Virtual Gourmet

"Cockles and mussels, alive-alive-oh!" Statue of Molly Malone, Dublin
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With St. Patrick's Day coming up this week, a look at Dublin's ebullient dining scene seems in order, beginning with an expression of my giddy affection for this, one of Europe's best walking cities, whose modest size makes a good stretch of the legs into a comprehensive tour of an entire neighborhood in an hour or two, with wonderful restaurants in every section, from St. Stephen's Green to Temple Bar.
As

Ireland

’s economy has boomed over the last decade, so have Dubliners' interest in food. Where once I might have had to stretch to fill a column with recommendable restaurants, I now haven’t the space to list them all, and while it is inaccurate to say there is such a thing as “New Irish Cuisine,” there has been a happy marriage of traditional Irish cookery with French classicism, all based on a wide array of extraordinary ingredients from the sea and farms. If, however, you wish to taste the true examples of traditional Irish cookery, you cannot do better than roly

Roly’s Bistro (7 Ballsbridge Terrace; 668-2611), a two-story wayside stop on the city’s outskirts with a good complement of antique furniture and artwork, a pub downstairs and delightful dining room upstairs serviced by waitresses in starched white shirts and black aprons. The place is always packed with locals and those travelers who know to call ahead, and the Irish cookery is based on the best ingredients--wild Irish salmon, fat Dublin Bay prawns, wonderful lamb, and seasonal fruits. They serve moist brown bread spread with lustrous yellow butter, and a plate of lamb stew will tide you over for a day or more. Desserts brim with fresh, rich Irish cream, and there is a good wine list and a fine array of farmstead cheeses.

For something in between Roly's and haute cuisine, there is the charming bistro lec

L'Ecrivain (left; 109A Baggot Street; 661-1919), where chef-owner Derry Clarke takes an old Irish idea like black pudding, pan fries it and serves it with a ginger-orange sorbet and Port sauce so that it tastes as lush as foie gras; he treats seared Bere Island scallops to a licorice-lick of Pernod cream and pimento relish, and he spices breast of Ailsbury duck with star anise. Dinner, without wine, should run about $60.

If credit can be given to one man who bravely attempted a sea change in Dublin dining, it is surely Patrick Guilbaud, a Frenchman whose namesake restaurant flourished for fifteen years tucked in a modest townhouse down an alleyway. Then, four years ago, his reputation secured by a Michelin star, he moved into the premises of the new Merrion Hotel (Upper Merrion Street; 800-223-6800; 353-1603-0600; www.merrionhotel.com), which is not only the finest in Dublin but also one of the finest in Europe. Composed of a series of 18th century Georgian townhouses (one of which was home and nursery to the Duke of Wellington) just up from the Government Building and National Gallery, this absolutely splendid renovation of the original rococo plasterwork and evocation of 19th century taste and affluence has a bright, welcoming foyer (right) 125 rooms, 20 suites, huge bathrooms, fireplaces, a fitness spa and lap pool, a beautiful garden courtyard, and every up-to-the-minute amenity for the business traveler. Fabrics have been copied from Georgian originals, lamps are based on 18th century Delft designs, the artwork throughout is of the first quality, and the drawing rooms are as sumptuously splendid--probably moreso--as when they were first designed. All of this is overseen with an endearing dedication to detail by manager Peter MacCann. Room rates begin at $390.

