Meal Ticket: Rua, Castlebar, Mayo

Ann McMahon opened Café Rua more than a decade ago. She wanted to share her love of uncomplicated food using local, seasonal ingredients.

Last year, I visited their new branch in Spencer Street, which opened in 2008. Its first floor is a bright, light-filled room that holds a grocery and bookshop, with floor to ceiling shelves filled with jars of local jam, bottles of Irish juice and packets of fish smoked in the West. The shelves hold a choice selection of cookbooks, including Niki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus.

Once you walk past the goodies, you’ll find Café Rua’s delicatessen, where we grabbed a couple of their honey roast bacon, cheddar and Rua chutney sandwiches to go. We tucked into thick slices of bread stuffed generously with great ingredients, the Rua chutney making a particularly good impression. Their bread is made in-house in the Rua bakery, which is where their cakes come from too.

Upstairs is where you can sit in for breakfast and lunch, alongside about 25 other diners. Lunch includes sandwiches and salads from the deli, alongside hot treats like roast loin of pork with carrots and red cabbage.

Last weekend, they were serving a Mayo Hotdog as a lunch special - a De Búrca Cumberland sausage with melted Carrowholly cheese and arrabiatta sauce on a floury blaa with local leaves and sautéed spuds (€9.95).