La Taverna di Bacco, on Dublin's quays, is untouched by futurist food and molecular gastronomy. Thank heavens, writes Tom DoorleyIT WAS SLIGHTLY SURREAL TO HAVE TOSTRUGGLE TOSEE THE MENUIN THE LIGHT OF A GUTTERING CANDLE, BUT THE FOODWAS GOOD IN A PLEASANTLY OFFBEAT WAYFOOD
I'm very fond of egg and chips. I don't eat it very often, but when I do it's with relish. Figuratively speaking, of course. I tend to go for tomato ketchup, in fact, preferably organic. Heston Blumenthal, the molecular gastronomist who owns the Fat Duck, in Berkshire, injects some of his chips with ketchup, which strikes me as one of the less daft ideas to come out of the food-as-entertainment tendency.
I'm prompted to think of this by two experiences I had recently in Madrid. The first was sitting down to the speciality of the casa in a very traditional restaurant with the bizarre name of Handicap (56 Calle de General Oráa, nearest metro Avenida de América), where the well-heeled and elderly clientele looked as if they were still mourning Franco. The speciality is strips of jamón de serrano served with little cubes of olive-oil-fried spud and a couple of softly fried eggs. It was very good, even at the near Dublin price of €18. As a way of
serving eggs and chips it was almost as good
as it gets.
What put me in mind of Mr Blumenthal and his take on chips was a presentation by Ferran Adrià, of the restaurant El Bulli, at the Madrid Fusió"international gastronomic summit". Adrià is the original exponent of molecular gastronomy, although he denies that he coined the phrase. You have to book months ahead to eat his witty and weird taste combinations, and now that I have heard his apologia pro vita sua I'm not sure I want to go there.
Having told us about his use of chemicals and techniques from the industrial food business - and shown us how to wrap a raw egg yolk in crisp caramel - he opined that it will be only a matter of time before people go to restaurants "not to eat but to be entertained".
I'm sure the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was saying something similar in the 1930s, when he was promoting much the same kind of idea. Mortadella with nougat, as you will have noticed, never really caught on. And his virulent attack on pasta cut no ice with his fellow Italians, although Mussolini approved. Not because he really agreed that pasta causes lethargy, as Marinetti claimed, but because of the cost of wheat imports.
In the end, Marinetti's avant-garde cuisine was ruthlessly parodied in a competition to find the most revolting dishes imaginable. "Tram driver's glove en croute with a sauce of Brylcreem" was the runner-up. The winner was "a soup bowl of warm gin garnished with a single red hair". I defy anyone to better that.
Anyway, it's a relief to be able to report that neither futurist food nor molecular gastronomy has hit La Taverna di Bacco, one of the latest openings in Mick Wallace's Italian empire. Admittedly, it was slightly surreal to have to struggle to see the menu in the light of a guttering candle, but the food was good in a pleasantly offbeat way. And the lighting improved in the course of the evening.
A plate of faultless salami and prosciutto was the conventional foil to a potato puree wrapped in a long slice of slightly undercooked aubergine drizzled with very dark and unsweet chocolate sauce.
A main course of risotto with pancetta and plums cooked in red wine was ace, but only after it had been sprinkled liberally with Parmesan. The plums were a perfectly sharp and savoury counterpoint to the richness of the dish. Our other main course, of hand-cut gnocchi with prosciutto, was a touch bland but nevertheless generous and clearly home-made; the commercial variety are always suspiciously uniform in shape.
A shared zuppa inglese, hideously sweet and drenched in syrup, suggested that the inglese trifle on which we were all brought up - Bird's custard, sherry and all - has a distinct edge.
I should add that we merely grazed the surface of what appears to be an interesting and rather different menu. I will certainly be going back.
Espressos were superb; with a couple of glasses of white wine and a bottle of red, they brought the bill to €73.40.
La Taverna di Bacco, 24 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1, 01-8730040
WINE CHOICE Mick Wallace has tried to introduce a bit of fun and excitement to his list. Our glasses of white Timorasso, from Piedmont (€6 a glass/€26.50 a bottle), combined generous fruit with steely, dry structure. Our Barbera d'Alba Pierin Valetta (€4/€18) was outstanding at the price: juicy but serious and utterly delicious. All of the wines are directly imported and otherwise unknown in Ireland, so I'm as yet unable to comment on the rest. If you want a bottle to take away you get 25 per cent off, or 35 per cent on six or more bottles.