Tom Doorley revisits his youth at the Bad Ass Café
Memory plays tricks. I was convinced that I had spent a goodly proportion of my undergraduate days with my nose in the trough at the Bad Ass Café. However, I discovered that this Temple Bar landmark dates from as recently as 1983, at which point I was starting to make my way in the big bad world.
Remember the scalding hot slates on which you could cook your own steak? It was great fun, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before the Health and Safety people outlawed this fairly high-risk way of eating. Bills still zoom along the spring-loaded lines from table to cash-desk, however, and the place is as cheerfully informal as ever. The days of the demi-johns of wine are gone, though; elderly readers like myself will remember these vast containers (and the vin rough therein), the idea being that you drank as much as you cared to, the level being measured before and after and the fee calculated accordingly.
Now let me make it very clear that while I want to enthuse about the Bad Ass, it is not for everyone. If you have to have starched linen, various forms of fancy bread, tall food, deep-fried julienne of leek and rocket pesto with your penne rigate, don't even think about it. It helps, too, if you enjoy really appalling puns e.g. Mickey Rooney Macaroni. The Bad Ass is a fun place in which to eat a hamburger or a steak. It has no pretensions and the prices are reasonable by Dublin standards. It's a good place to eat with children; not because children don't appreciate serious food, but because they enjoy the laid-back eccentricity of the place. And so do I.
We had a family outing for early dinner and got stuck into Mucho Macho Nachos (the menu reads like this, be warned) which comprised lots of corn chips with guacamole, tomato and mild chilli salsa, cheese and sour cream. We also demolished a dish of Kick Ass which translates as chicken wings with crunchy celery sticks and avocado salsa; and a Veggi Springer (oh dear!), little vegetable-filled spring rolls with a tasty soya and ginger dip.
A grilled 10oz sirloin was a flavoursome piece of meat, cooked pinkly, just as requested, with fried onions, grilled tomato and chips. At €17.50 this would make a very decent meal with a glass of wine and a coffee, yielding a bill of less than €25. Beef fajitas - strips of meat served with stir-fried onions, mushrooms and peppers, along with flour tortillas, sour cream and tomato salsa, was quite simply vast and a snip at €13.25. Not subtle, you understand, but the sort of thing that would fill up a hungry student for as much as 24 hours. It completely defeated me.
A medium pepperoni pizza was large by average standards, nicely crisp on the base and pleasantly gooey on top. A Kidz Combo involved a five-inch pizza with pepperoni, a Pepsi and ice cream to follow (which all comes to €6.65). A seemingly limitless amount of crisp, dry chips came with large bowls of mayonnaise and ketchup (not Heinz but tasty all the same). Add to that an Erdinger wheat beer, three quarter bottles of wine, two espressos, two ice creams with sparklers (a throwback, perhaps, to pyrotechnics with hot slates?) and three further Pepsis. We ended up very full and down €95.34. Which is not bad for a no-holds-barred meal that made five people, aged from eight to 45, very content.
Very few restaurants have survived in Dublin for more than 20 years, delivering much the same menu in exactly the same environs. The Bad Ass has achieved that largely through delivering value for money and sticking doggedly to a successful formula. And the puns, of course. Who could resist the "Bad Aztec Mexican Sombrero Specialities"? There's nowhere quite like it. u tdoorley@irish-times.ie
Bad Ass Café, 9 Crown Alley, Dublin 2, 01-6712596
WINE CHOICE: The Bad Ass is a not a wine kind of place, but things have moved on since the days of the demi-john. There are 12 wines, two of them available in quarter bottles. Our Jacob's Creek red was a decent mouthful of proper wine, while our Long Mountain red was truly awful. Both weigh in at €5. Albert Bichot Merlot and Chardonnay at €17.50 are perfectly drinkable and average in terms of value. Decent enough Montepulciano and Trebbiano weigh in at €18, as do the rather dull Terra Andina Chardonnay and Merlot from Chile.