.
Of course all them said “yeuch, I’m not eating that” as soon as the plates were put on the table. Rather than get hassled, I let them be and started on my hake. Never ones to miss an opportunity to annoy me, two of them asked to taste the hake and both decided they loved it, the little sods. I split mine between them and then took over their plates of risotto. Dishes of lovely baby spuds and one of the best selections of vegetables I’ve ever seen in an Irish restaurant appeared too.
Myself and the two middlers had a bit of everything. Baby would eat nothing. 2 year old wouldn’t touch anything until near the end, at which point he let me feed him a mix of fish, risotto, carrots and spuds.
Oh, I nearly forgot to say, the food was fantastic. The fish perfectly cooked, the flavours subtle and not overpowering, the vegetables beautiful. Apologies for the lack of pics and menu details but I really had my hands full.
The two boys began messing too loudly so it was time to go. The bill for the food plus three 7-ups and a Ballygowan came to a refreshingly low €53. We’ll be back very soon avec wife and fifth child so I can sample more and have both hands available to eat with.
No Comments
Yes the fish is fantastic
Posted on June 21, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Food, Ireland.
I did a last-minute race down to The Fish Shop in Union Hall this morning to check it out. It’s as good as they say! Great selection of fish, shellfish, gourmet seafood products and wine. Well worth travelling to.
So my lazy ass didn’t get up early enough and I left Bandon at 12 knowing they shut at 1pm on a Saturday. I made it to Union Hall by 12:45 after spending the journey as far as Rosscarbery behind someone who averaged 35 MPH. The three younger squirts came with me and were just as impressed by the foggy views in Glandore as I was. The whole area is just lovely.
The shop was hopping when I arrived and lots of empty trays told me I’d left it too late. The guy serving confirmed that it had been a really busy morning. Given the horrible weather I decided to do a fish pie and I bought hake, smoked haddock, prawns (frozen since they were sold-out of fresh) and mussels. Add 6 scallops for tomorrows dinner and the total came to a very reasonable €38.
You just know you are getting ultra fresh produce in a fishing village and there is something for everyone. I particularly liked the look of the John Dory, Sea Bream and Sea Bass. They have a lots of live crab, lobster and oysters too. The display cabinet had some very interesting products like smoked tuna and they also have lots of the ususal frozen shellfish. I didn’t get a chance to check out the wine but I will on the next visit.
The perfect fish shop?
4 Comments
Great news for fishies in West Cork
Posted on June 19, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Food.
So if food lovers are foodies and wine lovers are winos 
I’ve decided that fish lovers are fishies. Just got a comment on an old blog post about the fish shop in Union Hall and it’s all good news:
we Glenmar Shellfish have now merged with Antcar over 12mths ago - if you are ever in Union Hall again be sure and call into the shop again - The Fish Shop - you will not be disappointed - we have recently extended the shop and added alot of additional products to our impressive array of fish - including mussels !!- we also now have a wine licence and stock a very impressive selection of wines - look forward to seeing you soon!!
I’m embarrassed that it has been that long since I was down to buy some fish. Having heard this tho, we’re already thinking about what fish we’re going to cook this weekend. If I can drag my lazy ass out of bed on Saturday morning, I’ll be down for a look!
No Comments
You going to Taste of Cork?
Posted on June 15, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Business, Cork, Food.
It looks like Taste of Dublin this weekend was a big success and a huge improvement over last year. I was thrilled to hear that they are doing a Taste of Cork from Friday 27th June to Sunday 29th. Over on LouderVoice, we’d like to capture the quality of the event by having people review what they eat/drink/encounter by SMS. The most popular review will win a prize (suggestions on what that should be are very welcome).
