French fancy and a warm welcome

The restaurant at Tankardstown House is bright and welcoming, with food that hits the spot, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

THERE IS A little corner of Meath that is Provence. That’s how Tankardstown House feels when you pull in to the courtyard where the hotel’s Brabazon restaurant sits. It’s too wintery for lavender but still there’s so much French Country going on here you can almost hear accordion music when you open the car door.

Tankardstown House is a small country house near the much more famous Slane Castle, outside the handsome village that is Slane. It’s a proper out-of-Dublin excursion for Sunday lunch and I’m bringing an old friend. It’s a Two Tired Mammies road trip. Fittingly, the restaurant is in the old cow shed.

Despite a couple of U-turns and dithers over directions, we arrive pretty relaxed and are greeted with a warm and welcome blast of wood-fired heat inside the restaurant. It comes from a lovely brick fireplace, open on three sides so you can see the logs burn cheerily.

As sheds go, this one is pretty. The walls have all kinds of brick and cornerstones exposed. Duck-egg green French doors look out over the patio, and the furniture is made up of chintzy chairs and a mix of varnished and painted tables with fresh flowers on them. Almost every table is full and it’s got the air of a place where everyone knows what they’re doing.

Our table looks out over the patio, the box hedge and water features that bubble away beyond it. Water arrives in a Tankardstown-labelled bottle with a ceramic stopper. There’s a good wine list but we’re sticking to cranberry and soda.

Two disks of pork rillettes to start are less rustic than I would have liked, in that they are a little too smooth. This French classic is typically made with meat that is salted and cooked in its own fat, shredded and then mixed with more fat to a rough paté. Nonetheless, it’s tasty and comes with a good marmaladey pumpkin chutney. The wonderful element on the plate is a sprinkling of pea shoots, tiny blasts of fresh delicate pea flavour like a postcard from a summer garden.

Carol’s duck is perfect, peppered slices of breast with a clean, fresh Waldorf salad and a nicely-braised piece of chicory with more of those great pea shoots sprinkled on it.

According to its website, Tankardstown has its own walled garden so presumably these fresh home-grown elements are only going to get better as the growing season gets its wellies on.

My main course is a large, perfectly-cooked salmon fillet served on top of new potatoes, diced vegetables and crab. Sadly, there’s very little crab in the accompanying mixture (I seek it out hungrily and find about a dessertspoonful) but the fish is good and a saffron-water vinaigrette is a great, well-crafted twist. They’ve kept the pungency of the saffron under control so it’s confined to a hint of warmth and colour.

Carol’s beer-battered fish and chips are great, a light brownish crispy white fish with fluffy chips, all served in a mock wire deep-fryer basket with pretend newspaper (printed on pristine white instead of newsprint).

A shared chocolate brownie to finish is very good. It comes swimming in hot, dark chocolate sauce with a ball of rock-hard vanilla ice-cream on top. The brownie has whole walnuts inside its dark spongy depths and we get two lovely coffees to go with it.

We’re in no hurry to leave and get a refill on the coffee from the excellent waitress as we chat in this bright, friendly place. Around us, a second sitting seems to be underway and tables are filling with hungry families. The leisurely Sunday lunch is alive and well and living in a cow shed just outside Slane-en-Provence.

Lunch for two with soft drinks and coffee came to €69.

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Tankardstown House

Slane, Co Meath, tel: 041-9824621

Facilities: Clean and very French Country Music: Very low-key background music

Wheelchair access: Yes

Food provenance: Excellent. Eggs travel food feet rather than food miles, coming from the Tankardstown hens

COME WHAT MAYS: Cafe culture

It’s always nice to see a small new venture aim a little higher in the food stakes, and Eastwood Mays on Dublin’s Stephen Street is definitely doing that. Opened last November, the cafe is the work of husband and wife team Ionut Ifbanda and Clare Brady. Romanian head chef Ifbanda has been in Ireland for a decade, working in good kitchens around town, including Tribeca in Ranelagh and the sadly-closed Mermaid Café. The new cafe is a smart addition to the curved busy streetscape just opposite Dunnes Stores’ headquarters on Stephen Street. Inside, a trendy grey and silver colour scheme is lightened with egg-yolk yellow and some great limited edition black and white photographs by Stephen Farrell, which feature several of Dublin’s infamous concrete and glass buildings.

I had an excellent fish pie, crammed with chunks of salmon, smoked fish (I’m guessing haddock) and white fish with a few pink prawns. It came in a simple cream and mustard sauce, and was freshly topped with good mash and sprinkled with fresh dill. On the side was an excellent beetroot and celeriac coleslaw. My small dining companion (who had already lunched at school) tried his best to demolish a large slab of chocolate cake, which comes to this cafe from Joys Bakery. An orange juice brought the bill to €13.95. The place is open for evening meals on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And the name? It’s named after the couple’s two pugs, Clint (Eastwood) and Maggie (Mays).

Eastwood Mays Deli and Cafe, 17 Stephen Street Upper, Dublin 8, tel: 01-4788088