ERE is a restaurant story for our times: Two chaps are grabbing a quick bite to eat, in Wright's Fisherman's Wharf, a seafood bistro right smack in the middle of Dublin's Financial Services Centre - a starter, a main course (just a speedy feed on a Friday lunchtime), some salad and some fish. And a bottle of Chateau Lynch-Bages Grand Cru Classe, popularly known, of course, as "Lunch Bags". The 1991 is not a good vintage but, hell, it's Friday and one has to drink something. At £39 on the list its the most expensive red wine, with only the 1985 Piper Heidsieck bubbly, at a mere £49, costing more.
They drank it, ate lunch, and were gone in about 45 minutes.
I was sitting at the next table, enjoying the rather more quotidian Marques de Murrieta Reserva, at £16 a pop. The two chaps seemed like some sort of splendid entertainment, their manner and dress - Louis Copeland is clearly having a good year - wholly appropriate to the mood of Wright's. Ensconced as it is in this weave of glass tower blocks, heavily fortified by security guards, largely traffic free, the FSC feels like Trinity College sur mer. A world unto itself. A place where a bottle of Lunch Bags with a quick bite is nothing unusual. What, after all, is £39, but a nano-second's interest on some London gilts, or a Cayman fund?
I'm not sure if they realise this in Wright's. With this clientele, their wine list should be stuffed with blow-out clarets and wallet-busting Burgundies. But not only - is the list rather dull, it's also inexpensive - though they will sell you a glass of bubbly at £7 a scoop.
Overall, though, a smart fund-manager would be hard pressed to unload more than the average weekly wage in Wright's. The food is as keenly priced as the wine, a decision which shows they clearly want to attract more than bankers into their elegant room.
The food is as of-the-moment as the design: marinated chicken comes with a lemon grass, chilli and sun-dried tomato dressing; poached seatrout has courgette ribbons, while baked haddock has cucumber noodles; paupiettes of lemon sole get fitted up with a lime and dill beurre blanc, and a herb and garlic boxty gets a raspberry dressing in its accompanying organic greens.
We might call this pinball machine cooking. Ping! go the modern techniques. Ping! go the modish flavours. Ping! go the trendy associations. You sit there buffeted by the pinballs of modern eating as they ricochet around the room, demanding a response from you, left in no doubt whatsoever that it is 1997 and that Wright's Fisherman's Wharf is in 1997, and it is the here and the now that count.
Well the here and the now is fine by me, if the way they do things in Wright's is the interpretation of the moment. Its modishness may rob it of any sense of the past or of any true personality, but this weightlessness is strangely beguiling, and if the food lacks any true provenance, it is nevertheless vividly enjoyable.
Their fashion-chasing isn't foolish. A starter of a warm salad of goats' cheese with dried fruit and red onions may be trendy, but this was effortlessly delicious, with the onions perfectly cooked and just the right note to offset the melting cheese. A bowl of roasted tomato and garlic soup was spot-on, sweet and well-balanced, and only a rosette of smoked salmon with capers and mixed leaves was unconvincing, the individual ingredients being respectively fine, but the assembly lacking imagination.
That imagination was being visited on main courses such as lambs' liver with pommes puree and crispy carrots, with an oxtail jus. This was, in effect, a liver and spuds sandwich, with the puree interleaved between the slices of liver, and a little crown of deep-fried carrot rounding out the tower. If it was affected in style, it was delightful to eat, the jus rich and soulful, the liver expertly cooked, the puree dreamy smooth.
There is only a trio of desserts on the menu: a tuile basket with pastry cream and fresh fruit which wouldn't ring anyone's bell; a fine honey and poppyseed iced parfait, and a neat little ramekin of apple and pear crumble. All come adorned with spun sugar crafted into ship shapes.
And shipshape is just about the measure of Wright's. The team here knows what it is about, and has a good idea of what folk want. Service is snappy, with the choreography of the chefs behind the counter and the waitresses on the floor working instinctively. Prices run from starters at £3-£4, main courses at lunchtime go from £8 to almost a tenner, with desserts under £3. They serve an evening menu between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. for £13.95, and the carte ranges from soups at £2.50 to grilled sole on the bone at £14.95.