Don’t worry, you don’t have to be remotely geeky to do the reviews. Both of my parents are very non-technical and they do SMS reviews all the time. You don’t even have to sign up on the site, it’ll happen automatically when you send your first review to 087-9409325. Here’s all you have to do:
There is a good selection of reviews from Taste of Dublin here so you can see the sort of things people were saying. If you want to do it in Cork just follow the instructions above and your reviews will appear on LouderVoice a few seconds later. If you know for definite that you’ll be trying it ahead of time, why not leave a comment here or ask any questions you might have?
The SMS are at your standard rate, they are not premium rate. You can also write long SMS reviews if your phone supports them. We’d love to see the feedback you all have on both the event and the exhibitors, many of whom are local Cork businesses.
By the way, if you run a local biz that is exhibiting at Taste of Cork, we’d love to provide you with mini-flyers to give out to encourage people to review your offerings. Either pop a comment here or mail me on conor AT loudervoice DOT com for more info.
11 Comments
Elephants on Inchydoney, careful now.
Posted on May 29, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Ireland.
Just in from my sis. Some very cool Elephants on Inchydoney beach in Clon for the next few days.
It’s actually a project involving Clonakilty Macra and other local community groups to to highlight the plight of the Asian Elephant. I’ll be taking a trip down for sure.
No Comments
Review of Clonakilty Model Railway Village
Posted on April 13, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Family.
I love finding something great almost on your doorstep that you’ve ignored for years. We finally took a trip to the Model Railway village last weekend and it was a resounding success. Kids, young and old will have some fun here.
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said we must pop in for a look. The closest we got was some of the kids taking the road-train around Clon with their Granny last year. I decided to be brave and take all 5 with me to check it out properly.
It’s just on the edge of town past the GAA pitch on the way to Inchydoney. Lots of space in the car park which also acts as the start/end of the road-train. You are greeted by some lovely old carriages now doing duty as shop and cafe.
For the life of me I can’t remember how much it was in, but it wasn’t a hell of a lot. Baby got in for free. Our first stop was the indoor play area. Whilst very small (fitting into one single storey room), it’s ideal for wet days and all of ours had some fun there for 30 minutes or so. My only criticism is that with two doors, it’s too easy for a kid to sneak out. Maybe sliding bolts on half doors would make things a little bit more difficult for them.
We then headed outside and I was genuinely surprised by what I found. Lots of scale models of towns and train stations of the past in Cork. Bandon got pride of place and all were connected together by a long meandering electric model railway.
Each child found something different to occupy them. The 2 year old just ran around after the model trains. The baby checked out the models and the three eldest ran around, hiding, looking, and climbing.
The detailing on the model towns really is fantastic and it was a pleasure to see how The Shambles might have looked in the old days.
We finished off with a walk through the cafe and shop carriages and headed home happy after a good 1.5 hours of fun. All of the staff were extremely friendly and the whole place has a lovely feel to it. If you are in the area or just passing through, it’s a nice old fashioned relaxing way to hang out with your kids.
No Comments
Cork Airport Incompetence
Posted on March 12, 2008, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Ireland.
I meant to write this post a few months back and was finally reminded to yesterday when I was in Cork Airport yet again.
The old airport carparks had the most unreliable equipment on the planet, pure third world garbage. I spent more time stuck in queues trying to get out of there due to malfunctioning barriers than any other airport, including Dublin which I have used more.
So you’d think, when spending €180m on a new airport (and hoping we taxpayers will stump up the money for it), that they’d find a supplier of equipment that, ye know, actually works. Silly me, of course they decided to use the same rubbish as before. Does Cork Airport Authority understand that the phrase “competitive tender” does not mean “cheapest” or “close personal friend”, it means “competitive”?
In the past six months:
- I was locked into the carpark at 1am for 40 minutes. The barrier ate my ticket and the intercom system would not work. Of course if you embed an intercom into a barrier then the intercom will fail along with the barrier. What incompetent morons [a] designed this and [b] purchased it? A Thomas The Tank Engine Walkie Talkie duct-taped to the machine would be a more intelligent engineering approach to system reliability. I ended up running down to the terminal TWICE to ask to be let out and still failed to exit. Only the arrival of the hotel shuttle bus saved me.
