Driving progress
Justina and Liam Gavin at Honestly Farm Kitchen. Photograph Brian Duignan
An old fast food outlet in Carrick-on-Shannon has been turned into the country’s first organic food drive-through, serving a menu supplied by local farms. Marie Kelly speaks with Justina and Liam Gavin, organic farmers and ethical carnivores with big business ambitions.
The story of Ireland’s first organic drive-through restaurant doesn’t begin on the 300-acre Roscommon farm worked by owners Liam and Justina Gavin. Neither does it begin in a fishing town in Devon on the south-west English coast, where Justina grew up and the couple spent a decade growing a holiday-cottage letting business while touring farms in search of the perfect homestead.
The story begins 7,000km away in east Africa, where the young college graduates first met in the early 1990s. Liam was working for an agricultural supply company advising NGOs running refugee camps in Rwanda, and Justina was teaching English and drama at a mountain school in a Ugandan village minutes away from the Rwandan border. There, they both became intrigued by subsistence farming and the symbiotic relationship between land, food and community.
“In the village where I was teaching, people didn’t have jobs. They literally lived off the land, and if they couldn’t grow they couldn’t eat,” she explains. “It was a tough existence, but the other side of it is that they had a very real connection with the land they farmed, and people were always ready to help each other out.” The idea of eating what you grow with your own hands struck a chord with Justina and it was the beginning of the couple’s long-held dream to live off their own land. “None of the farmsteads we visited in Devon during our ten years there were quite right,” she explains. So in 2012 when Liam’s uncle James asked them to take over his farm on the shores of Lough Key in Co Roscommon – owned by his family for more than 150 years – the couple, now with three young children, packed up and relocated to the West of Ireland. “We recognised there was a really lovely community of people in this part of the world; a mixture of those who’d known Liam’s family for decades, and ‘blow-ins’ like me,” she laughs. We knew immediately that we could live here.”
Their broader vision has always been to reconnect people with local, organic and sustainable food, provide a valuable route to market for their own surplus produce and that of other small producers and to make a real contribution to rural regeneration. Honestly Kitchen in Carrick-on-Shannon, which opened its doors – and serving window – in December, was once a “fairly depressing” KFC restaurant. It’s now a chic modern eatery, complete with pendant lamps, communal wooden benches and foliage-adorned entrance. “Liam immediately saw the potential,” Justina explains. “It had the established drive-through infrastructure and it was a super-visible spot.” Also a farm shop, standard take-away and eat-in restaurant, Honestly Kitchen has generated huge curiosity since its launch, and Justina says they’ve been overwhelmed by public interest and community support. “We struggled at first to keep up with supply, customer demand was so high,” she explains.
Justina describes Liam as “a total entrepreneur”. When he returned to Dublin from Africa, he invested in a coffee dock in Heuston station after it was refurbished in 1998, serving good Italian coffee – a novelty in Ireland in the late nineties – and freshly made sandwiches rather than plastic-packaged triangles. It wasn’t long before he had two other outlets, one at Blanchardstown Hospital and another in Sandyford, which Justina helped run, before the couple employed a management team and moved to Devon in 2001 to focus on the fledgling letting agency started by Justina’s mother. When the couple arrived, the agency had 20 or so cottages by the sea. By the time it was sold in 2016, the couple had grown it to 1200 properties and it was a significant contributor to local tourism. With this self-starter attitude, proven track-record and Liam’s degree in agricultural science, the couple was well-placed to make their Irish smallholding dream come true, but it has involved a herculean effort too. The 40-acre plot they took over hadn’t been touched in 30 years (Liam’s uncle had run it as a small dairy farm and rented paddocks for grazing). Today it’s a thriving 300-acre organic farm that feeds their own family and supplies much of the ingredients for the Honestly Kitchen menu.
