A new venue for real Italian food

A tiny restaurant on Dublin's quays is serving authentic Italian food in casual surroundings, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

A BOWL OF PASTA is as likely to set my heart racing as a pile of socks waiting to be paired. It’s a wallpaper carbohydrate, a dish that’s only as good as what comes with it. Yet anyone who’s tasted pasta in Italy knows that it can be something very special.

It always surprises me that Italian food arrives here so clumsily and cheaply executed. There are pizza joints assembling balls of frozen dough and pre-chopped toppings costing a fraction of the €10-15 the customer will stump up at the end. It’s the food that Mamma would make if Mamma was a cost-accountant with an eye to an astronomical city-centre rent and turning tables over twice in one evening.

A tiny basement restaurant on Dublin’s Bachelor’s Walk, opened just a few weeks ago, is attempting to put the love back into Italian food. They’ve given themselves the name Terra Madre. It’s a big statement. The phrase, meaning Mother Earth, is the name used by the slow-food communities for a bi-annual conference in Turin.

There are just 17 seats in this small place between O’Connell and the Hapenny bridges, a mismatched set of them, with various sizes of assorted tables. In one corner is a red-painted glass cabinet that you could easily picture in a roomy old Italian kitchen. The only new thing on view is the coffee machine on the counter. The lunch menu has two soups, four paninis and two pasta dishes.

I ask for a bit of advice on the pasta and the waiter tells me the tagliolini alla gricia is special. It’s a white sauce, he explains. So it’s a pasta dish without the often-obligatory tomato. It’s made with the pig’s cheek he says, pointing to the mutton-chop sideburn section of his own cheek to demonstrate exactly what I’ll be getting.

To start, I’m going for the autumn soup, which has some distinctly un-autumn sounding ingredients of Irish baby potatoes and asparagus. When it comes, it’s a nice home-made bowl of soup, nothing spectacular but certainly tasting like nothing out of a packet and at €4 it’s good value.

The pasta is very good. The “white sauce” description might have made this sound like something claggy, but it’s just a very simple dish of fried onion, a tart (almost vinegary) Pecorino sheep’s cheese and tiny morsels of intensely flavoured bacon. Given a little more bacon this can be a big, blousy dish made for hungry farm hands. It is named after Grisciano, a village east of Rome, and was a traditional dish made when the shepherds came down off the hills with the sheep’s cheese and guanciale, a type of bacon made from pork cheek, hanging off their belts. Here, it’s a little tamer due to the smaller amounts of bacon, but with some fine yolky-yellow pasta that tastes like the real deal.

I also get a tiny tasting plate of the spelt salad – grains of nutty spelt (like barley only browner) are mixed with good cherry tomatoes and rocket. I begin to think at this point they might have rumbled me, but find out that this is their thing with new customers. You are given small tastes of things. It shows a certain pride in what they’re cooking in the small curtained-off kitchen at the back.

Two paninis that arrive at the next table look like good sandwiches made on nice-looking bread, instead of the oily, griddled shoe-leathery stuff this lunch staple can be.

A good Americano rounds it off, with another unasked for taste of a clementine tart, a delicious thin marmalady tart with a well-made base and a lattice of crisp pastry on top. My solo lunch bill comes to €13.50 and it’s cash only as the card machine hasn’t arrived yet.

It’s still rough around the edges, but this place has the potential to be the kind of Italian place real Italians and lovers of real Italian food will love.

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Terra Madre

Bachelor's Walk, Dublin 1 (no phone yet)

Facilities: Newly decorated and very clean

Music: A laptop playing 1990s pop the day I was there

Wheelchair access: No

Food provenance: It's "slow food" with ingredients coming from Italy, I was told

Locavore feast: in Galway

They did things the hard way in Galway for a stellar pop-up restaurant night recently. Not only was the venue – the Columban Hall on the Sea Road – a genuine pop-up restaurant, they also pledged that everything (excluding wines) would be sourced within a 50-mile radius. What followed was a brilliant night around two long banquet tables in this lovely old church hall. Although some of the locals had to banish memories of sitting their Leaving Cert exams here, the transformation into a magical restaurant was achieved with real style.

The food came from kitchens nearby and was plated in a tent to one side. Highlights included farmed abalone, a risotto made with barley instead of rice (no paddy fields within 50 miles), braised beef cheeks and a magnificent hazelnut ice cream made with wild Burren hazelnuts.

Sorcha Molloy from the Herons Rest BB and Kai chef Jess Murphy were the brains behind the night, and were joined by six other cooks: Seamus Sheridan of Sheridans Cheesemongers; JP McMahon of Cava; Junichi Yoshiyagawa of Kappa Ya; Jamie Peaker of Builín Blasta; and Paolo Burnato and Perluigi Suzanna from Ard Bia at Nimmos.

Wines came from Cases Wine Warehouse and the transformation of the hall was the work of designer Stephen Walton. Everyone worked for free and the cost of dinner, plus proceeds of a silent auction (bids in a sealed envelope) went to Galway Simon. This flash mob of cooks has the look of a collective about them. I'd book early for their next event.