- On another occasion, the ticket machine printed my ticket so badly that it could not be machine-read when I returned to pay. Of course the support desk was not manned and multiple calls had to be made before someone turned up and printed me a new one so I could leave.
- I have seen queues of people stuck coming out of the short term car-park due to equipment malfunction.
- One of the ticket machines has been broken for months. In fact, it’s been broken for so long that they have erected a permanent “temporarily out of service” sign! Has the airport not got an SLA in their service contract with the equipment provider? Or is that too complex for them?
A few simple steps:
- Dump the incompetent supplier
- Demote or fire the person who re-ordered this rubbish
- Replace the equipment with something that works. Maybe ring Frankfurt and ask them what they use
- Look up the acronym SLA
If Al-Qaeda wants an easy way into Ireland then Cork Airport is the route to take. There are obviously no CCTV cameras in operation or else these constant problems would be noticed far sooner by staff. If the Airport Authority is interested, I know a guy who could set them up with a reliable mesh of wireless enabled webcams for a few hundred Euro. Not everything has to cost €180m and reliability can be a default.
15 Comments
Car Sharing coming to Cork
Posted on December 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Motor Cars.
Michael Newham just left a comment on my post about car-sharing. It looks like this is going to happen next year. It’s a great idea.
Our company ‘Mendes - GoCar’ will be providing the car-sharing service in Cork City Centre. We hope to have it operational by May the 1st 2008.
Please see the Wikipedia article for a good overview of what Car-Sharing is about.
All our ‘GoCars’ will have dedicated parking spaces ‘GoBases’ near high residential and business nodes of population.
Research has shown that in a successful car-sharing business each car added to a car sharing fleet replaces 8 to 12 private vehicles; thus reducing Co2 emmissions and congestion.
Another benefit to joining a car-sharing service is the increased use of public transport as well as walking and cycling.
We hope to have our website www.gocar.ie live by mid January. It will just be a brochure based site to begin with where ye can leave contact details to find out about membership and so forth.
4 Comments
90-L-1944 attempted to murder my family today
Posted on December 9, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork.
The savage at the wheel of 90-L-1944 came within a hair’s breadth of killing me, all my children, my mother in law, all of those in an oncoming vehicle and everyone in his own vehicle 10 minutes ago.
This cretin who clearly rates his own life as worthless carried out a suicidal overtaking manouvre of my car just before Bandon with a stream of cars bearing down on us. If I hadn’t seen him in my side mirror and swerved into the road margin at the last second, there would have been a fatal three car collision.
This imbecile then immediately got stuck in 20 MPH town traffic.
If you spot this old grey Honda Prelude in West Cork, give it a wide berth, he may try to kill you too.
You may ask why I didn’t call the police. Do you think they would have done anything?
15 Comments
Cork Sailing Blog
Posted on November 16, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Ireland.
We went on our summer holidays to Barley Cove for 11 years in a row as kids. On several of those years we went to Garnish Island via Glengarrif. That was as far as I ever got on the Beara peninsula until last week when I visited Adrigole. I honestly can’t put into words how beautiful it is down there. If I was American I’d call it God’s country. Perfect views on a perfect day made me want to immediately retire and move there.
I also discovered that there is a blog been written down there by Gail and the West Cork Sailing team. Now I’ve never been into sailing or boats but this could get me interested. Lots of reports from the vessels themselves along with lovely photos. I’m now subscribed.
No Comments
Science Week in November
Posted on October 27, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Kids.
There is a wonderful bunch of things planned in Cork as part of Science Week which will hopefully increase the interest in science amongst kids. The target audience is 10-16 year olds but I’m sure we’ll drag our 8 year old along to some of it.
It is on from 11th Nov to 18th Nov in various locations around the city. I believe the HQ is City Hall and local tech companies will have stands there. Many of the events will be in UCC.
Check out the web-site for a full list of what is happening and make sure to book the ones that require it.
