Although he likes to dabble with the iconoclasts on occasion, Terry McCoy's culinary heart truly rests with the classics. You can almost sketch a history of Irish food of the past two decades from his work in The Red Bank, in Skerries, Co Dublin, where he has been rattling the pans for 15-odd years.
The classics are evidenced by the style of service - correct, formal, but charming - and the extensive menus and their ageless dishes, such as mushrooms cooked in port, and lamb's kidneys, and breast of chicken in puff pastry, and lobster thermidor, and entrecote with garlic, cream, brandy, mushrooms and peppers and tomatoes.
They do nice, old-style things such as offering you nibbles such as periwinkles, crudites and potato skins as you choose what to eat, and then at the table the presentation of the food itself echoes the old hotel-school style of the past, with the effect perfectly completed by that splendid, almost vanished, old warhorse, the loaded dessert trolley. McCoy was reared in the old hotel management way of doing things, and he still mines the tradition deeply.
But alongside these there are modernisms in his cooking which show a chap with lots of energy and imagination, a bloke who doesn't feel he shouldn't wear a pony-tail. I had a starter course of squid Chinese-style, and it was supple and spicy and funky, not the sort of dish you might expect to find in a formal restaurant in a fairly suburban setting. But McCoy's enthusiasm for cooking has always led him in the direction of very pleasing flavours, the sort of taste combinations which have won him an appreciative audience, folk who clearly feel extremely relaxed when in The Red Bank. On the Friday evening we visited, the room was buzzing, and it made one wish that every smallish town throughout the country could offer its residents a familiar, happy-to-be-back type of restaurant with a chef-patron whose food bears his signature.
That signature is underlined by McCoy's fondness for very full-on flavours. His baked crab Loughshinny mixes white and brown crab meat and then bakes them in the shell with cream and sherry, a combination which takes no chances, and which therefore succeeds completely. A trio of little tartlets of shortcrust pastry featured tarts with tomatoes, egg and leek, and mushrooms, once again offering the sort of broad range of flavours which much modern cookery fights shy of, and all three were well realised, proof that old-fashioned cooking need never tire, so long as it is treated with respect. Our main courses again showed a respect for fresh ingredients, carefully sourced and cooked. Scallops Lambay Island (McCoy loves to affix handles to his dishes, so there are crab claws Rockabill, and monkfish tail Fingal's Cave, and oysters and mussels Molly Malone, and so on) were cooked very simply in butter, cream and white wine, and gave the sort of flavours you simply cannot argue with. The entrecote Red Bank is a culinary pantechnicon, with the meat accompanied by mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, green peppercorns, garlic, cream and brandy, just the sort of Saturday Night Special which has largely disappeared from restaurant menus. This proved that we are perhaps too obsessed with fashion in our food, and we forget excellent dishes such as this at our peril.
My own main course was whiting bake with champ. On the menu, McCoy writes: "Whiting has long been considered a poor man's fish, but the poor man knows a thing or two about flavour." Indeed he does. The fillets of fish were rather curiously folded over a large mushroom, an intriguing idea which nevertheless worked, and the champ it came with (Skerries champ, needless to say) was spot on. Wisely, given the profusion of flavours with each main course, vegetables were simple: good potato gratin and crisp broccoli and carrots.
From the dessert trolley we chose chocolate cake, strawberry tart, and ice cream, all cooked as traditionally as one would have hoped for. For, despite the modern influences in Terry McCoy's cooking, the basic style of The Red Bank is traditional and, thereby, slightly nostalgic. It won't necessarily appeal to those who seek sleekness and newness and modish menus, but one must respect a chef who shows that the classics can live happily alongside the iconoclastics.
The Red Bank Restaurant, 7 Church Street, Skerries, Co Dublin tel: 01 8491005. Open: Tues-Sat from 7 p.m., Sunday lunch 12.30 p.m. - 2.15 p.m.