Introduction

It might seem like an obvious statement, but the food at Café Paradiso is produced mainly from vegetables, and a single vegetable is the foundation of almost every dish on our menus. Cheeses, oils, spices and herbs, breads and pastry, grains and nuts, are all brought along to enhance and play support to the vegetable in the starring role. From high summer to the end of the main harvest is the most wonderful time to be a vegetarian cook. Tomatoes, aubergines, sun-sweetened peppers, beans and peas - both familiar and strange - baby spinach, chard, soft herbs... The organic vegetable suppliers come to the restaurant laden with their pride and joy, freshly picked and bursting with the life-enhancing qualities that can’t be measured in vitamin counts or calorie levels. A cook’s job is to get the food to the customers with these qualities intact. But there are other high points in the year too, almost always centred on the arrival of the first batch of a favourite vegetable. Often it is just in time too, as the current favourite is on the wane and a vague sense of panic begins to creep in. Asparagus and new potatoes get huge cheers, of course, but so do pumpkins, black kale, leeks, beetroot, broad beans, artichokes and even parsnips. We can, it seems, get excited by the things other people push to the side of their plate. Every season has at least one hero and it is these vegetables that structure our year and dominate our menus during their high seasons. I say ‘dominate’ because of course not all our vegetables are organic or in high season all the time; in Ireland that would leave us eating stored roots and coarse cabbage during the ‘hungry gap’, that early spring period when we wait impatiently for the first fresh green things - spring greens, sprouting broccoli, asparagus - to grow.