Apologies for not posting for a while – we lost our blog password and as anyone who has a blog knows, that is the worst thing you can do. It is like being locked out of your house except you can’t get a man to come and change the lock – you have to wait until you find the key again (thanks to the patient and marvellous Sheri in WordPress).
It’s good to be back and as you will see, we have filled our little (now rather large) tummy and are ready to tell all. Thanks also to the people at Fallon and Byrne for responding to our post – we’re delighted that they chose to write and to treat our post as a genuinely held opinion. And gosh, have we been eating lots this year all around Dublin. Here’s a catch-up including some incredibly good new places to eat. We are thrilled to say there are still exciting pockets of food in Dublin city, places worth travelling for that won’t break the bank.
Since we wrote last, the country has gone into recession and the pricing landscape in the restaurants in the city has changed. Blackboard stands offering price reductions are popping up all over with early bird specials, two for one’s and set menus with wine included at knock-down prices. What we are really seeing is a re-balancing of pricing and, as commercial rents come down, hopefully the restaurant trade will find itself in a more profitable, and less life-saving, condition. It sounds bad doesn’t it? But yet the truth for the Gobbler on the ground tells us that the story is not as clean-cut. Yes, some restaurants are struggling to fill seats in the early part of the week, and the high end restaurants have lost their corporate euro but from Thursday onwards, we have seen local restaurants packed to the rafters. In some cases, we have found it difficult to actually spend our euro and have had to leave disappointed. At other times the service has been lax at best, appalling at worst.
On a single Sunday we tried to spend money on breakfast in four cafes in Dublin 6 and 6w and left empty-handed, arriving at the fifth venue where we had to wait almost half an hour to get served. In two places there was a huge queue, in another we were told we could only have a croissant and not a cheese and meat plate, despite us staring at the meats and cheeses in front of us in the glass case. In another, we received the breakfast menu at 12.05, then were told at 12.30 when the waiter came to order that we had missed the breakfast deadline of midday. The Gobbler’s feet had welts at this stage, having travelled through Ranelagh, then to Terenure and Mr Gobbler and I decided there and then that the recession was not affecting the middle classes. How our tummies rumbled and tempers flared.
Let’s fill you in on our more positive eating stories starting with a
return visit to Vaughan’s Gastropub in Terenure (we wrote
about it in a previous post).
|Vaughan’s has had the benefit of good PR and overnight it
seemed, they were serving hundreds at lunchtime and for dinner.
The PR effect has worn off and now they are back to us regulars
thank God and we can find a seat again for lunch.
Dinners however contnues to attract a crowd and we have heard apocraphal tales of queues outside on the street on a Saturday night (the local florist had to queue). They put their prices up a bit when they got the few extra punters but now they have added more good value lower-priced options. (They have also added a 30 oz steak with potatoes at 55 euro for two, we buy ours from Tony in the old-fashioned butcher, a huge t-bone for 12 euro so we stay at home for that one.) Still Vaughans remains one of the best places for food in the city with cutlery arriving in crisp linen napkins, fabulous ingredients and the best steak sandwich on sourdough bread in town (for just over 8 euro). Desserts are stunning too. Try the chocolate fondant or the apple pastry – you’ll have to wait as they are baked fresh but they are to die for. | It is he ultimate recession-proof place to eat with genuine food at a genuine price. They also offer some of the best service we have found. We hope they continue to thrive and provide decent food at fair (if not cheap) prices to people of all ages and sizes.
| The Rotana Cafe: We visited this lovely middle-eastern cafe and restaurant owned by a Lebanese chef Mohammed when we happened upon it for lunch a week ago. It is delightful, authentic, spotlessly clean and the food is delicious.
Middle-eastern food at its best. We had a mezze for three (which would have done four people for a little over twenty euro fora plate of mixed starters). We had the smokiest baba ganoush, that’s roast aubergine whizzed usually with tahini, a sesame seed paste – and it tasted as if we were sitting up a chimney eating it. It was as good as any The Gobbler ate in Jerusalem. They sat next to little daschund burgers, well that’s what we called them: dark fried meat in a sausage with spices,an ugly cousin to the aubergine but yummy. We had five of the best falling-off-the-bone meatiest chicken wings in a spicy sauce; a roll of Labneh, a cheese made from drained yogurt served with homemade flat breads for dipping and lots of other morsels that were just splendid.
The ingredients were excellent, everything was home-made and servings were generous. We had mint tea with fresh mint leaves, it sounds obvious but usually you don’t see mint in the teapot, just a bag. We just had to try the Lebanese cardamom coffee to finish off with baklava pastries which were made from scratch. To tell you how unusual that is, here’s how to make them. Buy some filo pastry, defrost it. Layer it with lots of nuts and flavoured honey in about five layers. Bake, then cut into squares. By the time you buy the variations of nuts you need, you’ll need another loan from the Anglo Irish Bank. As a result, many baklavas are made with cheap nuts (not premium pistachios or walnuts or almonds), then the nuts are dyed the appropriate colour to make them look more expensive. The result of course is not authentic and when the baklavas sit in plastic packaging, the pastry softens and they get chewy. To taste how freshly-made baklavas taste, you need to go to the Rotana. Theirs are crisp and sweet but not cloying and they make you understand why you would be bothered eating baklava at all. We also ordered a dessert of melted mozzarella with a florescent pink straw hairdo – that was what it looked like, honestly. The crispy fine noodle topping was dyed bright pink and doused in rosewater and sat on top of melted cheese – it was a local approximation of a speciality. It was better than we could have imagined and as one of our party was Italian, we had to try it. It wasn’t one of those things you would order again but it’s interesting to explore. And in the end, we ate nearly all of it.