Patrick Guilbaud (left; 353-1676-4192) is located just off the Merrion's lobby, prefaced by a very sophisticated lounge leading a few steps down to a large, modern, off-white dining room with rounded and square archways and a view of the garden. The walls are hung with Irish abstract art, the tables widely separated, the appointments superb. Guilbaud himself used to be the chef at his restaurant, but now he is more likely to be found greeting guests in the front of the house, while chef Guillaume Lebrun does the cooking, which recently garnered its second Michelin star. The food is very much modern French, of a style you would certainly find in Paris, but the ingredients are resolutely Irish--roast West Cork scallops with a crispy confit of chicken wings in a caramelized cauliflower cream, with grapefruit and cinnamon; tiny velvet crabs flavored with piquillo peppers, coriander and a lemon confit; wild sea bass cooked à la plancha with endive and chorizo; roasted turbot glazed with sea salt butter and a feuillantine of duck confit flavored with walnut wine, spinach and girolle mushrooms; Coonemara lobster baked in salt and seaweed, served with a marmalade of cèpes and a lobster coral sauce, its claws tossed with pasta in a tarragon velouté; a tourte of farmyard chicken in a truffled Port sauce with foie gras and cèpes and sherry jus; and roe deer with a Seville orange and whiskey marmalade in a juniper-red wine syrup with cocoa sauce. Spring lamb from Wicklow is served with honied roast apricots and dried nuts. One of the signature dishes here is roast Challans duck with honey, lemon, aniseed and soya sauce--a masterpiece of textures and aromatic flavors. Even an old Irish comfort food like crubeens--pig’s trotter--is ennobled here, stuffed with a wild mushroom and bread pudding, served in its own juices scented with rosemary, accompanied by warm potato salad and pickled baby vegetables. Such sophisticated cuisine risks an extremely high degree of error, yet, aside from a little saltiness in some dishes, LeBrun brings them off flawlessy, their textures perfect, the combination of sweet and sour flavors balanced, and their presentation just pretty enough without being pretentious.
     There is a good selection of Irish farmhouse cheese, and if you love chocolate, the assiette of five cold and hot chocolate desserts in a Banyuls sauce should sate you for days to come. Otherwise go with a hot soufflé. The wine list here is of astounding depth-especially in Burgundies and Rhône bottlings, certainly one of the best in Ireland or anywhere on the Continent.
      Starters run about $27-$50, main courses $56-$117 (this last for lobster, when available); there's a tasting menu at $160.
     The Merrion also has a newly renovated restaurant next to its popular Cellar Bar where chef Ed Cooney serves traditional but updated Irish and continental fare, including a very good pressed ham hock terrine with a honey-grain mustard dressing, roast monkfish with creamed potatoes, olive oil and watercress, a braised shank of lamb with tarragon sauce, fish and chips (left) and roast turkey with potatoes, stuffing, sausage and Brussels sprouts, finishing off with wine-poached pears with cassis sorbet and baked Alaska. Prices here range from about $20-$34 for main courses.

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Patrick Guilbaud's closest competitor in Dublin is Thornton's (128 St. Stephen's Green; 478-7008; www.thorntonsrestaurant.com), also recently re-located to a hotel, the Fitzwilliam and given a minimalist atmosphere spread throughout two dining rooms (left) by owners Kevin and Muriel Thornton. The cooking here is very refined, without grand flourishes, and as a result the flavors are exquisitely concentrated in dishes like a fillet of John Dory with beet purée and a little lime oil; braised pigs' head with shallot purée and thyme sauce; red mullet with oyster, baby prawn and a braised onion and pea sauce; braised pheasant with cèpes, roasted turnips and truffle sauce; and Barbary duckling with red cabbage, artichoke and cranberry sauce. Desserts are equally as concentrated, as in a tangy-sweet parfait of pineapple with roast pineapple and sorbet, and an apple tartlet with thyme and nettle sorbet with gin sauce. The wine list here is formidable.
Thornton's service is genteel, but frankly, the English skills of much of the French staff need some remedial work.
Lunch may be enjoyed for $48 for two courses or $60; at dinner main courses are about $56, with a tasting menu of 8 courses at $155.

Yet another hotel dining room is among Dublin's best: The Tea Room (6-8 Wellington Quay; 407-0813; www.theclarence.ie/tea_room.asp) at The Clarence is an oddly prissy name for a dining room (below) whose owner includes Irish rock group superstar Bono of U-2, and whose clientele includes just about any show biz celeb who passes through town.

The dining room (below) is
strikingly handsome room, with a 20-foot cathedral ceiling, beautifully finished Arts & Craft style furniture, and an altar-like elevated bar. The menu is elegantly simple, with hearty dishes like deep fried potato-and-bacon tart with well-buttered Savoy cabbage and tangy fresh caper sauce. Black pudding and Cashel blue cheese accompanies gratinéed Rossmore oysters, and black pudding, and the marvelous corn-fed chicken with tarragon-perfumed scented crushed potatoes and crayfish ravioli. Lunch ranges from $32-$37; dinner, $51-$65.
As for pubs, I am not the person to ask. For as much as I love a pint of Guinness and an atmosphere described by poet Louis MacNeice as, "the air soft on the cheek/And porter running from the taps/With a head of yellow cream," pubs have always been a bit too malodorous for me because of the amount of cigarette and cigar smoke in the air. This, however, is due to change, when tough anti-smoking rules go into effect in Ireland this year. Till then you might want to visit the state-of-the-art "World of Guinness" exhibition in a huge 19th century warehouse once used to store hops. At the top, with a great panorama of the city, is the Gravity Bar, beneath which is a cafe with standard Irish fare. Good spot to buy all those "Guinness Is Good for You" T-shirts for the kids back home. For a touch of the archaic, you might want to drop into an older pub like the historic Doheny & Nesbitt; the no-frills Mulligan's, here since 1820; or Davy Byrnes, around since 1789 and a traditional place to have lunch on June 14--Bloomsday. (You'll get good info on old and new pubs in the The Official Dublin Pub Guide 2003.)
And so you stroll the streets of Dublin, down along Grafton Street, closed off to traffic, and you turn a corner and there's Trinity College, and you can still buy Donegal tweeds at Kevin & Howlin, and pick up the new CD by The Chieftains, and visit not one but three museums devoted to James Joyce, and someone's singing always "The Irish Rover" in a pub, and, more than any place else, you'll start to feel taken in by a great city's magnanimous, good heart.