I’d like to go to “It’s Elemental! Role of elements in our everyday life”.
2 Comments
Cully & Sully Scale Everest
Posted on September 13, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Food.
Well not quite but they did get to Nepal. In Sully’s own words
If you would like to see Cully & Sully in action (and have a good laugh) tune into RTE 1 at 22.45 tonight.
There will be a half hour programme about our recent trip roughing it in Nepal whilst attempting to assist a women’s cooperative – you’ll get a flavour of my truly amazing negotiation skills and Cul’s cooking under pressure!!!!!
If you are not familiar with their soups and ready meals, check them out the next time you don’t feel like cooking. We are fans.
1 Comment
Clonakilty International Guitarfest
Posted on September 7, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Entertainment, Ireland.
Ray in deBarras in Clon mailed me to tell me about the Guitarfest starting on September 20th. I’m glad he did since it looks fantastic. Lots of details on their very cool site. MySpacers should check them out here.
The line-up has a very rich mix of styles but the one that caught my eye has to be Eric Bell, the Thin Lizzy founding member who is responsible for the classic Whiskey in the Jar!
If you are anywhere near West Cork from 20th-23rd, you owe it to yourself to get to Clon.
1 Comment
Charity photography exhibit in Mallow
Posted on September 7, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Ireland.
Via Donncha - Mallow Camera Club will be exhibiting a number of photos in Mallow Town Library for three weeks starting yesterday.
One of the Club’s members, Sean Riordan, is heading out to South Africa shortly as part of a group from the Niall Mellon Township Trust helping to build homes for the poor in that country. All the photos on exhibit will be for sale with all profits going to help fund Sean’s trip and the good work he’ll do in November.
This is a very worthy cause so if you can make it at all, please head up there and buy some pictures.
No Comments
Brand and Quality
Posted on August 19, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Food.
Clonakilty Black Pudding is rightly famous and many people were saddened by the passing of Edward Twomey who made it into a formidable brand. Over the years they have diversified a bit and I see their sausages almost everywhere. We’ve tended to buy them as our “standard” saturday sausage when supermerket buying (going more with Caherbeg or Gubbeen for a treat).
This morning I spotted an extra sticker on the pack and initially had to giggle “This product does not contain Colour Red 2g (E128)……It contains Colour (Carmine E120)”. Then I thought “what the hell is food colouring doing in a sausage?”. Surely pork, pork fat, rusk and seasoning is all that is needed in a quality banger?
So I looked at the ingredients and got depressed. 53% meat! That’s worse than most discount “value” bangers in a supermarket. It continued “E221 preservative, E621 flavour enhancer, E120 colour, Spice extract, Antioxidant E301″
A quick decode via Google gives: E221=Sodium Sulphite, E621=Monosodium Glutamate, E120=Cochineal, E301=Sodium Ascorbate. You think MSG in a sausage is bad, wait until you see this. Wonder why the E128 that they were using was replaced with E120?
Following safety concerns raised by EFSA in its opinion of 5 July 2007 [2], the European Commission has prepared a draft Regulation to suspend use of E128 as a food colouring. This proposed course of action was unanimously approved by European Union Member States at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Food Chain and Animal Health (Section Toxicological Safety of the Food Chain) on 20 July 2007
Now that I think about it, I normally associate “red” sausages with cheap and nasty. I was just led astray by the good name in this case. I hate seeing great brands ruined by a race for volume. We’ll be looking more closely at our sausage purchases from now on.
14 Comments
SOHO SOLO Ireland
Posted on July 25, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Blogging, Business, Cork.
I gave a talk today about blogging to the West Cork Soho Solo Networking Meeting in Clonakilty. I previous gave the same one to the East Cork group. It was very well received and I hope we see a few new blogs coming from them. If you are not aware of Soho Solo, it is a very worthwhile project. As their site says:
The aims of the project are to identify Small Office Home Office Workers(Soho Solos) in the South West of Ireland, to encourage others to relocate or return to the region, to promote Small Office Home Office Working and to offer support to these “new” entrepreneurs.
