Here's a round-up of a few good pit-stops within department stores
PHRASES YOU NEVER HEAR, number 2947: "As a special treat, let's go and eat in a department store!" Yes, it's a last resort. You're tired. It's raining. Time is tight. You have almost lost the will to live.
And the stores themselves seem to know this. Retailers seem to see eating facilities as, literally, a waste of space. In terms of yield per square metre, they can think of squillions of better ideas. So, where they are provided, they tend to be an afterthought.
The more enlightened retailers see restaurants and cafes as part of customer service, but they also regard them as a bit of a nuisance. This is not their area, so most of them farm out the job.
The unloved nature of the department store restaurant or cafe is best illustrated by what I suppose the retailers would call location, location and location. They are almost invariably tucked away in the most obscure part of the building, unloved and forgotten by all but the regulars.
And there are plenty of regulars in the restaurant at Clerys, a facility which I notice does not feature in any of the restaurant or food guides. This may be down to the food, but I suspect it may also be a case of being a mystery (in the same way as Hy-Breasil). You have to get to the third floor, follow a profoundly misleading sign, ask directions several times, and finally struggle through oceans of shagpile carpet samples before climbing through the back of a wardrobe.
Anyway, Clerysis currently offering a three-course lunch for €10, and the place is packed. This is industrial catering but, you have to admit, it's pretty cheap, even as industrial catering. Cod in batter looks generous, chips perfectly adequate.
Over in Arnotts, the Studio Cafe Bar is, by contrast, smack in middle of everything and equally busy. This is table service and clearly much posher. The food at Clerys may not have changed since the early 1980s (we did have lasagne way back then) but here it's . . . oh, late 1990s at any rate. Think pasta, pesto, roasted vegetables, melts, and people sipping glasses of cool white wine while gazing wistfully at expensive leather suites with built-in back massagers.
Just down the road, Debenhamsdoesn't make it easy to find the restaurant (you spend a lot of time on the escalators), but at least they don't try to hide it. The tone is set, rather unhappily, by a bank of bains maries above which a sign reads "Hot Food Pay by Weight" which, to be honest, looked as attractive as it sounds. Over at the serving counter, they were dishing up turkey, ham and Christmas pudding, all for €12.95.
At Brown Thomas, deep in Dublin 2, the restaurant almost requires sat-nav. But it's hard to say if it's difficult to see simply because of where it is or because its internal illumination is so gloomy (thanks to terribly cool and probably very expensive light fiittings). It is hard to see very much, but the steak and chips on the menu at €24.95 brightened up my day in the sense that it caused me to laugh. Even here, where nouveaux and the few remaining vieilles riches come to relieve the pressure within their wallets, this is a bit of laugh.
Table at Brown Thomasin Cork is much more in tune with the times in which we live. They do cracking hot sangers and crisp chips and springy salads, all at modest enough prices. But, again, you do have to find it (up the top, just out of sight). Follow the siren call of the Rochestown matrons.
The best department store food, as everybody probably knows by now, is to be found in the Dundrum Town Centre. Is this despite the competition in the immediate vicinity or because of it? It's hard to say. Harvey Nicholshas obviously raised the bar to vertiginous heights, but the much more modest Cafe Mimo at neighbouring House of Fraseris exceptional: busy, buzzy, quite cool and no sense of being in a shop, let alone a shopping centre. But be warned. If you want to eat lunch go very early. Or late. There's no secret about Cafe Mimo.
The cafe at Harvey Nicholsdoes the kind of sandwich that never graced my school lunchbox and its glass walls and high ceiling make it a lovely, lofty, light-filled oasis. But the First Floor Restaurant is outstanding. This is a glorious room (better at night, I admit) with some of the best cooking in Dublin, at €19.50 for two courses (crab tart with asparagus mousse to start, then herb-crusted cod, cockle and mussel stew, saffron potato, confit leek, for example) or €24.50 for three (let's throw in classic creme brulee with raspberry sorbet). There's no better value in the city and no department store restaurant that comes within an ass's roar. And the wine list is brilliant.