It’s been another tough year for the restaurant industry, hit by rising ingredient and energy costs and staff shortages just as it was finding its feet in the wake of the pandemic. There have been closings, with more to follow in the new year. It’s been said before but needs to be repeated: it’s no good crying when the restaurant you love closes down if you didn’t support it while it was open. Here are some of the places where I’d encourage you to spend your money in the year ahead.
In 2022, it seemed every second restaurant switched to a no-choice tasting menu, despite that not necessarily being what customers wanted in terms either of cost or the amount of food involved. Uno Mas stuck to its guns, offering the best — bar none — selection of snacks in town, alongside starters, mains and desserts; and cemented its reputation as the place to go for guaranteed deliciousness and a friendly, unpretentious ambience. I’ve visited at least half a dozen times over the year and have never been disappointed (Uno Mas also gets this year’s ‘Spending My Own Money’ award) with Paul McNamara’s food just getting better and better. Some of the standout dishes I’ve eaten have included rabbit rice with shiitake mushroom and tarragon, a snack of fried green tomatoes and anchovy, and the Cáis na Tíre agnolotti, while the salt-aged Delmonico with bearnaise AND bordelaise is the gold standard of sharing steaks. It’s also one of the few restaurants where the vegetarian option doesn’t feel like a second thought. I plan to go back many times in 2023, whether or not McNamara and his talented team land the star they deserve.
Joint Chefs of the Year: Christine Walsh and Alice Jary
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Christine Walsh and Alice Jary
I had a lucky run of it in Galway earlier this year when I ate first at Aniar to celebrate its 10th anniversary and then at Éan and Rúibín on consecutive days. At the time, Christine Walsh was the head chef at Éan and cooked me one of my meals of the year, featuring some truly outstanding dishes. I’m still thinking about the squid toast and the Dexter beef tartare eight months later. She’s since moved to London, I hope only in the short-term, because selfishly I’d prefer she was cooking in Ireland. At lunch the next day in Rúibín, where Alice Jary is the chef and co-owner, I ate a brilliant plate of fried chicken with sushi rice, served with vibrant pickles and daikon salad, topped with a fried egg and an astonishingly good honey butter sauce — a multi-layered orgy of flavour astutely balanced between sweet and sour. I know from talking to female chefs that the issues women face in kitchens — which justify toxic masculinity and ‘bro culture’ by the need to keep ‘pushing’ — have not gone away, so kudos to the new generation of women chefs such as Christine and Alice who are role models for a better way forward.
Newcomer of the Year: Terre
If you haven’t yet heard much about Terre, the new fine-dining restaurant at the Castlemartyr Resort in east Cork, I have a feeling that’s about to change. French chef Vincent Crepel (ex-Arzak) brings Asian influences from his time in Singapore to bear on a precisely judged tasting menu, with guests starting their evening in the salon, moving to the open kitchen for snacks and then to the dining room for the main event, with a finale of not-so-petit fours back in the salon. The highlights on the night of my visit (a press trip, so not reviewed) included a snack of A5 wagyu from the Miyazaki Prefecture with barley koji wrapped in nori and Chawanmushi with foie gras, wagyu ham and 46-month-old Parmesan. There’s lots of Michelin chit-chat about Terre, and it’ll be interesting to see how many stars it gets when all is revealed in the coming months.
Dish of the Year: Snail omelette at The Park Café
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The Park Café’s snail omelette
Who’d have thought the unlikely sounding Peter’s Omelette — featuring a filling of Irish snails in a rich bordelaise sauce with smoked pancetta, Parmesan and chives — would turn out to be the biggest hit on the menu at Richard Corrigan’s Park Café in Ballsbridge? I’ll admit to ordering it out of curiosity, but I’d go back just to eat it again.
New To Me: Savoir Fare
I had reason to visit Westport several times this year and ate in many of its restaurants. My favourite was Savoir Fare, a little piece of France in Co Mayo. If I lived in Westport, I have no doubt I’d be a regular, nipping in for lunch whenever I could, shopping for cheese and charcuterie, ordering dinner to take home on Fridays and schmoozing Alain Morice to try and secure my spot at one of his waiting-list-only supper clubs. As my home is on the other side of the country, I’ll have to make do with salivating over Savoir Fare’s Instagram and hatching plans to be back in Westport to reacquaint myself with its pâté en croûte, outstanding vegan cassoulet and decadent religieuse.
Long Lunch of the Year: Note
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Note restaurant. Picture: Steve Humphreys
During 2022, Note morphed from a decent wine bar with small plates into a proper restaurant with a lunch deal costing €28 for two courses and €35 for three, unmatched anywhere in the city. I think the flat-iron space, with its cool interior, terrazzo floor, serious bar and wraparound windows — it could be anywhere — is now one of my favourite rooms in Dublin. Under the knowledgeable supervision of Katie Sewell, the wine list is a joy — and if it’s filled with unfamiliar names, don’t panic. Just relax, sit back and let Katie and her team bring you on a journey of discovery.