If you fit that description, I would highly recommend you contact them as they offer great support for what can be a very solitary endeavour.
Three of the attendees today already had blogs. I didn’t get the details of the third but you should definitely have a look at:
7 Comments
Bandon Summerfest
Posted on July 15, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork, Ireland.
The Bandon.ie crew have the full skinny and there is a dedicated site too. August 1st to 6th. Check it.
No Comments
Anyone know who owns/controls the old Orange/Masonic building in Bandon?
Posted on June 10, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork, Ireland.
Someone has just suggested an awesome forward looking idea to me for it. Will collect my thoughts and blog it later.
3 Comments
Report problems in County Cork using this
Posted on June 3, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork.
So after a small amount of fiddling I have put together a simple system to allow people to report problems like water/gas/electricity outages and maybe car crashes and road blockages in Cork (other suggestions welcome).
This is by the residents and for the residents of the region.
Updates are always visible to everyone at The Cork Problems Page.
If you want to send reports then the setup will take you maybe two minutes. From then on you can report problems using a web-page, SMS or Instant Message.
You need to sign up to a U.S. based service called Twitter here. It’s very easy to do. Once you have signed-up, go to the CorkProbs Twitter Page here and add CorkProbs as a friend (simple link on the right hand side of page). Wait until you get an email saying that CorkProbs has also added you as a friend.
From then on, if you want to report a problem or a resolution/update then you can do the following: Go to twitter.com and type the problem into the wee box at the top of the screen. Make sure that the message starts with @CorkProbs followed by a space followed by what you want to say. Click Update.
Within a couple of minutes your message will appear on the Cork Problems Web Page here. You can check this page whenever you want to see what other updates people are posting. Techies can subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you like that, but want more flexibility, then you can set up your Twitter account so you send the problem reports via SMS. Just go to this settings page and tell them about your phone. From then on, you just send SMS messages to +447624801423 in the same style as before i.e. first bit is @CorkProbs
Note that number is a UK one (Twitter does not have an Irish one) so it’s a wee bit more expensive than sending it to an Irish number.
People on Google GTalk can also use that to send messages.
Let me know what you think or if you need any help getting set up. I hope we can create a useful resource for everyone in Cork in the absence of any notification system from Cork CoCo.
Of course there is nothing stopping their employees from signing up and sending updates to it!
5 Comments
How to find about problems like the water situation in Bandon
Posted on June 3, 2007, by Conor O'Neill, under Bandon, Cork.
We lost water around 2am Saturday and it returned dark brown at around 2pm. Does anyone know what the back story is and whether the water is safe to drink?
I would encourage Cork CoCo to immediately fire the arsehole at the end of the “All other emergencies” phone line listed in the Green Pages. My wife rang this cretin at 6am to report the water problem and find out what was wrong. She had already tried and failed to get through to the local engineers office. The bozo claimed that the number was only for reporting road problems. When asked for an alternative number he said she should check the Green Pages! No amount of arguing could convince this criminal waste of taxpayers money that she had rung the relevant listed number.
I headed to SuperValu to get bottled water at approx 11am to discover it was not just Old Chapel but all of Bandon that was out. Given that the incompetent fool at the end of the phone line is the only way we have of finding out the status of a problem like this, how does Cork CoCo propose to keep residents informed of problems, resolutions and warnings?
Maybe someone should tell them about this amazing new system called d’internet. If small Pacific Islands can set up web based warning systems for tsunamis, is it beyond the wit of Cork CoCo to have similar here? Of course they’d probably put the professionally negligent buffoon who mans the phone line in charge of it.
In the interim I am looking into putting together a very simple problem reporting and viewing system using something like Twitter or Jaiku. You would be able to send problems/resolutions using a web browser, SMS or Instant Message. e.g. broken water mains, ESB failures, car crashes etc.
