A butcher and a chef walk into a bar … and Dublin food history is made. 

this is a cookbook which I cooked for, styled and shot last year in dublin.

And for Mains is the brainchild of Gareth Smith and Rick Higgins, a chef and a butcher with a passion for food and an even bigger passion for life.* This book was born out of a desire to share their knowledge, stories and recipes with the people who they know love all the same things that they do.

Gaz and Rick have been firm friends and business partners ever since Gaz first sourced Rick’s steaks for his Dublin restaurant, Michael’s. Over the years they have made many a deal over a coin toss and come up with many a curveball for the restaurant over pints (cows’ lips, anyone?).

In this, their first cookbook, they combine the recipes for meat feasts, seafood classics and a few of those curveballs that Gaz is renowned for with stories of the food scene in Ireland, from the inside scoop on Irish beef to the reality of crab fishing in the Irish Sea.

Once you’ve sat down to a table overflowing with seafood, meat, shellfish and sides, there will be only one question left to ask: and for mains?