ph nic
Restaurant reviews
22
The Rotana Cafe We visited this lovely middle-eastern cafe and restaurant owned by a Lebanese chef Mohammed when we happened upon it for lunch a week ago. It is delightful, authentic, spotlessly clean and the food is delicious. Middle-eastern food at its best. We had a mezze for three (which would have done four people for a little over twenty euro fora plate of mixed starters). We had the smokiest baba ganoush, that’s roast aubergine whizzed usually with tahini, a sesame seed paste – and it tasted as if we were sitting up a chimney eating it. It was as good as any The Gobbler ate in Jerusalem. They sat next to little daschund burgers, well that’s what we called them: dark fried meat in a sausage with spices,an ugly cousin to the aubergine but yummy. We had five of the best falling-off-the-bone meatiest chicken wings in a spicy sauce; a roll of Labneh, a cheese made from drained yogurt served with homemade flat breads for dipping and lots of other morsels that were just splendid. The ingredients were excellent, everything was home-made and servings were generous. We had mint tea with fresh mint leaves, it sounds obvious but usually you don’t see mint
Monty’s of Rathgar Monty’s of Rathgar in Dublin 6 is a cousin of Monty’s in Dublin 2. Both serve Nepalese cuisine though the one in Eustace Street in Temple Bar is tiny while the Rathgar branch is deceptively large with a delightful outdoor seating area with a herb garden and tropical plants. Inside a plush red and black lacquer interior invites you into another world where you can forget that house prices are going down while upstairs you can sit on low seats and get cosy with your neighbours. The owners have invested heavily in the interior – it is a shame that they have not kept an eye on the waiting staff who swing from attentive to detached from starter to main course and completely disengage from dessert to coffee. Perhaps it was because we were sitting outside. We ate there on the three evenings we could get a booking – we called twice just after 9pm on a Friday and Saturday and both times were told they were booked out. When we passed by the restaurant, we saw that there were lots of seats empty outside and inside. Had
Café Mao Dundrum Cafe Mao started its life in Chatham Street where it carved out a niche serving really good reasonably priced Asian fusion food. Then it closed for unfortunate reasons and when it reopened, it had thankfully lost none of it’s oomph. There is now a Mao in the Dundrum Shopping Centre just beside the water feature, which literally springs to life while Bocelli is singing in time to the spurts. If you sit outside the cafe it can feel distinctly moist on a May Day but would be delicious in Summer. The cafe menu offers a good mix of lightly spiced starters and main courses with starters of crispy squid and spring rolls and main courses cooked as stir-fries and curries and freshly made salads, noodle and rice dishes covering every part of the Asian experience from India to China to Vietnam to Thailand.
in the teapot, just a bag. We just had to try the Lebanese cardamom coffee to finish off with baklava pastries which were made from scratch. To tell you how unusual that is, here’s how to make them. Buy some filo pastry, defrost it. Layer it with lots of nuts and flavoured honey in about five layers. Bake, then cut into squares. By the time you buy the variations of nuts you need, you’ll need another loan from the Anglo Irish Bank. As a result, many baklavas are made with cheap nuts (not premium pistachios or walnuts or almonds), then the nuts are dyed the appropriate colour to make them look more expensive. The result of course is not authentic and when the baklavas sit in plastic packaging, the pastry softens and they get chewy. To taste how freshly-made baklavas taste, you need to go to the Rotana. Theirs are crisp and sweet but not cloying and they make you understand why you would be bothered eating baklava at all. We also ordered a dessert of melted mozzarella with a florescent pink straw hairdo – that was what it looked like, honestly. The crispy fine noodle topping was dyed bright pink and doused in rosewater and sat on top of melted cheese – it was a local approximation of a speciality. It was better than we could have imagined and as one of our party was Italian,
