We are spoilt for choice here in West Cork on great places to eat. With such amazing produce and food producers on our doorstep, any place that offers up locally sourced ingredients to the discerning palates of the good people of West Cork might struggle to peek our interest and that all the good ideas of how to keep us well fed have been thought of.
And then came along the Food Depot – Gourmet Street Kitchen and did something mad like offering high end quality food from a food truck and serve it up in compostable takeaway cartons….? Food snobs everywhere will fainting onto their crisp white linens, fine porcelain crockery and designer cutlery….surely? Well Diana Dodog and Mike O’Donovan co-founders extraordinaire of this amazing food (ad)venture have proved otherwise.
It’s hard to explain it; it’s like the best restaurant food and the best festival food you’ve ever eaten all wrapped up in a tasty morsel. Operating four days a week (Thursdays and Fridays at the West Cork Technology Park in Clonakilty, and Saturday and Sunday from Courtmacsherry, Co Cork), serving up two hot food options, two or three cake options, offering the best coffee going at the moment (I believe) from Badger and Dodo Boutique Coffee Roasters of Cork and one freshly made juice you could argue that there isn’t much in the way of choice. But it really doesn’t matter because the fact is that you are choosing from “Gorgeous Tasting Option No. 1” and “Gorgeous Tasting Option No. 2” so there really isn’t anything to complain about!
All the produce is sourced locally and is organic where possible. All the packaging is fully compostable. This is a local and sustainable business enterprise serving up amazing food. What’s the catch? I’m searching here, but the only thing I would say is that the price point means that it isn’t possible to make this more than a once-a-week treat if you’re an average wage earner. But again, this doesn’t bother me much as I do exactly that, and mark my once-a-fortnight trip to the Food Depot Truck as a highly anticpated luncheon event! I leave work a little earlier so I get there before the rush, have a chat, agonise for a few minutes over which cake I will have (the brownie could win every time being as it is, the BEST brownie in the world EVER), before collecting my carton of deliciousness and speed back in my car to the office to gorge….usually in private, because moments like these are NOT for sharing! I get two bonuses from this: 1, the afternoon at work after my Food Depot lunch always seems to be easier somehow and 2, when I return to my car to head home after work, it smells absolutely lush inside!
The food itself is just packed with flavour – waves and waves of comforting flavours that are endlessly moreish. It just hits all the tastebuds in the right order and at all different points of the scale. I think the fact that in my moment of bliss (somewhere) is the acknolwedgment that I am helping with a select number of food producers and suppliers as well as this amazing new addition to the West Cork food scene makes it taste even sweeter! I almost wish it could remain a secret, but really, that just won’t do. Everyone must come and visit the Food Depot once, and I promise you will be hooked and planning on when you will visit again.
Go Forth now, and find that Big Blue Food Truck!
web design and development by the designer of things