Cookbooks

Cava Cookbook. Tapas: A Taste of Spain in Ireland 4th Edition  - 

The 4th Edition of our cookbook, Cava Bodega. A Taste of Spain in Ireland was released in December 2021. The 4th Edition has an additional twelve recipes and a new design.

This book is a story of food. A story of food in a particular place. It is about how food moves around, from country to country, settles and uproots itself again. It is a story of how food is more than just for eating. It is a story of how food is the crux of the human experience, a cultural phenomenon that can bring us closer together, make us share.

This book is the story of a Spanish restaurant in Galway. Its pages speak of a shared tradition of food, of like-minded people doing like-minded things. It is a story of food but also much more than just that.

PLEASE NOTE:
Jp will be signing the books once a week. If you would like him to include a message, please email food@aniarrestaurant.ie after you have placed your order. 

Order your signed copy now. 

An Alphabet of Aniar by Jp McMahon (2nd Edition)

This book tells the story of a small restaurant in the west of Ireland.

It is a reflective companion piece to my larger and more comprehensive The Irish Cook Book (Phaidon, 2020). While the latter book focused on the entire history of food in Ireland, encompassing the many diverse food traditions that have taken place on the island of Ireland, this book discusses some of our philosophy and findings of the last twelve years of our restaurant Aniar. This book is by no means exhaustive and simply represents what I feel to be some of the most important aspects of Aniar. It is the accumulation of twelve years of its existence, of its investigations, of its successes and failures. It does so through the framework of the alphabet. I use this device to cut through the usual format of the story, with a clear beginning, middle and an end. For in truth, there is no beginning or end. There is just a constant middle, a daily process of trying to better ourselves through food. Like good art, food is always unfinished. We begin again every day, ready to cook for new people.

Aniar began as a project to explore the possibilities of the Irish larder; to make sense of them and attempt to produce a new Irish cuisine. Though the restaurant has gone through numerous, though subtly different guises in this attempt, the overall project has remained the same. To explain, albeit, in a cryptic fashion, we began by doing away with lemons and black pepper and ended up exploring the possibilities of koji for Irish cuisine. Our journey is not unique, and it mirrors the journey of many restaurants attempting to find their feet in the 21st century. However, our efforts and results have an individual quality that demonstrates the restaurant’s position in a particular time and space: that is, in the west of Ireland.

Another aim of this book is to foster dialogue and generate new traditions by engaging more in our past. We need to be more thoughtful of our past traditions as we move forward. This may mean refining it in some cases or adapting it to push it forward to new places. Or it may mean leaving it alone. It is only with the past inside us that we can move forward into the future and create new ground for Irish food to inhabit.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Format: Paperback

Size: 168mm (w) x 240 mm (h) 

PLEASE NOTE:

Jp will be signing the books once a week. If you would like him to include a message, please email food@aniarrestaurant.ie after you have placed your order. 

Order your signed copy now. Price: €30 + Postage and Packaging