It was a bright morning when we arrived at Kai.
Tom was already there with his camera. Edgars and I arrived after him, and Lauren and Gennady came a few minutes later. The kitchen was in prep mode. I walked in with flowers in my hand, not really knowing how the day would unfold, or whether Jess would have time to sit down with us at all.
Curiosity, and a bit of not knowing what the day would bring.
Chef Jess Murphy with Chef Kelly in the kitchen before lunch.
Jess and David Murphy have been customers of ours since the summer of 2024. They use our Alder lumpwood at Kai in Galway, but until this visit, neither Lauren nor I had met them in person.
With summer coming and our weekly charcoal series already underway, it felt like the right time to visit, learn something useful, and capture a few honest images along the way. I wanted to see how a serious kitchen thinks about charcoal. Not how people talk about it online, but how chefs actually use it when timing matters and the fire has to behave properly.
The photos mattered too. Most of our customers know ECOFUEL™ through heating products. Fewer know this side of our work. I wanted to come back with something real that we could later share with customers who may never have thought much about charcoal beyond getting the fire started.
That was the plan.
Lauren and I (Janis) talking with Jess by the grill before lunch.
Kai sits quietly on Sea Road in Galway in a corner building beside the church and school. Inside, it feels much the same.
Stone walls. Wood. A kind of warmth that comes more from use than design.
Our table was by the window, and the whole seating area was built from thick old scaffolding planks. Jess mentioned that when they opened back in 2011, the recession meant there were builders available, and work could be done at a lower cost. It is a small detail, but it tells you a lot. Places like this are not born finished. They are made, bit by bit, through timing, effort, and whatever was possible at the time.
Above the kitchen, the blackboard menu was still blank when we arrived. The menu at Kai changes daily, and later, one of the team members began writing the dishes up by hand. The kitchen itself was compact but highly organised, centred around a custom-made Japanese-style grill.
Nothing felt oversized. Nothing felt for the show.
That was probably the first thing I noticed.
Kai did not feel staged. It felt lived in.
Kai in full lunch service.
Jess and David welcomed us warmly, and with everything they have going on, we felt lucky to get that time with them.
Jess came across as grounded, direct, and serious without making a performance out of it. She grew up in Wairoa, a small town on New Zealand’s North Island, and that closeness to land, produce, and honest work still seems to shape how she works and thinks. More than anything, she felt like someone who cares deeply about feeding people well and doing it with respect.
David has his own presence, too. A great host, easy to talk to, and clearly part of what holds the place together.
Spending time with both of them, you quickly get the sense that Kai is not built around one person alone. It is a team. Jess told us they now have around 25 people across the restaurant and bakery, with many different nationalities working there. You could feel that in the way the place moved. Everyone seemed to know their role. The place was busy, but not frantic. Full of movement, but not noise.
That kind of smoothness never happens by accident.
Lunch, conversation, and time together.
We sat down for lunch together, and somewhere around then, the visit changed for me.
I am not a food writer, and I have no interest in pretending to be one. But I know when food leaves an impression.
We ate stew. I had the house-smoked BBQ trout. There was plenty of coffee. Then Jess surprised us with grilled pork chops cooked over the charcoal.
That pork stayed with me.
Not because it was trying to be clever, and not because it needed dressing up in words. It was simply very good. Jess told us the pork had come from Athenry, Co. Galway, from one of the two local pig farmers she works with. She now works with almost 320 local producers and suppliers, and you could taste the quality of that approach straight away.
The food felt like the place itself.
Honest. Confident. No need to over-explain it.
Jess even gave each of us a pork chop to take home. I fried mine on the pan later that day and it was still magnificent, but nowhere near as good as it had been cooked over charcoal.
Pork chop cooked over charcoal.
Before coming to Kai, I was mainly thinking about the product. Bag size. Fire control. Chef use. Storage. Reloading. The practical side of how lumpwood works in a commercial kitchen.
I still came away with that.
But what stayed with me more was the standard of care behind the whole place.
Hard work matters. It always will. And sometimes, it is enough. But what stood out at Kai was something more layered than that. A quiet commitment. Care. Humility. The sense that the details still matter, even the ones most people will never see.
You could feel it in the kitchen, at the table, in the team, in the produce, and in the way Jess and David carried themselves.
They both came across as what they are: down-to-earth people doing serious work. What you see is what you get. There was ambition there, of course, and passion too. You would have to care deeply to build something like Kai and keep building it year after year. But none of it felt driven by performance. It felt driven by standards and by feeding people good food.
That matters to me.
A slower moment around the table.
One of the most interesting things I learned was how little the species name matters when service is on.
Jess did not care that the charcoal was Alder. She cared that it worked.
That was the real point. It lit properly. It settled properly. It fit the rhythm of the kitchen. A 6kg bag suited them well because it was easy to bring in one at a time from storage next door and easy to work through during service.
In a kitchen like that, charcoal is not chosen because it sounds good on a label. It is chosen because it behaves properly when people are depending on it.
That quietly confirmed something we have been learning ourselves. Lumpwood is not just a type of wood. In a real kitchen, it is a system. How fast it lights. How it responds. How it reloads. How much space it takes up. Whether it makes life easier or harder.
At Kai, it sat where it should sit in the background, doing its job well.
Sous-chef Jiri at the grill.
We went there to learn about charcoal in a professional kitchen and to capture a day with a customer.
We came away with something better than that.
A reminder that good work still carries weight. That care still shows. And that the best places, whether they are restaurants, kitchens, or businesses of any kind, usually do not need to tell you what they are trying to be.
You can feel it when you are there.
