Our Story

Diva has had many incarnations over the new millennium, passionate foodie Shannen Keane first opened her doors in Kinsale, Co. Cork in the Spring of 2002. Hailing from the rainy city of Seattle in the pacific northwest of the United States she was addicted to caffeine and the cafe culture that provided refuge from the wet weather and grey skies. What better place to open a coffee house and cafe than Kinsale, Ireland? Being the first of its kind in the town, locals soon began flocking in to get their seat in the little 20 seat cafe with fresh scones and cakes baked straight from Shannen’s oven in Summercove, Kinsale. Very few remnants remain from the original Diva Cafe as it was in the pre-social media/selfie era. Some of you might remember… back when you had to get film developed before you could see any of your photos! Yeah THAT long ago!

Diva stayed in Kinsale for 6 years before moving to its latest home in Ballinspittle. right near the beaches of Garretstown and Garrylucas. It seemed perfect for beach goers to pop in and grab some deli items from the now even smaller (12 seats!) location than previously in Kinsale. This location had its own kitchen (what the Kinsale Diva lacked) so Diva ran wild with all possibilities, pop up dinner nights (mexican, morroccan themes), picnic items for the beach, farmer’s markets, takeaways the whole she-bang!

The popularity again grew quickly with die hard Kinsale customers travelling out and wanting to eat in. So… naturally Diva expanded the walls came down the kitchen grew more seats emerged. There was now space for 35+ customers who came for brunch and lunch and for an after meal treat of in house baking. Diva started baking bread on the daily, using mostly prefermented bread recipes until we caught the sourdough bug! Sourdough bread was still a relative unknown in the country but Diva missed the breads from stateside and we always tried to make everything in-house.

The new kitchen soon became to small for all the baking and cooking. So when a space across the road opened, Diva did the obvious and opened a new bakery premise dedicated to the art and craft of all things butter, flour and vanilla. Why not?!

Since the bakery itself opened Diva has been on the up with creating over the top cakes, decadent handmade pastries, delicious savouries plus we had a deli onsite to stock up on all the essentials, Irish and European, olives, cheeses, charcuterie and more….

Fast forward to March 2020….A global pandemic hit.. no one could of predicted what was coming down the pipeline… tough decisions had to be made and one of those decisions was that we had to keep it small in order to survive..we put in a takeaway hatch( like many other food businesses) in the bakery, which has worked a treat, while that worked, we still had a whole cafe that was not doing a thing. It really didn’t make economic sense to have two places in the same village doing pretty much the same thing, so while it was a bittersweet choice, the decision to permanently close Diva Cafe was made.

Currently the bakery is not trading as we are waiting for the 5k travel restrictions to be increased to 10k…once we get that we will start with opening on the weekends for your favourite coffee’s and cakes…and…those handmade pastries that you all love so much!

There are many stories to be told in regards to Diva…we had a gas explosion(with a full cafe) in our kitchen, we had flooding that same year, then when we thought we could get back on our feet along came the roadworks in the village that saw many deep holes right in front of both businesses..oh..cant forget Storm Ophelia..where we were without power for 1 week..and the mega snow storm of 2018… yep, we’ve really seen it all!

Through it all, myself and my staff have kept our heads held high and looked forward creating the best sweets, savouries, cakes and bakes…

-Shannen Keane