Seaside Restaurant of the Year: Fisk Seafood Bar
On an Irish summer’s day too hot for eating outside, Fisk Seafood Bar in Downings was the perfect place for a lunch of seafood and white wine. Not the traditional Irish crab claws and mussels offering you’ll find dotted all around the coast though, but fish tacos, crispy oysters with XO sauce, scampi with chips and aioli… the short menu is one of those that makes you want to say: ‘One of everything please!’ And when food (and wine) prices are as reasonable as they are here, why on earth not?
Tasting Menu of the Year: Margadh RHA
There are too many tasting menus around at the moment but I’m willing to make an exception for the €42 offering at Margadh, which — as well as being excellent value — avoids the pitfalls of the genre by being delightfully unpretentious, getting the food quantity just right AND including one of my favourite snacks of the year, Cantabrian anchovy toast with preserved lemon aioli.
Burger of the Year: Jack Rabbit at Churchtown Stores
I can’t be sure of the exact list of ingredients Ian Marconi uses to make his Jack Rabbit burgers so damn delicious, as there is definitely some sorcery involved, but the combination of a proper handmade burger with Gruyère, aioli, pickled onions, dill pickles and his signature Tsumami sauce is a humdinger. The rest of Ian’s food is a serious cut above your run-of-the-mill pub food too.
Pizza of the Year: Bambino
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Top-quality fare at Bambino
You can’t not love a slice shop modelled on New York’s finest that’ll sell you grower champagne for half-price if it’s your birthday, but if you don’t get your timing right and visit on a whim, you’ll still be able to nab a slice of something truly excellent for around a fiver. Bambino uses top-quality ingredients, and it shows. Even the vegan slice is properly tasty.
Best Value Feed: Nomo Ramen
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One of the great-value options at Nomo Ramen
When Nomo Ramen opened earlier this year, there were just two ramen options on the menu. That number has since expanded to six, and there’s now a rake of other dishes too, but for my money — all €15 or thereabouts of it — you’d be hard-pushed to find better value than a whopping bowl of either the signature Og Nomo Ramen made with chicken broth simmered for eight hours and custom noodles topped with chashu pork, free-range marinated egg, leek, spinach, scallions, or the San Diego Ramen, outstandingly flavoursome and vegan to boot.
Cafe of the Year: Together Academy Cafe
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Together Academy Cafe. Picture: Steve Humphreys
If all you want is some tasty food, you’ll find that in plenty of places, but I’d defy anyone to eat lunch in a more joyous place than the Together Academy Cafe, located in the clubhouse at Wanderers rugby club in Ballsbridge. The social enterprise trains young adults with Down syndrome to work in the hospitality industry. And as a model of a truly inclusive workplace, it is somewhere more businesses struggling for staff should look to for inspiration. The food is delicious too.
Hotel Restaurants of the Year: Gregans Castle, and The Bishop’s Buttery at Cashel Palace
Hotel restaurants used to be where food ambition went to die, but the economics of the industry now means some of the best cooking in the country happens in them. At Gregans Castle Hotel, Robbie McCauley’s food is — as the saying goes — worth a detour, in harmony with the low-key luxury of the surroundings. And at The Bishop’s Buttery in the swanky Cashel Palace Hotel, Stephen Hayes also had a visit from the Michelin inspectors. Could be interesting.
Sunday Lunch of the Year: Locks
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The chocolate tarte at Locks restaurant
How much do we love Sunday lunch in the canalside dining room at Locks, where Andy Roche’s confident focus on flavour makes landing a late lunch table feel like winning the jackpot? Heading into the new year with a reservation for the end of the month (when that first paycheck hits) might just be the best present you could give yourself.
Disappointments of the Year
Adrian Martin’s Wildflower was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moment in time, so short-lived I wonder did I dream it. Dinner at the Michelin-starred House at the Cliff House confirmed that there is so much more to a great dining experience than the food, with a true sense of hospitality even more important. Jamie Oliver’s Chequer Lane proved that celebrity chefs don’t necessarily make for great restaurants, and Anna Haugh’s pop-up at the Conrad was a salutary lesson in hubris, which will have sent a shiver up the spine of Irish chefs abroad contemplating a return to show us how it’s done.
To Look Forward To in 2023
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Danni Barry. Picture: Elaine Hill
As Danni Barry gets her feet under the (kitchen) table in Ballynahinch, Niall Davidson is making plans to bring Allta from the car park (now closed) to a new warehouse venue in the Docklands, where there’ll be a restaurant, event space and a bar. Telly chef Mark Moriarty is due to open his first restaurant, and Kildare folk will want to beat a path to Gareth Naughton’s Neighbourhood in Naas which opened just before Christmas, with Jordan Bailey of Aimsir consulting on the menu.
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