A meal in Vermilion, Dublin 6W, isn't helped by a weak wine list and no choice of beers, writes Tom Doorley
Eating alone always brings out my inner Maeve Binchy. It's not eavesdropping, of course, it's more a matter of allowing yourself to be entertained by other diners, and by their conversation.
On one such occasion, in a rather drab hotel in the midlands, I was within earshot of a large man who was enthusing about Indian food. He was explaining to his friend that he always relied, for advice about garam masala and the like, on someone whom he seemed to call "the mad hoor". This, I reflected, was a moniker particularly well-suited to pronunciation in rich Cavanese. Only gradually did it dawn on me that he was referring, with affectionate familiarity, to Madhur Jaffrey, the doyenne of Indian food writers.
Now Madhur is the fons et origo of the little I know about Indian cooking, and I particularly like her recipe for chettinad pepper chicken. I tend to think of Kerala cuisine, in general, as featuring not just the fiery heat of chillis, but also the broader spice of black pepper. And that's why I ordered lamb chettinad at Vermilion, of which more anon.
Vermilion is number two in the Dubliner magazine's list of favourite restaurants, as voted by punters. It has also received numerous awards. Frankly, I thought it was pretty grim.
A few points need to be made. The wine list is appalling, which would be forgivable if there were a good beer list. There isn't. You can have a sweetly mawkish lager called Bollywood, and that's the long and the short of it. And I don't like being asked five times if I'm ready to order wine. In the end, I didn't.
Furthermore, Indian and Chinese restaurants appeal to us for various reasons, but one of them is that they tend to facilitate sharing, with various dishes placed in the centre of the table. At Vermilion, each dish is served in a container of two halves, one containing the food, the other the rice. It feels more appropriate to airline catering.
As to the grub: aloo tikki, little spiced potato cakes served with a gloopy kidney bean sauce, was deeply unattractive and decidedly tepid. Elai gosht kebab, a skewer of rather greasy lamb served on a spicy chick- pea salad was passable. A rather rancid onion on the skewer utterly spoiled whatever merit this dish might have had. Jhinga kurkure, floured and mildly spiced deep-fried prawns, didn't taste of very much at all.
The chettinad lamb seemed to contain no black pepper, but complaining about this is like arguing about the wisdom or otherwise of putting carrots into Irish stew; doubtless there are as many recipes for it as there are cooks. Nevertheless, it suffered from what I call "tomato soup syndrome". This afflicts many "Indian" restaurants and involves a base sauce resembling the aforementioned, into which various combinations of spices are then mixed, depending on what menu item is being prepared.
Our fish masala was bathed in a sauce identical to the one with the lamb, except it had rather less chilli. We were not impressed.
Alleppey kozhi, chicken pieces in a mild but quite tasty coconut-based sauce was fine, but nothing that you would cross a busy main road for.
Three of us had sat down to dinner. With a couple of naan breads, three glasses of white wine and four Bollywood beers, the bill for this rather less than average meal came to €136.65, excluding service. Service included having a waitress pour the remains of a bottle of dreaded Bollywood into a glass and walk away while the beer overflowed on to the table.
I don't know how they do it. All those awards, and still they produced one of the least enjoyable meals of 2005. Is it a question of resting on laurels, or would most Irish people fail to recognise good Indian food if it bit them? I have no idea, but I'm distinctly puzzled.
Vermilion, 94/96 Terenure Road North, Dublin 6W, www.vermilion.ie, 01-4991400.
WINE CHOICERestaurants that provide tasting notes on the wine list need to be very careful, or they will end up with a lot of pretentious twaddle. In extreme cases, the comments will be completely meaningless. Consider this description of Ariston (sic) Bay Chenin/Chardonnay (not a wine that I would willingly let past my lips, by the way) at €23: "A fresh fruity light easy yet full-bodied wine". Or this, referring to Montana Reserve Sauvignon Blanc (€25): "A ripe and watering style of Marlborough Sauvignon". The only bargain on the list is Bodegas Lan Rioja Crianza at €21. The copy of the wine list that I perused, by the way, needed a good wipe.