we not been reviewing the restaurant, we wouldn’t have bothered. Why would you eat at a restaurant that doesn’t want your money? We ate excellent food the first time with excellent service, the second time we had good food and average service and the third time we had below-average food and disinterested service. The menu looks different at first glance, partly because of the descriptions (starters are called Surawa, mains are Moukhay Khana and the descriptions on the main menu are equally unfamiliar) but the more you eat there and drill down the menu, the more you see the similarities to the dishes you order in any Indian restaurant. The fish dishes are the most original. If you choose the Poleko Squid (medium-spiced baby squid barbecued in the Tandoor and served in a sizzler: €8.75) it is cooked fresh and is meltin-the-mouth soft and tender. Monkfish Tareko (a barbecued spicy monkfish, finished off in the pan with crunchy vegetables and soy sauce €26.50) is lightly spiced and delicious, a truly interesting fish dish and deservedly a finalist in the Moreau Chablis Fish Dish
The food is stunning: we had a mixed platter of crispy vegetarian spring rolls moistened by soft golden nuggets of butternut squash; roast baby back ribs and juicy chicken satay skewers, all cooked fresh with the crispest salad sitting underneath (18.95 euro). The dressings (a sweet honey, then a chilli, then a sour saltier one) were just right offering the salty, sweet and sour flavours that are a fundamental plank of Asian cooking. We shared this and a Coconut Lamb Korma (17.95 euro) which came with coconut jasmine rice. The meat was soft and plentiful, the sauce sweet had a light chilli warmth though it but the rice didn’t taste any different than plain rice. Service by our Hungarian waiter was charming and he negotiated with the bar to get us a glass of wine from an opened Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc bottle instead of selling us those
we had to try it. It wasn’t one of those things you would order again but it’s interesting to explore. And in the end, we ate nearly all of it. Three of us ate oodles (and noodles!), drank coffees, stuffed ourselves with pastries and the bill came to €55 – that was partly because we ate about five desserts in the interest of research. They do shawarma and doner plates for about eight euro and as they don’t have a wine licence yet, you could get out at a tenner a head if you wanted to. The owner is a Palestinian refugee, his family was exiled to Lebanon a long time ago and it is a privilege to eat his food and to help him to find a happy home in Ireland. Our verdict: Rotana Cafe is well worth a trip, bring a gang and share everything. Hopefully they will have a wine licence soon, but if not stop at The Portobello before and after where you can get two pints and a glass of Guinness for a tenner in lovely surroundings. 31 South Richmond Street, Portobello, Dublin 8 (just before the bridge on the left coming from town). Tel: (01) 4759969 / Mobile: 0857803800 E-mail: info@rotanacafe.ie Website: www.rotanacafe.ie
Competition in 2004. The Jyogi Bhati is the equivalent of a good quality Biriyani. We ate a lamb dish that was the same as a Rogan Josh curry. After our third visit and great hopes on our part that we would have a second alternative to the very good Poppadum Indian restaurant next door, we decided to return to our old haunt. We had given Monty’s a genuine try but the last time we ate there, we had to go in search of the waiter to pay because he had completely forgotten us. This is a restaurant with so much promise and an audience on its door step who have the money to eat out, regardless of the economic climate. When we last ate there upstairs was full and downstairs half full, so perhaps we had a singular experience or need to eat indoors where the gaze of the waiting staff is steady and consistent.
Montys of Rathgar, 88 Rathgar Road, Rathgar. Tel: 01 492 0633
awful quarter bottles that they insist on offering instead of wines by the glass. The other diners were relaxed shoppers or people who work in the shopping centre taking a break after a hard day standing on their feet all day (what a daft phrase, what else would they stand on). We would have to rate Cafe Mao in Dundrum highly for the price, the service and most of all, but an increasingly rare commendation for restaurants in the mid-price-range, we recommend it for the food.
Dundrum Town Centre, Dundrum - Telephone: 01 296 2802 Opening Hours: Monday-Saturday 12pm to late Sunday 12pm-9pm