The Kilkenny cafe's gorgeous views over Trinity College are its best feature, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
A FRIEND STILL TALKS about his days as a barista (when that meant a horse-hair wig and gown) on Dublin’s Nassau Street. It was the early 1990s and the coffee shop was in the heart of coach-tour country. He had to brace himself when a bus full of Italians pulled up. The coach-bound passengers would spot the shiny chrome eagle on the espresso machine in the window, sprint across, and throng the counter, thrusting £50 notes at him, gasping for a proper shot after days of enduring criminally-bad coffee on their tours around the beauty spots of Ireland.
Today’s coach-tour visitor is not starved of good caffeine fixes, but to assess what they might be fed, I’m headed to the restaurant at the Kilkenny shop on Nassau Street. This place used to be Kilkenny Design, which opened in 1976 as an offshoot of the Government-owned Kilkenny Design Studios in Kilkenny. In those pre-Avoca days it was a pioneer in serving good Irish food. Then the Nassau Street shop was bought by the Blarney Woollen Mills. Over a decade ago a family split which ended in the Four Courts led to the setting up of a separate company, Kilkenny Group, which took over the Nassau Street shop.
The first indication that I’m not going to come away with a song in my heart is the reluctance of a friend to join me for lunch there. I don’t usually get the “do I have to?” response to lunch invites, but from her base in Trinity College she has eaten here before and it’s not on her list of favourite places.
I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised and we arrive with an open mind. The cafe is upstairs from the ground floor showrooms. It’s a one-stop wedding shop down here, outfits to the left, gifts to the right. The restaurant is on what looks like a mezzanine floor above the shop.
There are two areas of food service, a sandwich bar and a slightly larger salad counter and hot food offering. It’s canteen style, get-your-tray-and-point-at-your-food service. We first look at the tortillas, which are thick potato-y wedges of pastry, egg and various fillings. There are salmon fillets with what looks like a chilli sauce on them, lying un-alluringly on lettuce arrangements. It has all got that limp and tired look of something that was assembled a few hours ago.
We move along to the hot counter and Juliana orders the mushroom and tarragon soup. It’s gluten-free and vegetarian. I go for the julienne of beef stroganoff with rice, a small portion of pickled red cabbage, beans and broccoli.
Only one of the tables here are free. They’re round tables with the veneer worn to grey in patches. Underfoot is a charcoal-coloured carpet that has seen better days. The only beautiful thing is the view out to the lush trees on the Trinity campus. Around us, almost all the tables are full. The tourists are easily spotted, as they are the only people dressed in appropriate rain gear.
Juliana’s soup tastes vaguely of tarragon and the slice of brown bread that comes with it is dry, as if it was sliced much earlier that day. My stroganoff is terrible. It’s dreary brown, without any of the delicate biscuit-beige colour that sour cream and mushrooms should bring to the dish. It’s not the classic 1970s dinner-party dish – beef, mushrooms and some perfectly cooked rice – but a miserable beef stew with some quartered gherkins thrown in. The grains of rice are swollen with water and a lone cardamom pod seems to be the only nod to flavour in the rice. The beef is tough, stringy and tastes like cheap meat badly cooked. The red cabbage is the only halfway decent thing on the plate. The broccoli and beans combo is the worst kind of canteen veg, broccoli cooked and left under a heat lamp for its sulphur to overpower any of its natural sweetness. It’s not overcooked, just cooked too long ago to be edible.
We go back to the counter for dessert. My white chocolate and raspberry bread and butter pudding looks good. Unfortunately it has been zapped in a microwave and is strangely tasteless. The raspberries are brown and bitter and it starts to ooze an oily white substance which Juliana describes using one word: “mucus.” Thereafter I am unable to put another spoonful in my mouth. Her lemon meringue pie consists of a lemon layer with no discernible flavour of lemon, topped with that suspiciously industrial meringue that looks like it’s been made with a mixture of dried egg whites and washing-up liquid and then browned on top.
Behind us two men are talking about the venue. “I like this place,” one of them says. And I know what he means. I like what Kilkenny stands for. But here, everything from the cheap cutlery to the heat lamp and microwave mediocrity speaks of complacency. Perhaps it’s the captive audience of coach tourists. Downstairs they see some of the best of Irish craft and design. Upstairs there is no sense of place, identity or excellence. It’s pitstop fare. You could be eating in a European motorway services cafe. If nothing else, it’s a missed opportunity to send visitors home with a food memory from Ireland worth sharing.
Lunch for two with desserts and one coffee came to €28.70.
Twitter.com/Catherineats
6 Nassau Street, Dublin 2, tel: 01-6777066
Music: Half-heard transistor radio variety
Food provenance: None
Facilities: Cramped and stuffy
Wheelchair access: No
