STARTING from now, a table in Eden, Temple Bar's newest restaurant, is going to be the hottest ticket in town. During the summer, the temperature attached to this culinary ticket is going to rise even higher, as the sun shines and the seats spill out of the restaurant onto the lovely space of Meeting House Square in Temple Bar. For Eden is a place of earthly delights.
The room, for starters, is charming, a fusion of styles where London's River Cale meets New York's Union Square Cafe, which is to say stylish minimalism, an intensely open-plan kitchen, groovy white tables and chairs, canopies to cover the outside seats, a verandah, and staff with attitude.
The good news about this attitude is that it is good. The women who work the floor in Eden are cool and confident. Indeed, if the restaurant feels like a theatre, which it does, these women are a major part of the drama. We ate on a Tuesday night, and were amazed by two things.
Firstly, the staff are so controlled and capable that you imagine they must have been undergoing extensive, in-depth training for months. But if they were controlled and capable, they almost paled beside the attitude of the crowd who packed the place out.
Even before it was completely up and running, with the verandah in operation and lunchtime service established, Eden was jammed with a crowd who behaved as if they have been coming here every week for the last decade. I have never seen such a vivacious crowd of movers and shakers, folk who behaved as if they have charted and colonised Eden within a week.
But if the staff are cool, and the crowd is hip, and the room is delightful, the food is the final reason why this is going to be hot: because the work of Eleanor Walsh and her team is splendidly considered and mature. They enjoy playing around with some of the ephemeral flights of fashion-fancy which every restaurant needs, but the totality of their work transcends fashion following. This is very assured cooking, both well-thought and well-wrought.
You might not think so however, when you see the plainness of the menu. Just look at what I ordered, for example: Gravadlax with red onions, fennel and blood orange to begin, then fillet of organic beef with bearnaise sauce and chips, then a mint souffle.
You might almost see those dishes on the menu of a country hotel, but in Eden the trio was nothing less than superlative, each with elements of surprise, and an ambition of utter deliciousness achieved with each one.
The gravadlax, for example, was a very lightly cured array of slices of salmon, but what was so charming here was the interplay between the fish and its supporting stars, the sharpness of the blood orange, the crispness of the shavings of fennel and the tartness of the red onion. The ingredients were individually simple, but together they were utterly dynamic, the logic of the mixture unassailable.
With the fillets of organic beef, I can only say that the chips were so good we actually requested more, the bearnaise was bliss, and the meat gloriously sweet, though I could have tolerated it slightly rarer than it came.
And then, the mini souffle, into which one pours an accompanying jug of melted chocolate. It was awesome, no less. The souffle was light as a breath and fresh as a sprig of mint, the chocolate sauce made with excellent quality chocolate; it was a duo to rival Fred `n' Ginger.
It says something for the consistency of ambition in Eden that my wife's dinner, while not quite so mesmeric, was no less excellent. A warm goat's cheese with a pistachio nut crust was just right, the cheese softly yielding within the crust, but the star here was some expertly roasted vegetables - slices of aubergine, courgette, red onion and red pepper which were dotted with pine nuts and garlic which had been roasted in its skin. The balsamic vinaigrette had absorbed the scents of the roasted garlic, and it was a smashing elaboration of flavours.
To prove just how much we like to eat the classics - and they like to cook them - a main course of Dover sole on the bone with feathers of fennel and a lemon butter sauce proved to be terrific, the flesh of the fish firm, the sauce wholly appropriate, a few little new potatoes just right, and some gratings of barely cooked leek were a lovely foil. There is nothing new in a dish like this, and you don't want anything new in a dish like this.
Dessert, then, was a fine rhubarb creme brulee, but the unfortunate dish was on a hiding to nothing in the presence of the extraordinary mint souffle.
The rest of Ms Walsh's menu shows how indebted she is to the classics: French onion soup with gratinated Gruyere cheese; potato cakes with smoked black pudding; smoked haddock smokies; chicken liver pate; cornfed chicken with mash and a garlic and thyme sauce; lamb's liver with a celeriac puree; confit of duck with lentilles de Puy; bean casserole with spicy sausage; kassler with red cabbage and an apple Calvados sauce. This is true, contemporary, Irish restaurant cooking, confidently stamping its character on staple ingredients.
Within the context of Tom De Paor's room, with its see-saw of styles leavened with a humorous kitchiness, it creates in Eden a truly confident and logical theatre for eating. Value for money is excellent: starters run from £2.50 for a bowl of soup to £5.25 for a warm crab salad, main courses from £8.50 for a buckwheat pancake to £15.50 for the sirloin, and the interesting wine list is also good value, though some half bottles should be added to it.