Dinner at the Carrigart One 8

My best friend Thomas and his family are up from Dublin, staying with us for ten days. Halfway through the trip they took a table at the Carrigart One 8, the boutique restaurant on Main Street in the village, and came home talking about it: one of the best meals they’d had in the area, they said, and they had been eating well all week.

He gave me the details, because I asked. He had the chargrilled Irish sirloin, cooked exactly as it should be and tender through; his partner had the beer battered haddock, light and crisp, with a homemade tartar sauce worth mentioning on its own. The staff were warm and attentive without ever hovering, and the room, he said, is a cosy one: made for a special meal.

I’ll own up straight away: I haven’t had the pleasure myself yet. It’s top of my list for when I’m next back. But between their verdict and the story behind the place, it earns its Journal entry on their word alone.

And it is some story. It’s in the food, it’s in the house, and it’s even in the name.

The One 8 is Wendy’s place, and Wendy is the chef. She trained in Killybegs in the 1980s and then took her cooking out into the world: Switzerland, London, the Channel Islands, Bermuda, and finally twenty years on Nevis, a small island in the Caribbean, before coming home in 2011.

You can read the whole journey on the menu. Killybegs smoked salmon and a Wild Atlantic Way seafood chowder with Guinness bread sit alongside a Jamaican jerk chicken satay; there are organic Mulroy Bay mussels out of the water below our own house, and a Caribbean slow-cooked chicken curry straight from the Nevis years. Donegal and the Caribbean, on the one page, because one cook lived both.

The restaurant seats about thirty-five, in a house that has been in Wendy’s family for generations. And here’s the detail I like best: in every generation it was a woman who ran a business inside those four walls. There was a café in the cellar, which is now the prep kitchen. There was a hair salon. There was Harkin’s shop, where the tables are now. Wendy’s mother raised her family in the same rooms.

The name goes back further still, to the days before dialling, when you rang the exchange and asked to be put through to a house by its number. For this house you asked for Carrigart one eight. When Wendy first left for Switzerland, that was the number she rang to speak to home. When she opened the restaurant here in 2021, the old number became the name over the door.

One more thing, and the reason this place belongs in our Journal more than most. Long before the café and the salon and the shop, horseshoes were made in the cellar of the house. Carrigart kept more than one smith busy in those days, and Davey John, whose forge our whole place is named for, worked the same trade a few kilometres out the road at Devlinmore.

So the house on Main Street and the forge above Mulroy Bay were once at the same work. These days one of them serves dinner and the other holds a games room, and I’d say both are the better for it.

The One 8 is on Main Street in Carrigart, four kilometres from us. It’s evenings only, from five o’clock Wednesday to Sunday through high summer, with shorter weeks in the off season, and with around thirty-five seats it fills up. Book ahead: online at carrigartone8.com or on 074 915 5584. There’s a takeaway menu too, if you’d rather eat at your own table with the bay in front of you.

When I’ve finally had my own dinner there, I’ll report back. On current evidence I’d want the table by the window.