“For the first year or two, it was like The Good Life,” Justina laughs. They tidied up hedges, cleared fields, cut back an old orchard, re-fenced and raised some chickens and pigs. “I have lots of videos of the kids in their wellies carrying around piglets or baby ducks.” Their priority during these first couple of years was to grow enough food to feed themselves. “But in year two, we had some produce to sell,” Justina explains. “We had a few organic pedigree Dexter cows, so we bought a shepherd’s hut-style catering trailer, and I took it around the country selling burgers at festivals like Electric Picnic. We wanted to show people that convenience food doesn’t have to be rubbish.” That year, they won a McKenna Food Guide Award for their burgers at the Co Laois music festival.
Eight years later, the couple boasts a herd of 200 organic pedigree Dexters. They also have a small flock of rare breed Jacob and Shetland sheep, outdoor organic pigs and organic laying hens. At Christmas, they raise organic geese, ducks and bronze turkeys. Four polytunnels and an outdoor market garden facilitate their organic salad leaves and vegetables, all of which are used in the drive-through restaurant. Honestly Kitchen also has its own organic bakery, based in an industrial unit five minutes away. The German baker, Michael Schwessinger, who moved his family across Europe to work with the Gavins, had previously grown a tiny bakery in Bucharest into a hugely successful business, recruiting kids off the street there, employing and training them to be first-class artisans. “He had a successful business, but with a purpose,” Justina explains, “and this mentality fit perfectly with our own.” He bakes brioche for the burger buns, bread for sandwiches, and a variety of cakes, all with organic flour and as many organic ingredients as possible.
Liam and Justina have also worked incredibly hard to grow their local network of producers, which now includes tea blenders, coffee roasters, raw milk producers, artisan cheese makers and chicken producers. These will also supply the Drumanilra Farm Kitchen due to open in Strandhill in County Sligo in May, and the boutique hotel with organic restaurant, farm shop, microbrewery and teaching kitchen planned for their old premises in Boyle in Knocknashee next year. “Liam’s family has strong links with the town of Boyle going back more than a century,” Justina reveals. “His family would have brought cattle to the market there. At the moment, it’s a rural town in decline, but we’re hoping this project will help to reverse that trajectory.”
The Honestly Kitchen drive-through is five or six times busier than their Boyle restaurant was (which won several awards, including Georgina Campbell’s Natural Food Award in 2019). Justina believes this is down to more than simply a visible location, greater customer capacity and the added convenience of a drive-through. “When we first opened in Boyle in 2015, the idea of organic food still raised eyebrows, but this has changed dramatically. People now ask a lot more questions about where their food comes from, and there’s a much greater interest in making sustainable food choices. I think the vegan movement has encouraged this, but there are a lot of meat eaters like us who want to enjoy a burger without feeling that they’re contributing to climate change.” She believes that when beef farming is practised sustainably and on a smaller scale, it can be one of the solutions. Alongside the ‘ethical carnivore’ options, which include Organic Sausage Brioche and 5oz Dexter Burger, the Honestly Kitchen menu includes a vegetarian, vegan, free-from and ‘organic kids’ offering. Feta and Sundried Tomato Flatbread, Veggie Stack Burger and Vegetarian Frittata of the Day are just some of the tantalising dishes available. It’s not surprising then that the Gavin family are their own best customers. “There’s no guilt feeding this food to your kids,” Justina says.
The couple’s 16-year-old son Fionn has started working in the restaurant at weekends, and he helps his 13-year-old brother Aaron look after the family chickens when he returns from Sligo Grammar School on Friday, where he and his twin sister, Emily-Anne, board during the week. Emily-Anne is a budding artist and is currently curating photos of the farm and its produce to display on video screens in the new drive-through. “She’s also a keen cook and our resident food critic,” Justina tells me. It sounds like an all-hands-on-deck approach to life all of the time. Justina agrees but admits they’re now beginning to feel the effects of opening a restaurant during the pandemic. “It’s time to take a breath,” she says. I think she’s right, although I’m not sure downtime is in this family’s DNA.
Originally published in the Sunday Independent Life magazine, February 2022