Travelling Side Ways: The Connemara Cafe

22/6/2019

We know that when we travel we’re supposed to be collecting up such icons as the Eiffel Tower, Madame Tussauds, and the Taj Mahal, but for us it’s the small bits, the human stuff, that gets us going. And eateries are one of the best places to catch up on the human drama.

This one was after a long day of exploring the Connemara National Park and Joyce’s Country in the West of Ireland (just brilliant!), and all we wanted was a quick feed before falling down on our B+B bed...

< >

Sunday 23rd May 1994

Back into Clifden and we opt for an early-ish tea, to get in and out before the rest of the tourist throng want to do the same, and decide to try a newly opened caff. This turns out to be a unique bit of café theatre.

This one is REALLY new, like opened this morning. In High Season. In Connemara. And the staff are even newer, look like mum and three daughters going into business together and thought a caff would be the way to go and how hard can it be? But it rapidly becomes clear that none of them have done this before and they’re still trying to work out how all this short order stuff is done smoothly. Even how it’s done roughly. This is now a mass exercise in on-the-job training.

There’s not many customers when we sit down, but the early-teen daughter on duty quickly goes self-conscious and has a nervous breakdown over all this complicated order-taking business and flick-passes it on to her elder sister. Right, elder sister takes over.

There's a special on “Soup Of The Day” so I’ll have that please, and Herself orders “Pizza-and-Salad”, plus two coffees, and could we have two serves of icecream for dessert afterwards thanks love?

This sounds simple, but we finish up with a bowl of soup EACH. We’re typical middleclass Aussies insofar as we’ve never complained in an eatery in our life nor ever sent anything back even if the steak is still moo-ing or it’s the colour and texture of the Hume Highway. So I clean up both bowls of soup and both rolls and all the butter, although one set would've probably done the job.

Herself’s pizza plate arrives, and it’s a typically generous Irish serve and she with the midget stomach can only handle half of it so I generously volunteer to clean up the rest while we wait for our icecreams. Which Herself changes to cheesecake please if that would be okay? Oh, and could we have our coffees please?

Elder sister is just starting to look flustered, as by now half the nations of the known world have sent three people each to this rather smallish coffee-and-snacks place and mum and daughters and whoever is pedalling madly out the back in the kitchen are rapidly losing the plot with orders and our coffees have been forgotten entirely. But then so have most of everyone else’s.

We’re starting to think this must be the only caff open in town because a group of TEN rock in. They quickly assess the situation and to relieve the pressure the five adults bribe their five kids with money to go find an ice cream somewhere else while they stand waiting for some tables to empty, although we hang onto ours because we can sense a small human drama in the making. And we still haven’t had our coffees.

One couple takes a table after trying to order at the counter – the daughters are really pleasant kids but they have absolutely NO idea how to run all this – while another couple give up on ever getting their coffees and settle for what they've had and decide to look elsewhere, while yet another couple who have been forgotten entirely go on waiting patiently.

Hoo-wee, Herself's cheesecake arrives and it’s a slab big enough to surf on, with wonderful great GLOBS of cream – they must all have double digit cholesterol readings in Ireland – and there’s no way she’s going to get through this either. And still no sign of our coffees. But at least we aren't being discriminated against. Now nobody seems to be getting coffee.

Best we can think is, they’re concentrating on the food first... uh-oh, the couple in the corner are still trying to catch someone’s eye as more people stumble out and more people stumble in and set about clearing their own tables. And hey, the couple in the corner finally get some attention and order cheesecake just as the last of it goes elsewhere and it’s all too much for them and they give up and go. And they were such patient souls too. This whole show is heaps better than TV.

I finally coax some coffee out of elder sister who's now on the edge of a very serious mental collapse. And she thought this was going to be such fun too. Coffees down at last and we’re at the counter waiting to pay and now Mum and daughter are manically thumbing through the spirex order pad, back and forth and back and forth, making notes and crossing things out, checking through to see who they've missed, can't read each other’s writing. And having no pre-agreed set of abbreviations clearly doesn't help one bit. We go on waiting with wallet in hand.

All I wanted was a bowl of soup and a bit of something sweet. And a coffee. I've had two bowls of soup, two large rolls, much too much good Irish butter, half of Herself’s pizza and salad, a great swodge of cheesecake, and all the bloody cream!! My guts is groaning and I should be ashamed of myself but God help me I got caught up in events.

Okay, WE know what we’ve eaten/drunk, but they have NO idea, so I do a swift calc and add on twenty percent to be sure to be sure and suggest this to the kid, who now looks like she's set to burst into tears as she takes our dough and tries to work out the change but she’s past all capacity to add, subtract, or even speak by this stage. She’s tried her decent heart out but she’ll need some serious counselling tonight if not a straight jacket. We feel acutely sorry for them but geez we’re happy to escape.

< >

Extract from “Haggis And Silver Birch Wine”

=================================================