Why are so many restaurants getting away with charging €25-€30 for an average main course, asks Tom Doorley.
Does this sound like you? "I am sick and tired of being ripped off by Irish restaurants and paying way over the odds for indifferent food and poor service. I am just not going to put up with it any longer." This is one of the milder comments which I've received from readers in recent months. There is a seething ocean of discontent out there, and if I were a restaurateur I'd be taking stock of it. Business down a little? You ain't seen nothin' yet ...
It would seem that many people who used to eat out quite casually are either giving up or are within a hair's breadth of doing so. One of them, who e-mailed after a recent visit to Germany, says "... in an average restaurant main courses cost about €7 or €8, i.e. half or less than half what we're expected to pay at home. It's beyond a joke." The age of the docile customer is well on the wane.
I repaired to La Mère Zou recently in search of the kind of meal you might have on holiday in France: a dinner, fairly simple, pleasantly relaxed. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who ate a similar dinner on the Continent this summer as to how much the damage was. And how it tasted.
Anyway, we kicked off with a glass each of white wine, served with a little dish of olives. One starter consisted of a dozen mussels which had been simmered in tomatoes, then topped with breadcrumbs and garlic butter. They were edible but what flavour there was owed little to the actual mussels. And the bread with which this was mopped up was very dull. The other starter was crab, mixed with far too much mayonnaise, plonked on top of some mushed-up avocado, served with some salad. It would be incorrect to say that it tasted of very little. It tasted mainly of mayonnaise.
Things looked up, to a degree, at the main course stage. "Rack of lamb", actually four separate, but chunky cutlets, were flavoursome, cooked pinkly as requested, and served with some curiously tough and very over-salted flageolet beans. Through these were mixed cubes of the usual woefully under-ripe stuff that we think of as tomatoes. Magret de canard, pink and moist duck breast, was good in terms of taste and texture, but the accompanying Puy lentils were both dry and mushy at the same time and, to add insult to injury, tasted of very little. Even the best of lentils are, really, just a vehicle. These had no payload of flavour. Both main courses came with lacklustre mashed spud.
After this, we didn't relish exploring the dessert menu and opted instead for a couple of glasses of Calvados at a fiver a glass. With a bottle of decent red wine and one espresso, our bill came to €127. Having the cheapest wine would have reduced the bill by a tenner.
I am, frankly, past caring about how much it costs to pay staff and rent in Dublin these days. The simple fact is that this meal was not worth the guts of €130, very pleasant service notwithstanding. And, to be fair to La Mère Zou, the same can be said of what is being dished up these days by many - probably most - restaurants throughout the land. Readers are right.
La Mère Zou, 22 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, 01-6616669, www.lamerezou.ie
WINE CHOICE Our glasses of white wine were Château Jolys Jurançon Sec, simple, delicious and too expensive, surely, at €6.80? A Riesling Grand Cru from Bruno Sorg looks good at €31.80, while our Château de Gueyze Buzet, similar to gutsy, very ripe claret, seemed fair enough at €29.80. Old favourite Domaine de Terre Mégère from the Languedoc weighs in a little heavily at €24.50. Domaine du Grand Montmirail Gigondas is a star performer at €33.20.