Picture this: you’re taking a friend – a first-time visitor – on a tour around Ireland, and you’re delighted to be able to show them the sights. You drive for a few hours to one of the nation’s most iconic visitor attractions, pay the entry fee and wander around, drinking in the surroundings.
You’re lucky with the weather – there is not a cloud in the sky, it’s not too windy and you can’t believe how much natural beauty can be found in your own (metaphorical) backyard. In that moment, you feel so proud to be Irish.
Then, as this attraction is located in a rural area and you’re not sure where there might be a proper restaurant, you decide to grab a bite in the on-site café. When you walk in, you see a few sad, pre-packaged sandwiches alongside a crisp display and a machine pumping out cups of generic-brand coffee.
You’re a food lover and you know there are numerous quality foods produced within the locality. Suddenly, the pride you felt exploring the site shifts to disappointment.
You know that an opportunity to showcase local food to the many visitors who appear at this site each day is being missed.
For too long, this has been the reality at many of the visitor attractions around the country, but today, some sites are taking their food offerings as seriously as their main showcase.
At Mount Congreve Gardens in Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, CEO Sara Dolan says their on-site eatery, Stables Café, which is headed by chef Jean Baptiste (JB) Du Bois, is as much of a draw as the estate’s 16km of exotic garden and woodlands.
When the historic house was restored and opened to the public in 2023, it was important that they got their food offering ‘just right’ because it ultimately ties into their ethos: to respect the great history of the house and gardens while making use of their home-grown produce.
“Truthfully, we went through a few iterations of the café to get it right,” Sara says. “We’ve hit the right model now and the feedback we’re getting from visitors is fantastic – if there’s ever a complaint, it’s about wait times [for a table] because we’re so busy. The food offering has become an integral element to our guest experience – and the café page is the second most visited on our website.”
Waterford Festival of Food, Chef JB Dubois & Sara Dolan from Mount Congreve photographed for an article by Janine Kennedy \ Claire Nash
High-end hospitality
Sara’s background is in high-end hospitality. Previous to Mount Congreve, she worked with the Cliff Group and was based in nearby Ardmore, at the Cliff House Hotel. Before that, she spent a decade in France working in luxury campsites, making her uniquely qualified to undertake a property like Mount Congreve.
The café and grounds are hives of activity and they offer on-site accommodation in the form of bell tents and forest cabins. They have restored all of the property’s gate houses and also offer a QQI Level 5 certificate in horticulture, which is affiliated with the Waterford and Wexford Education and Training Board (WWETB) with demonstrations given by their own garden team.
“I love being out in nature,” Sara says. “I have a grá for a big house and its history. When I saw all the lovely cottages [on the site] falling down, I saw an opportunity. With our accommodation options, guests get access to the gardens after normal visiting hours which is a real draw. We are right on the Waterford Greenway. Waterford is Ireland’s oldest city; we are really lucky with our location.”
Mount Congreve dates back to 1760 and was a fully functioning estate with butlers, chauffeurs and, of course, gardeners, until the last owner – Ambrose Congreve – passed away in 2011. It was Ambrose who made the grounds and gardens the brilliant spectacle we see today.
“He had the ambition to create this great garden of the world,” Sara explains. “He retired here in the late 1960s and hired a Dutch garden director, Herman Dool. For 40 years, the two designed gardens and sought out rare and unique species.
“Ambrose lived to be 104 and died of a heart attack on his way to the Chelsea Flower Show, so he was passionate about plants right up until the end.
“When he died, the estate was left in limbo,” she continues. “Teams were let go – the butler, the chauffeur – and it was a difficult time. It was vacant for about 11 years.
“Waterford Council and Fáilte Ireland stepped in and sought funding to create a new visitor attraction, and my role was identified out of that. I came here four years ago, when we were essentially a building site,” explains Sara.
The on-site food offering at Mount Congreve is Stables Cafe, which is run by chef JB Du Bois. The menu uses as much produce grown on-site as possible and JB aims for a completely waste-free kitchen.
While the estate’s larger gardens feature rare and exotic plant species, the walled garden was equally important to Ambrose because it was where all of their fruits and vegetables were grown. He was a creature of habit who enjoyed afternoon tea at 3.45pm each day and followed a basic diet, rich in wholefoods.
“A former cook from Ambrose’s time lives locally,” Sara says. “She says they would send a list down to the head gardener each day. They had a dairy farm on-site. Nothing was bought in – they made their own cheese and cream, the whole lot. What’s special about the Stables Café is that it’s using as much of the on-site produce as possible.
“JB has been a godsend,” she adds. “He understands our ethos. He is a zero-waste chef – he will use the whole tomato, the whole carrot. Nothing goes in the bin. It’s about looking back to what the place was and bringing that back to life.”
In addition to JB using the estate’s produce on the Stables Café menu, Sara says they have been able to produce enough food to offer seasonal veg boxes to Waterford locals or those staying in the on-site accommodation. “It’s a pleasure to see people coming having good food, going out into the gardens and coming back transformed – we know the benefits of spending time out in nature.”