Three of us ate oodles (and noodles!), drank coffees, stuffed ourselves with pastries and the bill came to €55 – that was partly because we ate about five desserts in the interest of research. They do shawarma and doner plates for about eight euro and as they don’t have a wine licence yet, you could get out at a tenner a head if you wanted to. The owner is a Palestinian refugee, his family was exiled to Lebanon a long time ago and it is a privilege to eat his food and to help him to find a happy home in Ireland.
Our verdict: Rotana Cafe is well worth a trip, bring a gang and share everything. Hopefully they will have a wine licence soon, but if not stop at O’Connell’s Pub before and after where you can get two pints and a glass of Guinness for a tenner in lovely surroundings.
Rotana Cafe, 31 South Richmond Street, Portobello, Dublin 8 (just before the bridge on the left coming from town). Tel: (01) 4759969 / Mobile: 0857803800 E-mail: info@rotanacafe.ie Website: www.rotanacafe.ie
| M&L Chinese Restaurant, Cathedral Street, Dublin 2
Fuschia Dunlops’ book on Sichuan cuisine transported the Gobbler to a world where something exotic to eat could be based on very few apparently plain jane ingredients: just a few dried and fresh chillies fried over searing heat in a wok with niblets of chicken and a few shards of garlic, a splash of black vinegar, a nod and a wink to a soy sauce bottle and bob’s your sichuan uncle, you have a dish fit for a king. I replicated many of them at home and have the
burst veins in my face to prove it.
When I arrived back from Paris and was dropped off by Mr Gobbler next to the Pro Cathedral, I spotted this chinese restaurant and popped in to see what it was like. It was the best thing the Gobbler did. They have two menus, local and Chinese, that is the beef and black bean sauce and spring roll menu (nothing wrong with that) and the menu all in Chinese characters. I ordered from the latter. Well I asked for ribs and something else not too dear and not too spicy. I got baby ribs in a spicy sauce and a dumpling dish (24 for about 8 euro) stuffed with pork. I couldn’t eat it all and paid my 12 euro and left, thrilled at the sheer volume and the obvious genuineness of the food. I was a proper Chinese person now.
I have returned lots of times since then and it has only got better, enhanced I think by the fact that the loos are designed hotel-style and are clean which makes me think that the kitchens are hygenic too. (Given that the last place I ate that tasted of real China was in Moore Street and when I went to the bathroom, I passed a man weeing in a urinal en-route, then found that the bathroom tiles were smeared with, well you can imagine, I admit this is an issue for me. Forgive me sharing the unsavoury details but this is an honest column.)
The last time I visited the M&L, home of the pristine loo, I arrived with two Italian friends. We ordered a bottle of Chablis and the waiter presented us with a choice of two, both of which he had just bought in the Dunnes Stores across the road, secreted on his person and re-presented to his waiting guests at presumably double the price. We ordered spicy chicken with whole dried chillies and peanuts (amazing, amazing, amazing, it’s not burning hot, the dried chillies give it this incredible uplifting warm roasted taste – you completely understand the subtlety of Sichuan cooking from this dish alone), crispy roast duck; pork with fried green beans; spicy pig’s intestines (we like them, they are like Italian tripe but please feel free to skip them); ribs and I hate to say it, two more main courses which escape me. And a big bucket of rice. Every dish served three people and the food cost 55 euro (plus the Dunnes Chablis which cost thirty euro and is a waste with spicy food, avoid that and take beer or the house white which is Chilean). We had the best fun, ate everything and didn’t feel full. The waiter was highly amused to find out that the word for goodbye is Ciao (pronouned Chow) and his name was also Chow. So we had great fun waving goodbye in chillied endorphined Chablised good spirits saying Caio Chow! Oh how we laughed, but then we must take our good cheer in recession where we can and so far, we’ve had a good time here.
On every occasion the M&L has been filled with good -natured Chinese ex-pats who are delighted to tell you what they are eating so you can choose it too. They give the lie to the surly Chinese person you find in ancient Dublin Chinese restaurants who insist their name is Paddy or Sean. And that’s the trick to finding what you want from a menu that is unintelligible – just point to someone else’s food discretely and ask them what they are eating. One thing that you notice is how happy and gay Chinese people are, they chat among themselves, giggle away and are so friendly when you engage. It makes your heart sing as does the food here. If you are not a spicy kind of person, tell the waiter that and perhaps eat from the Western menu and ask for one dish from the authentic Chinese menu to try. That way there will be no risk and at these prices, it’s hard to see how even if you leave it behind, that it will break the bank (let the property developers do that.)
| M&L Chinese Restaurant, Cathedral Street, Dublin 2
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
