The best pop-up restaurant in Ireland

Here’s the food year in a soup. It starts with pickled garlic scapes, slices of the pregnant flower stalks sent spiralling skyward last summer. Bobbing above them are summer-ripened pickled nasturtium seeds.

These sharpnesses slice through the full-throated turkey bone broth, an echo of midwinter feasting. In the middle floats a bright green leaf of this year’s new wild garlic, raw and hopeful like warm sunshine that catches you by surprise on a bitter day. 

The brilliant broth is the work of Rose Greene, an Irish chef you’ve probably never heard of because she’s spent most of her career outside Ireland. With her partner, Margaux Dejardin, Greene returned to live in Westmeath in 2018, renovated an old barn at her family home and set up the 4Hands Food Studio. They forage, cook, grow and ferment. Tonight they’re holding one of their monthly pop-up suppers in the Fumbally Stables in Dublin. 

“It’s the food we want to eat ourselves and we want to share it with other people,” the chef explains. As an old bird who’s been around the block with most restaurant concepts, this is the one that gets me, every time.  

We’ve started like all the best house parties where everyone slides onto the nearest chair and feels a bit self-conscious. Then a woman yelps: “No. Don’t eat that,” when my friend reaches for a pumpkin crisp on a plate and the ice is broken. It turns out the crisp has been on the floor. A 100-second rule should apply to these snacks. They’re light as air drenched with sweet nutty pumpkin flavour.

There’s a rectangle of lardo eaten by tearing soft strips and rolling them around camomile flowers in all their summery hay-sweet crunch. We share bowls of toasted split yellow peas coated in fermented honey and onion, a nutty sweet salty snack part cheese and onion crisp, part Bombay mix.