Waterford Festival of Food, Chef JB Dubois & Sara Dolan from Mount Congreve photographed for an article by Janine Kennedy \ Claire Nash
The chef
JB is originally from France and came to Ireland as a young chef in the late 1990s. He worked his way through various high-end kitchens before settling down in Waterford.
He says it was his sense of adventure which brought him to Ireland, but it was the quality of our Irish produce which made him want to stay.
“I intended to just stay for six months; to travel as a young chef, but I fell in love with Ireland and I am still here,” he says, smiling.
“I did my journey in fine dining; I wanted to learn ‘proper cooking’, but then I started to get more interested in sustainable foods – what they are, and how far we can go in that space. I have since specialised in sustainable seafood and zero-waste cooking.
“It’s actually quite easy to transform a kitchen into a zero-waste kitchen. Some might think it’s more expensive to cook this way, but that’s really not true.
Smaller suppliers won’t overcharge you, and you won’t waste their produce – it’s only been picked two days ago, it hasn’t travelled far.
“A big thing for me is to respect the produce and the work that went into it. When you have a garden team who work as hard as they do here, I’m not going to waste any of the food they grow.”
JB spends a lot of time preserving Mount Congreve’s produce to ensure guests can enjoy the food when it’s fresh and at its peak, but also throughout the year through fermentation, pickling and other types of preservation.
On 26 April, Mount Congreve will host a special lunchtime event for the Waterford Festival of Food. 350 Metres and Beyond (tickets €55) will feature JB’s culinary skill and the best of what the kitchen garden has to offer while equally showcasing the diverse foods, producers and landscapes of the county.
The menu will be inspired by Mount Congreve’s 350-metre ‘Estate-to-Plate’ philosophy (350 metres being the literal distance between the Stables Café and the walled gardens) followed by a panel discussion exploring food, place, and purpose in contemporary Irish cooking.
JB will be joined by the estate’s director, Ray Sinnott, and Russ Parsons, Waterford resident and former food editor of the Los Angeles Times. Their conversation will be guided by Georgina Campbell, bringing together perspectives from the garden, kitchen and world of food writing.
“On the day, we will feature vegetables grown on-site alongside some local sustainable fish – rock salmon, which would have been used in 1980s but isn’t well used today.
“I have some of this fish coming in and we will be using the whole fish – their bones will make a bouillabaisse and we can use their bellies for stir-fries, etc.
“And, of course, we will be featuring the rhubarb grown on the estate for dessert.”
See mountcongreve.com
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Picture this: you’re taking a friend – a first-time visitor – on a tour around Ireland, and you’re delighted to be able to show them the sights. You drive for a few hours to one of the nation’s most iconic visitor attractions, pay the entry fee and wander around, drinking in the surroundings.
You’re lucky with the weather – there is not a cloud in the sky, it’s not too windy and you can’t believe how much natural beauty can be found in your own (metaphorical) backyard. In that moment, you feel so proud to be Irish.
Then, as this attraction is located in a rural area and you’re not sure where there might be a proper restaurant, you decide to grab a bite in the on-site café. When you walk in, you see a few sad, pre-packaged sandwiches alongside a crisp display and a machine pumping out cups of generic-brand coffee.
You’re a food lover and you know there are numerous quality foods produced within the locality. Suddenly, the pride you felt exploring the site shifts to disappointment.
You know that an opportunity to showcase local food to the many visitors who appear at this site each day is being missed.
For too long, this has been the reality at many of the visitor attractions around the country, but today, some sites are taking their food offerings as seriously as their main showcase.
At Mount Congreve Gardens in Kilmeaden, Co Waterford, CEO Sara Dolan says their on-site eatery, Stables Café, which is headed by chef Jean Baptiste (JB) Du Bois, is as much of a draw as the estate’s 16km of exotic garden and woodlands.
When the historic house was restored and opened to the public in 2023, it was important that they got their food offering ‘just right’ because it ultimately ties into their ethos: to respect the great history of the house and gardens while making use of their home-grown produce.
“Truthfully, we went through a few iterations of the café to get it right,” Sara says. “We’ve hit the right model now and the feedback we’re getting from visitors is fantastic – if there’s ever a complaint, it’s about wait times [for a table] because we’re so busy. The food offering has become an integral element to our guest experience – and the café page is the second most visited on our website.”
Waterford Festival of Food, Chef JB Dubois & Sara Dolan from Mount Congreve photographed for an article by Janine Kennedy \ Claire Nash
High-end hospitality
Sara’s background is in high-end hospitality. Previous to Mount Congreve, she worked with the Cliff Group and was based in nearby Ardmore, at the Cliff House Hotel. Before that, she spent a decade in France working in luxury campsites, making her uniquely qualified to undertake a property like Mount Congreve.
The café and grounds are hives of activity and they offer on-site accommodation in the form of bell tents and forest cabins. They have restored all of the property’s gate houses and also offer a QQI Level 5 certificate in horticulture, which is affiliated with the Waterford and Wexford Education and Training Board (WWETB) with demonstrations given by their own garden team.
