EATING OUT: Hotel cuisine is seldom haute, but Tom Doorley knows an exception
Experience has taught most of us that eating in Dublin hotels is not a good plan. The bill will be high, the food will be just about edible - if you're lucky - and the whole experience will leave a bitter taste. The average hotel kitchen wouldn't know fresh food from cardboard: everything is pre-sliced, pre-packed, frozen or vacuum-packed. And because we all know that people don't generally eat in hotels for sheer, hedonistic pleasure, there's rarely much pride, let alone skill, in the cooking.
There are exceptions, of course, but very few. And this is why producing good food in a hotel must be a very lonely and isolating experience. The danger is that the cook is presumed to be one of the herd of bad hotel chefs.
It's a while since I ate in the Shelbourne's glorious dining room, but the food then was way beyond the average (and light years ahead of what was dished up in the dark old days of the 1980s and early-1990s). And the Four Seasons in Ballsbridge - though breathtakingly ugly on the outside and internationally anodyne on the inside - serves some of the best food in Dublin.
And there's the Tea Room at The Clarence, a restaurant that has had its peaks and troughs over the years, but which generally has delivered the kind of grub of which the average hotel is simply unaware. Chef Anthony Ely has been there five years, by my reckoning, and a recent lunch underlined how he has honed his act to something exceptionally impressive. On the basis of this meal, I would have to say that the food here is most certainly in the capital's premier league.
And lunch offers very attractive value. Two courses weigh in at €26, three at €30 (although coffee adds a staggering €3.75) and there's an attractively summery feel to what is on offer.
Fish soup with roast scallop, Serrano ham, fried squid was a good, lightly textured soup with a deep seafood flavour to it. The sweetness of the plump scallop, which had been wrapped and roasted, certainly did something for the broth, but almost vanished underneath the saltiness of the ham.
On the other hand, deep-fried Carlingford oysters with sauce gribiche and herb salad was flawless and cleverly thought through. Served in a glass dish with four depressions, each of the four oysters, encased in crisp, delicate batter, lay in its own compartment. A further two compartments contained the sauce gribiche (essentially an enriched and refined version of tartare sauce) and the salad of fine frisée and baby herbs. Biting through the crisp casing released a salty, sea tang, and the gribiche cut the richness. I could cheerfully have put away a dozen.
Pot roast leg of rabbit, truffle mash, summer vegetables and girolles had undergone some kind of alchemy to translate big flavours and - let's face it - mashed spud, into something light and delicate. The bunny had more genuine flavour than many I've tasted and the spud, very generously flecked with truffle, picked up those earthy, slightly gamey nuances.
Confit pork belly sounds like an odd dish for a sunny, summer day, and I hesitated before ordering it. But it was a triumph. There's far too much bloody confit pork belly knocking around Irish menus these days and most of it is dire. Here, on the other hand, the pork comes from free-range rare breeds in Northern Ireland, and the flavour has to be tasted to be believed. Why the menu hides this bright, shining fact under a bushel I have no notion.
With a bottle of Moulin-a-Vent, a pichet of Albariñho, mineral water, two espressos and one portion of quite exceptional pistachio ice cream, the bill came to €130.65.
The Tea Room, The Clarence Hotel, Wellington Quay, Dublin 2, 01-4070813s.