When I last wrote about WD-50 upon its opening a year ago, I reported on what I thought was an over-the-top reach of highly experimental cooking that left some people dazzled and others, like me, dismayed. Chef-owner Wylie Dufresne (far left, with his staff) had won my affections when he opened the tiny 71 Clinton Fresh Food on the Lower East Side and actually spurred development of an area that previously looked a lot like the back of a radiator. I loved the purity of Dufresne's cooking and his effusive flair, possibly restricted by the minuscule size of his kitchen. So, with a move up one block north to larger premises, with a huge kitchen that must have sucked up a good portion of the millions spent on the place, Dufresne's culinary imagination and ego leapt to a stratospheric level, with dishes that were always interesting but sometimes bizarre. After a couple of meals at WD-50, I began to think there might be a gas leak in the kitchen affecting his equilibrium.
I was, then, somewhat reluctant to return, but I'm glad I have--not because Dufresne has backed away from his exotic style of cooking but because it now seems more carefully focused, while still being very much out of the ordinary. I was, in fact, very surprised that many of the same dishes that were on the menu a year ago are still there, assuming that a restless chef like Dufresne would constantly be changing it. Thus, I opted for his 7-course tasting menu ($95; with wines, $130; otherwise appetizers run $12-$16, main courses $24-$30), and got to taste a whole slew of new dishes.
The dining room (right) still looks to me like a coffee shop David Lynch might use for a move called "Dark Formica"--shadowy, stark, brown, with hard industrial surfaces--but the reception, usually by Wylie's affable dad, Dewey, is very warm indeed. int

We began subtly enough, with Spanish mackerel warmed under a salamander, with firm tofu blended with pickled radish and sorrel, with a drizzle of maple syrup and olive oil. It was delicious, giving notice that many sweet notes were to follow. Next came eel ("smoked at the Delaware Water Gap") served warm and topped with chopped toasted sunflower seeds, dehydrated red onion, and very very sheer lime chips dusted with powdered sugar then baked. The limes' piquancy was delightful with the smokiness of the eel, something you might find at a modern Japanese restaurant like Nobu. Cucumber noodles were blanched then tossed in crème fraîche and ginger juice and dusted with a citrusy sansho pepper. (Note well: Dusting is a new trend.)
    Venison tartare with edamame ice cream and a crunchy pear was. . . interesting, perhaps better later in the meal as a way to combine the meat course with dessert. Involved here was seared venison loin mixed with lemon grass, lime leaf, mint, cilantro stems (I always wondered what to do with my cilantro stems), Tabasco and topped with toasted basmati rice powder. The ice cream was made from black soy beans and milk, with no sugar to sweeten it, but the pears added the sweetness, dusted with star anise and sugar, baked until crunchy.
    Hamachi came poached by the Sous-Vide process in soy, with a purée of parsnip and green olives. A roasted Anjou pear was topped with mushroom streusel of dried mushrooms, almond flour, and butter. As you can see, the sweet notes continued, and sweetness can cloy the palate and beat up on wines. A poached egg arrived--cooked at exactly 145º F for 60 minutes!--ladled into a warm Parmesan broth made with the cheese's rind and Parmesan oil.
    All portions were small, so consuming all this was not a problem; nor were the overall flavors. Onward!: Duck breast (this poached at 150º for exactly 30 minutes) was seared and served with a sunchoke purée blended with almond oil, and a pomelo salad of "fresh pomelo cells," chives, dehydrated capers, toasted almonds, and yuzu juice with honey and salt, topped with crunchy, dehydrated pomelo cells. Oh, I forgot the Roquefort foam. It was a terrific dish, though I can't say I tasted every one of those ingredients. At this juncture I couldn't help thinking: 1) How does one decide on making broth and oil from a cheese? 2) How labor intensive is this kitchen and who gets the job of dehydrating the pomelo cells? and 3) Is all this necessary?
    After so much complexity I found quince tonic with baked manchego cheese just the thing--very satisfying, almost substantial. Then came something called "Coffee Soil," made from coffee, butter, and flour, accompanied by a butternut squash sorbet--not a great idea.   Then pastry chef Sam mason strutted his stuff, which, oddly enough, is not nearly as complex as what precedes it: Lovely rum-roasted banana, with milk chocolate ice cream, curry, a tasty brown butter cake, and a dried banana slice. Then some real childlike cotton candy infused with ginger juice, and last, chocolate truffles made with foie gras butter, which, he promises, "doesn't influence taste as much as texture," which was true on the first count, though one wonders if this might be a waste of good foie gras.
      So by now you are either shaking your head in amazement or utter confusion as to why Dufresne and Mason go to such lengths to prepare dishes that are eaten in a bite or two, then evanesce. It's easy enough to say, well, that's simply their style, but it begs the question whether every component is of sufficient weight and flavor to justify the immense intellectualizing and preparation of such dishes. Nevertheless, despite this kind of food being way too fussy and experimental to my taste (I rather side with Paul Bocuse when he said, "The so-called nouvelle cuisine usually means not enough on your plate and too much on your bill."), I have to admit that Dufresne is dead serious and has a very high batting average in a league of his own making. My original admiration for him has come back, if not with a full embrace, at least with a firm handshake that he has the courage of his convictions and is very proud of his work--which cannot be said of many of his colleagues whose idea of novelty is silly-looking, pretentious plate decoration.   Novelty for its own sake is never a very good idea, but Dufresne shows--though he may not prove--that a meal can be an adventure and taste pretty damn good along the way.