“I love being out in nature,” Sara says. “I have a grá for a big house and its history. When I saw all the lovely cottages [on the site] falling down, I saw an opportunity. With our accommodation options, guests get access to the gardens after normal visiting hours which is a real draw. We are right on the Waterford Greenway. Waterford is Ireland’s oldest city; we are really lucky with our location.”
Mount Congreve dates back to 1760 and was a fully functioning estate with butlers, chauffeurs and, of course, gardeners, until the last owner – Ambrose Congreve – passed away in 2011. It was Ambrose who made the grounds and gardens the brilliant spectacle we see today.
“He had the ambition to create this great garden of the world,” Sara explains. “He retired here in the late 1960s and hired a Dutch garden director, Herman Dool. For 40 years, the two designed gardens and sought out rare and unique species.
“Ambrose lived to be 104 and died of a heart attack on his way to the Chelsea Flower Show, so he was passionate about plants right up until the end.
“When he died, the estate was left in limbo,” she continues. “Teams were let go – the butler, the chauffeur – and it was a difficult time. It was vacant for about 11 years.
“Waterford Council and Fáilte Ireland stepped in and sought funding to create a new visitor attraction, and my role was identified out of that. I came here four years ago, when we were essentially a building site,” explains Sara.
The on-site food offering at Mount Congreve is Stables Cafe, which is run by chef JB Du Bois. The menu uses as much produce grown on-site as possible and JB aims for a completely waste-free kitchen.
While the estate’s larger gardens feature rare and exotic plant species, the walled garden was equally important to Ambrose because it was where all of their fruits and vegetables were grown. He was a creature of habit who enjoyed afternoon tea at 3.45pm each day and followed a basic diet, rich in wholefoods.
“A former cook from Ambrose’s time lives locally,” Sara says. “She says they would send a list down to the head gardener each day. They had a dairy farm on-site. Nothing was bought in – they made their own cheese and cream, the whole lot. What’s special about the Stables Café is that it’s using as much of the on-site produce as possible.
“JB has been a godsend,” she adds. “He understands our ethos. He is a zero-waste chef – he will use the whole tomato, the whole carrot. Nothing goes in the bin. It’s about looking back to what the place was and bringing that back to life.”
In addition to JB using the estate’s produce on the Stables Café menu, Sara says they have been able to produce enough food to offer seasonal veg boxes to Waterford locals or those staying in the on-site accommodation. “It’s a pleasure to see people coming having good food, going out into the gardens and coming back transformed – we know the benefits of spending time out in nature.”
Waterford Festival of Food, Chef JB Dubois & Sara Dolan from Mount Congreve photographed for an article by Janine Kennedy \ Claire Nash
The chef
JB is originally from France and came to Ireland as a young chef in the late 1990s. He worked his way through various high-end kitchens before settling down in Waterford.
He says it was his sense of adventure which brought him to Ireland, but it was the quality of our Irish produce which made him want to stay.
“I intended to just stay for six months; to travel as a young chef, but I fell in love with Ireland and I am still here,” he says, smiling.
“I did my journey in fine dining; I wanted to learn ‘proper cooking’, but then I started to get more interested in sustainable foods – what they are, and how far we can go in that space. I have since specialised in sustainable seafood and zero-waste cooking.
“It’s actually quite easy to transform a kitchen into a zero-waste kitchen. Some might think it’s more expensive to cook this way, but that’s really not true.
Smaller suppliers won’t overcharge you, and you won’t waste their produce – it’s only been picked two days ago, it hasn’t travelled far.
“A big thing for me is to respect the produce and the work that went into it. When you have a garden team who work as hard as they do here, I’m not going to waste any of the food they grow.”
JB spends a lot of time preserving Mount Congreve’s produce to ensure guests can enjoy the food when it’s fresh and at its peak, but also throughout the year through fermentation, pickling and other types of preservation.
On 26 April, Mount Congreve will host a special lunchtime event for the Waterford Festival of Food. 350 Metres and Beyond (tickets €55) will feature JB’s culinary skill and the best of what the kitchen garden has to offer while equally showcasing the diverse foods, producers and landscapes of the county.
The menu will be inspired by Mount Congreve’s 350-metre ‘Estate-to-Plate’ philosophy (350 metres being the literal distance between the Stables Café and the walled gardens) followed by a panel discussion exploring food, place, and purpose in contemporary Irish cooking.
JB will be joined by the estate’s director, Ray Sinnott, and Russ Parsons, Waterford resident and former food editor of the Los Angeles Times. Their conversation will be guided by Georgina Campbell, bringing together perspectives from the garden, kitchen and world of food writing.
“On the day, we will feature vegetables grown on-site alongside some local sustainable fish – rock salmon, which would have been used in 1980s but isn’t well used today.
“I have some of this fish coming in and we will be using the whole fish – their bones will make a bouillabaisse and we can use their bellies for stir-fries, etc.
“And, of course, we will be featuring the rhubarb grown on the estate for dessert.”
See mountcongreve.com
Read more
From cruises to couverture chocolate – made with love
Churning out orders at Irish Gourmet Butter
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