If you're going to write a successful cookbook these days, it seems you must be a celebrity chef (see Jamie Oliver and Antonio Carluccio) or own a successful restaurant (see the River Cafe or the Sugar Club). Of course, neither guarantees that your cookbook is going to be any good - the celebrity chef oeuvre can be irritatingly lacking in practical details such as easily attainable ingredients, while the restaurant-based cookbook can be little more than an extended plug for the restaurant in question. Yet when the formula works, the end result can be delightful.
The Avoca Cafe Cookbook is definitely one of the success stories. True, it is liberally sprinkled with pictures of the Avoca craft shops - the mills, the looms, even the clothing labels - but such is the standard of the photography by Georgia Glynn Smith, a regular Vogue contributor, that these black and white shots look atmospheric, intriguing. Together with her extensive jewel-bright photos of fresh scones, red cabbage salad, rocket-laden pizza and milky smoked haddock, they invite the reader to dream up cosy suppers, imaginary picnics, and lazy lunches.
Of course, it's the recipes that really do the work. Collected and written up by well-known food writer Hugo Arnold from recipes dreamed up, adapted and put into practice by the chefs in the five Avoca Cafes, they are an eclectic and tempting bunch, with little airs and graces about them. Avoca Cafe specialises in the kind of food that's best summed up by the word tasty. Think leek, blue cheese and rocket fritatta. Think aubergine, feta and poppyseed tart. Think spiced lentil and lemon soup. You wouldn't find them on the menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant but nine times out of 10, you'd rather have a dish like this for your supper mid-week.
The credits flow thick and fast through the cookbook; if an Avoca chef invents a dish it's named after the person, or if a recipe is adapted from a Ballymaloe version, it's noted. But behind the whole Avoca food project - the cookbook, the Avoca Pantry range of preserves and dressings, the six cafes including the 100-seater one in the new Suffolk Street flagship store - is Simon Pratt who, with his sister Amanda Pratt, heads up the retail side of the family-run Avoca group. It was he who first put together a couple of tables and chairs in one of the Avoca outlets in 1990; the idea was to serve some biscuits and tea to tired shoppers, but like Topsy, it just grew.
"I was living in the gate lodge in Kilmacanogue at the time, making soup and chicken liver pate and salads in the morning, before heading off to work" remembers Pratt, who is currently working flat out on the Dublin shop. By his own admission, the Avoca cafes took off with the arrival of executive chef Leylie Heyes, who was fresh from a stint in London with Antony Worrall Thompson after her training in Ballymaloe, Co Cork. From those few tables in 1990, the food side of Avoca has expanded until now the two largest cafes, in Kilmacanogue and Powerscourt, are likely to serve up to 2,000 people per day during the summer.
"We always wanted to do the food a certain way, and to us, there's no point in doing it otherwise. We wanted everything to be made fresh every day. We're never going to not put hazelnuts into a recipe if the recipe demands them or use margarine instead of butter. It's just not worth it . . . You have to protect your own integrity and the integrity of your brand," says Pratt, who chose to publish the Avoca Cafe Cookbook himself to keep its cost down and its quality high.
Still, he is firm about the fact that "food is the tail and not the dog"; in other words, the food is a very successful sidebar to their shops rather than being a huge money-spinner in its own right. "There's a comfort to having food sold in a shop, it gives it a soul," he says.
Practically speaking it brings the customers in and makes them stay there. Down in Kilmacanogue and Powerscourt, a delicious cafe overlooking some well-tended gardens turns a rather long drive to do some shopping into an outing. In the Dublin Avoca store, which is due to open next month, the cafe and food hall serve an equally important function - they are carefully placed on the third floor and the basement respectively to entice people through all four floors of the building.
Still, the cafes are much more than candy-covered lures. Downstairs is going to be a mecca for those in a rush. You can either grab a salad, soup and smoothie and go, or stick around to buy a custom-made salad at the Toss-Up bar and some portions of Mediterranean tart, Thai fish cakes or pavlova to take home for supper. Upstairs is for the slightly more leisurely. In a break with the Avoca tradition of self-service, there's going to be table service: "Nobody likes arriving into the back of a queue." The food, however, will remain true to the Avoca ethos thanks to former Powercourt head chef Eimer Rainsford, who is coming back from a stint of travelling to take charge of the kitchens.
With windows on both sides of the building, the cafe promises to be a bright and airy space which Amanda Pratt and stylist Dorcas Barry are filling with two- and fourseater tables and church chairs that have a prayer-book shelf for the cafe menus. Black boards painted red will display the salads of the day, while a huge table of Iranian mustard marble will be packed full of tempting desserts. The food will come down from the kitchens and bakery upstairs via a dumb waiter; "Of course it would be cheaper to have a centralised kitchen for all the cafes, but then you're just asking for a deterioration in quality."
At the back of the shop, a dingy overlooked flat roof is going to be transformed into a green space with tables and chairs because Pratt just loves the idea of a "secret garden in the city; a kind of urban oasis". This will only hold a couple of tables but he is already talking longingly of the expanse of flat roof on the building, which he admits he would like to turn into a roof-top cafe one day. "I'd like to come up with some way of bringing the outdoors inside, but for the moment, I think it'll just be a great place for the staff to sunbathe."
Describing himself as a "passionate foodie", Pratt is nonetheless quick to attribute the success of the Avoca cafes to his staff. "When people are going bust every day, I do sometimes wonder why we're doing so well. I think it's because we're not trying to be something we're not . . . There's elements of integrity throughout the business and we built it up the long way by hard work. That's not an attempt to get into heaven; I just believe it works if you do it right."
The Avoca Cafe Cookbook is on sale from June 27th, price £17.99