"If Jerry Garcia and Elvis walked out of a shop carrying a bag of kachina dolls and a couple of Navajo sand paintings, no one in Manitou Springs would bat an eye. It's just that kind of place. One of the last holdouts against chain retail and Starbucks, the sleepy, slightly loopy Manitou has managed to retain its small-town, cheesy-kitsch charm in a state that prizes its multimillion-dollar mountain resorts and offers itself up to Wal-Mart like it's Madonna and we're Britney Spears. Famous people stayed in what Nichols turned into a 200-room hotel: Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison, Clark Gable, P.T. Barnum, J. Paul Getty. Fat chance finding a Brylcreemed hair from Gable's head, though, since over the past 80 years the Cliff House has undergone more remodeling than Michael Jackson's face." –Kyle Wagner, “From Food to Service, Cliff House Casts a Spell,” Denver Post (Dec. 26, 2003).

* On March 20 Greenwich, CT’s Restaurant Jean-Louis celebrates its 19th Anniversary with a dinner at $100 pp, wine and champagne included. Phone 203-622-8450.

*From March 22-26 the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group holds its 34^th National Wine Week, with 10 wines for $10 at lunch. For participating restaurants visit www.nationalwineweek.com

* The second annual Hamptons Restaurant Week will be held March 28-April 4, during which all participating restaurants offer a 3-course prix fixe for $19.95. Some restaurants will offer a special discounted bottle of Long Island wine. The public is invited to the Hamptons Restaurant Week kickoff cocktail party on March 28 from 3-5 p.m. at Della Femina in East Hampton. $25 pp, with proceeds to Suffolk Community College’s Culinary Arts Program. For info go to www.hamptonsrestaurantweek.com .

* On April 3 eight of chefs will assemble at La Quinta Resort & Club for a wine dinner at AZUR by Le Bernardin, to benefit the Jean-Louis Palladin Foundation: Wolfgang Puck and Lee Hefter of Spago, Beverly Hills; Charlie Trotter of Charlie Trotter’s, Chicago; Laurent Gras of Fifth Floor, San Francisco; Jimmy Schmidt of Rattlesnake Club, Detroit; Florian Bellanger of Fauchon Paris, NYC; Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin, NYC; and AZUR’s Jasper Schneider; $250 pp; Call 760-777-4927.

* From April 14-18 Ladera Resort on St. Lucia offers a 5-day/4-night “Island Cuisine Experience” package, with cooking demos by chef Orlando Satchell of Dasheene restaurant, culinary & wine tutorials and excursions to the island’s markets and purveyors. Rates from $1180-$2600. Call 800-738-4752 or visit www.ladera.com.

* The San Domenico Palace Hotel in Taormina, Sicily, is offering a two-night “Romantic Escape” package with a candlelight dinner served on the private terrace or in one’s suite with an hour of violin music; buffet breakfast daily; bottle of champagne, oysters and strawberries upon arrival; choice of two Champagne Breakfasts, inclusive of a half-bottle of champagne, Beluga caviar served in suite, or two candelight aperitifs with champagne and caviar. The rate starts at $965 per room for a junior suite and $1,265 per room. Call 011-39-0942-61-3111 or email reservations-san-domenico@thi.it.

MARIANI'S VIRTUAL GOURMET NEWSLETTER is published weekly. Editor/Publisher: John Mariani. Contributing Writers: Robert Mariani. Naomi Kooker, Kirsten Skogerson, Edward Brivio, Robert Mariani, Mort Hochstein. Contributing Photographers: Galina Stepanoff-Dargery, Bobby Pirillo. Technical Advisor: Gerry McLoughlin.

John Mariani is a columnist for Esquire, Wine Spectator, Diversion and the Harper Collection. He is author of The Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink (Lebhar-Friedman), The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink (Broadway), and, with his wife Galina, the award-winning new Italian-American Cookbook (Harvard Common Press). To purchase from amazon.com, click on the image below.