Why Irish foodies are smiling

John McKenna compiled the first edition of the Bridgestone Irish Food Guide 13 years ago, with his wife Sally. Since then, he tells Aoife O'Riordain, Ireland has been put firmly on the gourmet's map

If you said that we wrote our first book on a wing and a prayer, it would be an understatement." John McKenna is reminiscing about the first guide that he and his wife Sally ever wrote. The purchase of an ageing Renault 4, a love of travel, and Patricia Wells's Food Lover's Guide to Paris spurred on the then barrister and restaurant reviewer. "I was a comprehensive failure at the Bar, and I was becoming more interested in food," he recalls. "We weren't sure at the time whether or not there already existed in Ireland anything like it – somewhere you could look up an area, drive down a road and find a funky cheese-maker at the bottom. You can really tap into a country's culture through its food."

Thirteen years on, and with the imminent publication of the 2002 guidebooks, the McKennas have thoroughly mapped Ireland's food culture, and become an Irish publishing phenomenon. Sponsored by the Bridgestone tyre company, but published by the couple's own Estragon Press from their west Cork home, their 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland, 100 Best Places to Stay in Ireland, Irish Food Guide and Dublin Food Guide, were joined last autumn by the food lover's Shopper's Guide and Traveller's Guide to Ireland. Anyone with an interest in food and eating out in Ireland should travel with at least one of the six.

These influential and respected food critics continually scour the lanes, roads, farms and shops of Ireland for gastronomic experiences. "The gathering of information is completely scientific," McKenna laughs. "It's all gossip. If they abolished gossip tomorrow, the Bridgestone guides would die." The discoveries such gossip leads to – shops, markets, restaurants, cafés, cheese-makers, butchers, grocers, bakers and growers – are written up in laid-back and familiar style; the recommendations read like advice given to a friend. While you may not agree with everything that they say about the restaurants or hotels, no other guides can match theirs for attention to detail, up-to-the-minute information and enthusiasm.

McKenna, now a lively-looking fortysomething, has monitored as closely as anyone the renaissance of artisan food- production in Ireland. "When we first started out, some of the cheese-makers had been making Irish farmhouse cheese for over 25 years, and in many respects, very little has changed. The fundamental difference between now and when we began writing our books is that artisan producers in Ireland have moved from the periphery to the mainstream."

The currently burgeoning Irish economy has helped. "People in Ireland, have more money these days, they travel more widely and are more discerning.What I like about the way people enjoy good food in Ireland is that it's not just a status thing. You can't sustain an artisan food culture without a discerning general public, and producers are now deeply appreciated.

Over the past 10 years, all these circumstances came together in a magical way and we can now really talk about the idea of a food culture and about quality. Take the case of the people who make the farmhouse cheese Cashel Blue, who have gone from producing five tonnes a year to 50 tonnes, such is the current demand. It's production on a larger scale, but it is still very much an artisan product."

The Irish government's shifting agricultural policy and introduction of the REPS (Rural Environmental Protection Scheme) has produced changes for the better, too. More and more farmers are joining the initiative to lower use of pesticides and insecticides. "The days of the intensification of Irish agriculture, which was the modus operandi of the Sixties and Seventies, is gone, and I'm optimistic for the future," McKenna says. Large-scale production led to some terrible abuses in Irish agriculture. Farming was badly hit in the Eighties through the various scandals and beef inquiries that dogged the farming community. The government's new guidelines have changed the emphasis completely. The organic movement has grown steadily but slowly." He predicts conversion to organic will increase more rapidly. "And the focus of Bord Bia, the Irish food board, is now very much on specialist production and quality."

Conventional farming is doomed, according to a recent article on the McKennas' website. This sparked heated debate and letters from enraged farmers. En route to our meeting in Dublin, McKenna called in on one correspondent in County Tipperary, and stumbled on something delicious. "He produces some of the best apple juice on the planet."

Even if the finest doesn't have to come from unconventional producers, the way Irish food is being sold helps people to understand and appreciate it. McKenna cites Sheridans Cheesemongers, owned by two brothers, with shops in Galway and Dublin, as a shining example. "The Sheridans are some of the most important people in Irish food in a number of ways. Their shops are tactile, they make buying cheese alluring, and they are knowledgeable about what they sell. The English Market in Cork city is a great place to shop for the same reasons." Another exemplary food retailer: Peter Ward, proprietor of Country Choice, in Nenagh, County Tipperary. "He knows everything about everything he sells," says McKenna. "I know this story is going to sound very Irish, but I was in the shop recently and one of the local nuns came in with five eggs laid by her own hens. Not four, not six, not 10. Peter instantly took them, it's the five-egg place, and it's brilliant that it exists and is thriving."

He sees the second generation of food- producers coming to the fore, and rattles off the names of cheese-makers', grocers' and butchers' offspring branching out on their own. The son and daughter of the Maher family continuing the Cooleeney Camembert tradition in County Tipperary. Fingal Ferguson, the son of the makers of Gubbeen Farmhouse Cheese, now smoking his own bacon. "Irish food is going to get better and better."

Bridgestone guides will accordingly have to get bigger and bigger. But not too fast; there's something organic about the way they develop, too. The McKennas are planning a guide about Northern Ireland for next autumn, and he'd like to write a book about wine. For now, however, there's enough to do constantly updating their existing guides. "I'm a total control freak, but because we publish the guides ourselves, it means that the information is up to the minute. In truth, we work on small margins, very much like the people we write about. We live on top of a hill in west Cork and write books about food, and our nearest neighbour lives on top of the next hill and makes Durrus cheese."

With their gusto for discovering and describing the finest Irish food, in the rolling hills of west Cork, the McKennas are now as much a part of the scene as the producers they celebrate.

For more information: www.bridgestoneguides.com