Eating out:Gordon Ramsay is at his most entertaining, and impressive, when giving often unwelcome advice to struggling restaurateurs, writes Tom Doorley.
The guy knows how to run a restaurant, even if he doesn't always show up when his own open their doors. The people behind the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Enniskerry should not take personally his absence from the first days of Gordon Ramsay at Powerscourt. He didn't make it to the opening of Maze, in London, either, but that restaurant is very good indeed.
Unlike his new establishment in Co Wicklow. The developers of the Ritz-Carlton have put a huge amount of money into building a hotel that delivers a distinctly US take on luxury. But the restaurant, part of Ramsay's international group, is simply not up to snuff. I don't know how often he visits, but I'd suggest he spend some time there, turning the air blue in the kitchen with some robustly expressed advice.
Four of us ate there on a Thursday evening when the restaurant was half-full. I later learned that two of the best front-of-house people were off, which may have explained the rudderless feel to the operation of the dining room, but the prices, as you might expect, remained the same.
In a restaurant where starters cost in the thirties and main courses cost in the forties, you have a right to expect impeccable service. We didn't get it. On four occasions waiting staff interrupted our conversation without apology. You also have a right to expect food that is somewhat out of the ordinary. Again, we didn't get it.
An amuse bouche of butternut-squash soup tasted simply of truffle oil; an accompanying beignet of blue cheese tasted largely of ammonia. And, as if to underscore its sheer awfulness, it was burnt on the outside. Did nobody in the kitchen taste it? Or even look at it?
A terrine of foie gras and smoked goose was decent enough in an upmarket-bistro kind of way, but a raviolo of lobster and salmon was leathery and rather too light on lobster. Anyway, why annihilate the delicate taste of wild lobster with farmed salmon? A lemon-grass cream it was served with did nothing to redeem it.
A risotto of ceps indeed featured some fresh mushrooms, but the flavour seemed to be entirely down to the dried kind, which in its Marmite-scented way is fine when you're cooking at home on a Tuesday evening. But not at twentysomething euro. We tried very hard, but none of us could detect the presence of the promised shaved truffle.
And on to the mains. John Dory was overcooked and accompanied, bizarrely, by both crushed potato and tortellini, which is revolutionary but
not in a good way. Too much carbohydrate by far. The rather nasty, olive-dominated filling of the tortellini killed off whatever potential this dish may once have had. In a restaurant of this sort, where expectations are high, it was wretched. If cooked by a first-year student in catering college it would have earned a few sharp words.
A Tipperary beef fillet may have been organically grown in its own personal field on the slopes of the Galtees for all I know, but you can get meat with this level of flavour, or absence of it,
in any supermarket. The fact that
it was topped with a slice of unannounced foie gras only underlined its drabness.
Monkfish wrapped in prosciutto
is a very 1980s phenomenon, a straightforward dinner-party dish for the unambitious. Ramsay's version avoided the worst pitfall, namely overwhelming the fish with the saltiness of the ham. No, that task fell to the smoked-paprika-and-tomato sauce. An accompanying white-bean cassoulet was, if anything, even worse in its startling coarseness. It would have been disappointing in a bistro in Bangor Erris, but here, in a €42 dish, it beggared belief.
On the other hand, halibut "larded with smoked salmon" was surprisingly good, considering the description, and with its braised lettuce and horseradish veloute it amounted to a successful dish.
A combination of dark chocolate and raspberries was, in theory, attractively unsweet; in practice it simply tasted unpleasant. It was an example, if we needed yet another one, of spectacular lack of judgment. Why a perfectly pleasant panna cotta should have been festooned in the kind of deep-fried noodles you get in Chinese restaurants I will never know - and I will draw a veil over our other two desserts.
So much for the food. I could also mention the ludicrously oversized volumes that contain the wine list, the smudged windows, the fact that our table was too small for four people paying these kind of prices.
The dining room itself has a pleasant view at lunchtime, but, come evening, the windows are black and the ceiling seems oppressively low. If everything else were good, these details probably wouldn't matter, but they suggest a lack of understanding of what a good restaurant space really is, day and night.
When my host tried to pay the bill he found that a friend of his at a nearby table had picked up the tab. My friends tend not to do this. Anyway, we calculated that, with two bottles of wine, it would have come to about €500 for four. tdoorley@irish-times.ie
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WINE CHOICE
The wine list is currently under review. We greatly enjoyed the Hiedler Grüner Veltliner, at €45, despite its generous deposit of tartrates. We also felt that our Thelema Merlot, from South Africa, offered good value at €49. There is a generous selection of wines by the glass, priced from €7 to €20 (for the second wine of Château Léoville Barton in the 2004 vintage). Aquilice Cencibel (€35) is a serious Spanish red at a decent price, and Hubert Lamy Saint-Aubin (€65) puts a lot of Puligny-Montrachets to shame. Prices are as you would expect in a restaurant of this sort, but not all are extortionate. However, €119 for Alión, the second wine of Vega-Sicilia, seems a little steep. Mâcon La Roche Vineuse Vieilles Vignes, an old favourite of mine from Olivier Merlin, weighs in at €50.