WINE. LIST. This week I'll be eating⦠beef dripping. Not on its own, I hasten to add, and specifically the ... region,
Food and wine bites This week I’ll be eating… beef dripping. Not on its own, I hasten to add, and specifically the beef dripping from James Whelan Butchers. It’s the perfect fat for cooking a steak, delicious for roast potatoes and it has a much longer frying life than vegetable oils. I rarely cook chips but when I do, this is the fat for the job. Not only has it a very high smoke point, it adds wonderful flavour. And, by the way, saturated fat is now recognised as the good stuff. The recent news that we in Ireland rank third in the EU as consumers of highly processed foods (after Germany and the UK) should not be used as a weapon by finger-waggers to berate people who are too poor and busy to cook from scratch. But it’s worrying that such food is implicated in depleting the beneficial bacteria in our intestines and linked to cancer. If you can avoid or minimise consumption, all to the good. Jamie Oliver has been forced to sell 12 of his Italian restaurants and is off-loading his flagship (but lacklustre) Barbecoa restaurant. It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him as his insistence on ethical produce – no intensively reared chicken, for example – pushed up overheads. However, it’s hard to see how you can run a chain of 200 restaurants worldwide and keep up such standards and stay fresh. Despite all this the Irish franchisee is planning to open a second Dublin outlet. We have a serious shortage of chefs and very little seems to be happening to solve what has become a major problem, one with catastrophic implications for the future of the hospitality industry. Pay is a major issue and a survey found last week that 75% of chefs in Ireland are working for less than the average industrial wage. No wonder they don’t feel valued and drift into better paid work with more family-friendly hours.
TASTebud TIP Lemon juice is not just for seafood! Use a squeeze on vegetables, roast chicken, barbecued meat, even strawberries and cream. It’s a great flavour enhancer.
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Tom
Doorley ÷ Bang Café 11 Merrion Row Dublin 2 Phone: 01 400 4229 bangrestaurant.com
B
ang Café is, if you like, bang in the heart of Dublin 2 and yet, for some reason, it doesn’t seem to attract much attention. Originally owned by the Stokes twins before eventually coming to grief, the somewhat unusual name, incidentally, is in honour of the Stokes’ mother, Pia Bang.
It was also originally the first home of one of Dublin’s oldest restaurants, The Unicorn, which used to belong to Stokes pére. The family was once – I’m told because I don’t know these things – the toast of Celtic Tiger Dublin, no less. Anyway, that’s all history at this stage. Bang Café now belongs to Joe Barrett, brother of the more famous Richard, the property man, and, more importantly, it has a fine chef in the form of Niall O’Sullivan whose food I had enjoyed in the past in Isabel’s and East Side Tavern. However, I didn’t realise any of this when I went along for lunch. And why did I go along for a Friday lunch? Essentially because I reckoned it was a restaurant that’s rather underreviewed. But by the end of the meal I was amazed that we don’t hear more of the place. And for all the right reasons. The other reason is that I had seen mention, on Bang’s website, of Peter Hannon, the king of Irish meat, the Ulsterman who has made the best of our beef the toast of the top London restaurants. Marco Pierre White once told me that he’d like to use Peter’s meat but it’s too dear for his chain of franchises. Interesting, then, that Bang Café has his salt-aged rib-eye on a lunch menu that offers two courses for €20 and three for €25. And it was one of the two or three best steaks that have ever passed my lips. Anyway, to table. Starters were a contrast. On my side of the table a slab of dense, exuberantly meaty ham hock terrine served with a tangy, slightly sweet and sour mushroom ketchup (actually more of a silky purée). On the other, very lightly charred sea trout with a fine avocado purée, a black garlic purée, and a touch of soya sauce,
the
WINE LIST
Three worthy bottles every week – for three different budgets
The future is bright on this famous site with Ulster’s King of Meat Bang at it... maybe a hint of sesame oil. Both were, in their different ways, very good indeed: honest, thoughtful, delightful. In the mains, the rib-eye was sensational. That’s the only word. So often beef, even well brought-up beef, aged properly, just doesn’t taste sufficiently of itself. This was steak with the taste turned up – Spinal Tap style - to 11. And yes, the accompanying mushroom was grand, the black garlic aioli likewise, but everything paled beside this champion piece of meat (cooked just on the medium side of rare, as it should be). Roasted hake was à point, and came with vadouvan-scented mussels (I had to Google; it’s a French blend of masala spices) and beurre noisette. Again, thoughtful cooking, a clever twist but no showing off. Confident food. It was a Friday, the end of a long week
Exquisite Collection Limestone Coast Chardonnay €7.99, Aldi
Save 50 cent currently on this beautifully made Australian white wine: unoaked with fresh peach and pineapple character, creamy
Chateau de Pena Cotes du Rousillon €10, Tesco
under
€10
A lovely blend of Grenache, Syrah, Carignan and Mourvedre from the far south of France. Bramble and blackberry fruit with good length.
and the cooking was exceptional. And so to dessert, one each. The chocolate mousse and caramel ice cream was even better than that sounds. Each, to quote the great food writer Kurnonsky, tasted intensely of itself. But the pièce de resistance, snapping at the heels of that steak, was a coconut cream and rhubarb granite with a blood orange jelly that was a symphony of flavours and textures. This is no mean feat and requires impeccable judgement. Each course is paired with a suggested wine and, needless to say, we decided to see how well such matches worked. Effortlessly, is the answer, but, needless to say, this added considerably to the bill. If you exercise restraint – and I’m not suggesting for a moment that this will be easy - lunch here is a snip. With mineral water, coffee, a wine match with each course, the bill came to €136.20.
€10€15
Casa de la Ermita Idilico €19.99, SuperValu
A fabulously concentrated, dark, oaky red from Spain’s Jumilla region, big but stylish and idilico with a rare steak.
€1u5s pl
