My Kitchen

A Retail Car Park, a Bowl of Curry, and the Gap Between Them

The approach does nothing to prepare you. Carrick Retail & Business Park on the Sligo Road is the kind of place you pull into for a hardware store or a discount clothing run. The signage is functional, the tarmac wide, the architecture forgettable. My Kitchen sits at Unit 12, and nothing about its exterior announces what happens once you're seated.

Across Ireland, the restaurants that generate the conversation tend to cluster in predictable locations. Chapter One by Mickael Viljanen in Dublin, Aniar in Galway, Liath in Blackrock, serious cooking in Ireland has historically anchored itself to city centres, coastal villages with a tourism draw, or heritage market towns. My Kitchen operates in none of those conditions. It sits in County Roscommon, in a business park, serving food rooted in the culinary tradition of peninsular Malaysia. The incongruity is real, and it deserves examination rather than a quick dismissal.

What Arrives in Front of You

The dish that has come to define My Kitchen's reputation is Sham Hanifa's Malay-style beef curry. Before it reaches the table, the kitchen announces itself through scent: galangal cutting through the room's air, coconut rounding the edges, cumin and star anise arriving in layers rather than all at once. This is a spice profile that draws from the Chinese, Indian, and indigenous Malay culinary traditions that converge in towns like Taiping and Kajang in the north and centre of the Malaysian peninsula. That convergence, what Malaysians call the country's defining food identity, is not a simple thing to reproduce. The spice pastes (rempah) that underpin Malaysian curries require specific aromatics: galangal rather than ginger, the sharper lemongrass varieties, candlenuts, dried chilies rehydrated and ground to precise texture. Getting those base flavours right outside their home context is the first challenge. Getting them right in Roscommon is a different category of achievement.

Within Ireland's restaurant conversation, the closest comparison point for this kind of work isn't a Connacht address. dede in Baltimore, County Cork, built a comparable reputation around Turkish cooking in a small-town setting, demonstrating that technically grounded non-European cooking can find a committed audience far outside the major urban centres. The restaurant operates in that same niche: specialist, ingredient-led, and dependent on a kitchen that sources and prepares foundational components rather than approximating them.

The Sourcing Question

The editorial angle that matters most here is ingredient provenance. Malaysian cooking of this type is not something you rebuild from a general-purpose supplier list. The aromatics that give Hanifa's curry its reported authenticity, galangal, fresh turmeric, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, dried and fresh chilies in combination, require deliberate sourcing, either through specialist Asian grocery wholesalers or through networks that have developed alongside Ireland's expanding South and Southeast Asian communities. Dublin's growing concentration of Asian food suppliers has created a supply chain that regional kitchens can access, but the logistics are non-trivial from a County Roscommon address.

This matters because the alternative, substituting or approximating, produces a categorically different dish. The rempah paste that forms the base of a Malay-style beef curry is not a product you can replicate with supermarket ginger in place of galangal, or ground spices in place of freshly ground rempah. The scent profile suggests a kitchen operating with the actual ingredients rather than their substitutes. That level of sourcing discipline is the foundation on which the restaurant's reputation rests, and it's the reason the food reads as coherent rather than approximate.

Terre in Castlemartyr and Chestnut in Ballydehob both build menus around similarly specific provenance commitments, though within Irish and European culinary frameworks. The principle is the same: the food's coherence depends on what comes through the kitchen door before any cooking begins.

Where This Fits in the West of Ireland Eating Picture

Carrick-on-Shannon has a restaurant scene disproportionate to its population, driven in part by its status as a popular hen and stag party destination and a summer Shannon cruising hub. The town's dining rooms tend toward the reliable and the familiar: good pub food, solid Irish bistro cooking, the occasional strong wine list. The Oarsman represents that tradition at its most considered. The restaurant occupies a different register entirely, and the two restaurants don't compete for the same diner or the same occasion.

Within the broader Irish conversation about restaurants doing non-European cooking with serious intent, the restaurant sits in a peer group that includes Bastion in Kinsale, Homestead Cottage in Doolin, and House in Ardmore, not because these restaurants cook the same food, but because each represents a kitchen committed to a specific culinary tradition operating outside the obvious urban market. Campagne in Kilkenny demonstrates what it looks like when French technique finds a committed regional audience. The restaurant makes an analogous argument for Malaysian cooking in Connacht.

Internationally, the phenomenon of serious cooking in improbable settings has precedent at the highest level. Le Bernardin in New York City built its seafood reputation in Midtown, a neighbourhood not associated with fine dining's natural habitat. Atomix in New York City established Korean haute cuisine in a basement space that gave no outward signals of what was happening inside. The lesson across all these examples is that the building and the postcode have limited predictive power once the kitchen is operating at the level the ingredients and technique demand.

Planning Your Visit

The restaurant is located at Unit 12, Carrick Retail & Business Park, Sligo Road, Cortober, Co. Roscommon, a short drive from Carrick-on-Shannon town centre, with parking directly outside. Given the restaurant's size and the reputation it has built in the region, reservations are advisable, particularly at weekends and during the summer Shannon season. The retail park setting makes arriving by car direct from either the N4 or the approaches from Sligo.