Oh to be the owner of Trentuno restaurant in Castleknock Village, where all day every day the tables are full and the till is ringing and pinging as money simply pours in.
What a great location for a restaurant. A huge posh neighbourhood where the locals have virtually no place else to go, bar Myos pub and a nearby Chinese. Now they have Trentuno, and Trentuno has them firmly in its garlic-scented thrall. This is a spanking new place with a long grey frontage, and big plate-glass windows so that you can see who's in there and how much pasta they are slurping. (The slimming clinic on the same block may remind people not eat too much of the stuff).
It's very smart on the outside with a dark grey facade and the name scrawled across the top in silvery writing. While it looks expensive, inside the scene is casual and local with lots of families, gangs of girls and young couples.
You can't book in advance, so we arrived early and got one of the last window tables. We walked into a great atmosphere. Plenty of noise and laughter - and glasses being shattered on the ground with positively Greek abandon. Despite the noise, though, there is no real sense of Italy going on here. Front of house is a man in a suit who steers people to tables politely and efficiently but with little charm and without much of a welcome.
It's a big bright room with a stainless steel counter, behind which a team of chefs shoot out the food.
There are lots of window tables and the wall of windows can be pulled back - if ever the weather improves enough to allow eating al fresco. Sitting down, we were handed laminated menus and left to peruse them for a good long time, so long, in fact, that we were able to watch two parties who had arrived after us, get their orders in first.
At one stage, we asked for bread and got two huge slices of admittedly very fresh bread, plonked on a small plate. Fine, except there were three of us.
We got our drinks very quickly, a gin and tonic, mineral waters and a bottle of overpriced Vernacchio at £17.
After all the talk, we hadn't chosen by the time the waitress came back but she was infinitely patient as Emer and Maria changed their orders a couple of times. The choice isn't that complicated but there is plenty on the menu that sounds good. Lots of choosing your own type of pasta - though they don't give a list of pasta types to help you out - with any of the sauces. Mmm . . . fresh pesto, was at the top of the list of sauces, made with a pestle and mortar, according to the menu. It's rare you get that in a restaurant and in fact you don't get it here either. Having done time with a pestle and morter myself, as an aupair in the home of pesto, Genoa, I know what the fresh stuff is like, and this was not it. No, it was lazy man's pesto - finely chopped basil, lots of oil - a lake of it sunk at the bottom of the dish - and a handful of pine nuts scattered through. No parmesan or pecorino in it at all.
Oh well, the day I get a really good dish of pesto anywhere in Ireland you will know all about it. Usually, it is either swimming in cream or oil or both, or a dark green mush straight from one of the less expensive jars. The parmesan was freshly grated but when it is being doled by the teaspoon you never really get as much as you want.
The starters were good. Maria's Caprese salad was simple tomato slices topped with mozarella cheese, which looked summery and tasted fine. Emer's baked goat's cheese was a big slice of the cheese, rolled in breadcrumbs and just baked to the stage where it was crisp outside, and warm inside. It came sitting on top of a generous dressed salad.
My plate of prosciutto came adorned with three grapes rolling around the plate and accompanied by two battered packets of matchstick thin breadsticks, most of which were broken into small pieces. Was I meant to wrap the thin slices around the sticks? Maybe. The slices were definitely thin to translucency, but they tasted a bit tired and were hardened around the edges.
Emer's main course of grilled sardines was less exciting. These are lovely to eat when you are in a beachside cafe in Portugal, where they come spitting from the grill, scattered with parsley and lemon juice, but Emer's four or five skinny sardines looked sad and stranded on the plate and all the more plain since she had asked for the pesto dressing (the same oily stuff) to be served on the side. This was a madly overpriced dish at £12.50 and it comes with a choice of chips or side-salad when you really need both with such a skimpy meal. Both came in small high-sided dishes for portion control. The chips were those pale, almost white shoestring ones that taste entirely of fat.
Maria's dish of tortellini in a creamy sauce came with a Frisbee sized disc of puff pastry sitting on top of the pasta at a jaunty angle. She loved the creamy sauce spiked with salami.
There were people hovering at the door waiting for a table by this stage - about 10 p.m. on a Monday night - but the waitress still asked if we would like to wait a while before ordering dessert, which we appreciated, having a lot more talk to get through.
Eventually we ordered a couple of bowls of ice cream, a delicious walnut and vanilla one for me, chocolate and vanilla for Maria. Emer ordered tarte tatin, a mistake in an Italian restaurant and it turned out to be a great lump of sliced apples glazed to an unappetising shade of orange, on top of damp pastry.
We skipped coffee and went straight to the bill. It was £81 for three, service not included. This is a good neighbourhood place that needs to make more effort with the food but probably won't because the formula seems to be working just fine.
Trentuno, Main Street, Castleknock. Tel 01-8228400
