Ahead of this year’s much anticipated Beyond The Pale festival, we catch up with Tolu Asemota, owner of West African restaurant IBILE, as he gets ready to dish up a taste of West African cultures as part of this year’s festival in Glendalough Co. Wicklow.
What’s your take on festival cooking – do you see it as an opportunity for chaos, creative freedom, or something else?
Honestly? It’s controlled chaos with intention. Festival cooking strips away all the comfortable infrastructure of a permanent kitchen and forces you to be really decisive about what matters — what’s the one bite, the one flavour, the one moment you want someone to carry home? That constraint is actually where creativity lives. For IBILE, it’s also an opportunity to introduce people to West African food who might never have walked into a tasting menu restaurant. The festival format democratises that access, and I find that exciting rather than daunting.
What challenges do you face when you take your kitchen out of the restaurant and drop it into a festival setting in a field in Wicklow?
We’re a pop-up by nature, so we’re comfortable without walls — but a field in Wicklow still throws its own curveballs. The biggest challenge is maintaining quality and consistency at volume without a full brigade or a fixed kitchen. Everything has to be engineered to travel well, hold well, and assemble quickly under pressure. We spend a lot of time in pre-production so that on the day, the team is plating rather than panicking. Weather is always a wildcard too — nothing humbles a chef faster than wind and rain.
Is there any one flavour or ingredient that defines your menu at Beyond The Pale?
Suya spice. It’s the thread that runs through everything we do — that complex, layered warmth of ground peanuts, ginger, paprika, and a few things I’ll keep to myself. It’s deeply West African but completely approachable for anyone tasting it for the first time. At its core, suya spice is the flavour of a Lagosian night market — smoky, bold, sociable — and that’s exactly the energy we want people to feel when they’re eating with us at the festival.
What dish are you most excited to serve at Beyond The Pale? Is there anything on the menu that might surprise your regulars?
Our regulars are used to seeing our food in a refined, plated format — so the festival versions are a deliberate reimagining rather than a scaled-down version. The dish I’m most excited about is our suya-spiced protein served in a way that you can eat walking around a field, without any sacrifice to the flavour profile. That’s the puzzle I enjoy solving. People who know IBILE will recognise the DNA immediately, but the format will be new.
What does it mean for you to be part of the food line-up at Beyond The Pale this year?
It means a lot, genuinely. Beyond the Pale has a curatorial reputation — the music line-up, the overall vibe — so being selected as part of the food programme feels like an alignment of values, not just a slot at a market.
IBILE has always said we belong in rooms like this, where culture is taken seriously, and this is one more step in proving that West African contemporary dining has a seat at every table — including tables in fields in Wicklow.
Beyond the food, what are you most looking forward to experiencing at the 2026 festival?
The music, without question. There’s something about eating well and then losing yourself in a crowd — that sequence is almost ritualistic. I’m also genuinely curious to see how our guests experience the brand in that context. IBILE events are usually quite intimate and contained. At Beyond the Pale, we’re part of something much larger, and I want to watch how people carry that energy.
Sum up your festival menu in three words…
Bold. Rooted. Joyful.
For those not familiar with your work, can you say a few words about what you do at IBILE?
IBILE is bigger than a food stall. Everything we do — whether it’s a tasting menu in Dublin or a brunch at a festival in Wicklow — is about making West African culture feel present, celebrated, and contemporary. We’re not serving nostalgia. We’re serving a living, evolving cuisine with a lot still to say. Come hungry, and come curious.
Dining Experiences at Beyond The Pale
Ali Dunworth curates Beyond The Plate, under the banner of The Spice Bag Edition, celebrating global influences on Irish food through tastings, collaborations, and storytelling.
The programme includes three of Dublin’s most exciting restaurants – Reggie’s, Host and IBILE – who will be cooking at this year’s festival. Ranelagh’s Host brings primal, fire‑led cooking and generous shared plates; Reggie’s, the cult Rathmines pizzeria, brings its signature pies to the festival; while Ibíle serves bold West African flavours and spice‑driven dishes designed for sharing.
With only three sittings per restaurant per day, capacity for these sit‑down dining experiences are limited. Bookings are now open via itsbeyondthepale.ie/
Beyond the Pale takes place from June 12th to 14th at Glendalough Estate, Co. Wicklow.
