Is this the most dramatic setting for a food truck, music gigs and a yoga class in Cork?

BALLYBRANNIGAN is a gorgeous strand along the East Cork coastline. Overlooking it sits a small food trailer called Niamh’s Larder.

It’s a remote and stunningly picturesque setting for a business and has garnered plenty of attention over the last few years.

Niamh Hegarty is the founder of Niamh’s Larder’ She studied Commerce and Chinese and ended up working in the commercial food industry.

More drawn to the hands-on approach to food, Niamh opted for a change of direction, and attended the Ballymaloe Cookery School. Throughout the duration of her time there, she was casually posting her creations onto Instagram.

The moment of inspiration for her business came to her when she was sitting on the beach in 2020 and overheard a passer-by express their appetite for food. Niamh immediately thought, I can do that, and very quickly went to work on her idea.

She designed a picnic box menu and began photographing and promoting these eye-catching meals through her Instagram account - and began selling them out immediately. The immediate quantity of people ordering her product shocked her, but also inspired further ideas.

Niamh has a clear talent for clever branding and marketing, so she decided to design products that were launched successively throughout the year, coinciding with Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day, and the orders kept clicking in through her Instagram.

Neighbourfood, which is a delivery business that boomed during the lockdowns, asked if she’d like to become part of the delivery network, which further extended her reach around Cork.

Niamh took the next step of converting a trailer into a food truck and created a semi-permanent location for her products little more than 100 metres from her family home.

She invited me to her home on a Sunday morning to give me the express tour of her business. We sat and had tea in her kitchen with her dog, Poppy, and her cat, Pearl, snooping about.

The setting looked like it could have been snapped out of an interior design magazine, decorated quaintly with farmhouse style furniture and an AGA range cooker as a centre piece. It was obvious to me that her style, taste, and eye for aesthetics runs in the family.

Niamh’s trailer is a beautifully rustic kitchen on wheels and it fits the setting in which it stands perfectly; amidst the long grassland, overlooking the waves, with an unobstructed view of the horizon line. She serves a selection of picnic style boxes with freshly ground coffee and her own kefir beverages.

Two weeks after Niamh started posting images of her trailer online, she was contacted by the producers of the RTÉ TV show, Battle Of The Food Trucks. They asked if she’d like to take part and she instinctively said yes, thinking it would be good for the business, but with little expectation that it would actually happen.

Shortly afterwards, she was asked formally to take part and then the panic set it in!

A few nights before, I looked online and saw the level of contestants I’d be up against, and they were all proper chefs with award-winning restaurants and I began to feel very nervous!

However, Niamh got halfway through the series. Considering she’d only had a few months of culinary experience behind her - it was not a bad achievement at all!

When her trailer is set up, it’s adorned with bunches of foliage and flowers and feathers, with tiles, timber and hanging retro metal lampshades. All of these trimmings create a dreamy foodie’s larder.

Niamh decided to branch out and create her own range of fermented beverages called Bkultured. She showed me her prep kitchen set-up, with rows of great jars of liquid with sliced fruit and whole spices in their various stages of fermentation, with the microbial addition resting at the base of the jars.

These fermented drinks promote gut health and will be the focus of a lot of Niamh’s attention in the near future.

Her location isn’t solely a foodie spot, she also hosts a variety of events such as yoga classes, reiki workshops, and full moon women’s circles.

Niamh has a summer of Saturday night gigs lined up, the Waves of Sound/Summer Music Series, with her stage ready for performances of various genres.

Yoga classes are hosted every Sunday at 11am and they might be the most dramatically set classes in all of Cork.

You can find Niamh, her events, and her creations on Ballybrannigan Beach every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

For information on her various events, you can go to her social media pages @niamhs_larder.