EATING OUT:It's well worth a detour off the main road as The Kitchen more than delivers on its promise of a lunch less ordinary
IT’S THE LONE FACT that sticks in my head from Inter Cert geography class: the ox bow lake. A river gets tired and silted from going around a bend so it simply finds a more direct route. And the bend is quietly left to become a bow-shaped lake while the river rushes on in a straight line. By-passed towns remind me of ox bow lakes, places where congealed traffic has been released onto a motorway leaving the backwater to its residents once more.
The Wexford town of Gorey is showing no symptoms of stagnating. Two signs welcome you to the town, as if you deserve double the gratitude for leaving the conveyor belt of the N11 for a meander. I’m on my way to pick up two men in lycra who are pedalling their way to Wexford along with hundreds of others on the annual Wexford Cycle for Father Peter McVerry. They will have burned between 3,000 and 5,000 calories on the road so as part of the support team I feel it is my duty to eat a hearty lunch.
The Kitchen is a trendy-looking place on the North Parade at the top of the town. Buckets of black paint have been used on the long front and black awnings have been put up outside. Inside the trendiness continues with auction house furniture mismatched (naturally), blackboard paint and an ancient Remington typewriter on a dresser inside the door.
The menu headlines are typed in pretendy-old-typewriter script on good paper.
They promise a “lunch less ordinary” here which is a high ambition. Lunch is a harder gig in a small town when much of your passing trade has gone to the motorway. Local shoppers are closer to their own kitchen tables. And going out to lunch in your home town can feel a little like sitting in the good sitting room, something only done when someone’s visiting. So The Kitchen is pretty empty on this busy Saturday, all the better for a fast pitstop.
The just-awake boy is instantly cheered with his own glass of water and wants nothing more than a giant cookie from the jar on the counter for lunch. He gets talked into having something else first. A father with five children of assorted ages arrives to the table next to us and dives into his phone after getting the Wifi password while the children get on with deciding what to eat. There’s a brick pizza oven at one end of the large restaurant and two chefs working in an open kitchen space.
Their smoked Wexford mackerel salad for €6 shows this kitchen knows a thing or two about feeding people well. The best salads, especially in these dank days, have a cooked element, all the better if it’s warm. Here the mackerel has been marinated in a tomato base, cutting the savoury whack of this robust fish with some tomato tang. There’s more sweetness in a tangle of red onion marmalade, a layer of comfort in some potato salad and a set of well-dressed leaves to finish it off. It’s a great Irish fish staple used perfectly.
The “pie of the day” is beef and it comes with brilliant skin-on chips which are fork-tappingly crisp outside, floury and soft inside. The pie may not pass the trades description act definition of a pie. In effect, it’s a bowl of stew with a pastry lid on top but when the stew is as perfect as this that’s fine by me. The thin pastry lid is crimped with a fork at the edges and scored from side-to-side. When I punch a small hole in the lid it releases the steamy fragrance of slow-cooked beef, rosemary, pearl onions, button mushrooms and red wine. I’d put a bet on that no flour was added as the gravy is still light and liquid. The pastry lid drops in like light dumpling shards.
Dessert is the quaintly-named “storm in a teacup” which is served in a flowery bone china cup and saucer. It’s an Eton-mess type dish of roasted figs, mascarpone with orange stirred through it and biscuity chunks of chocolate cake. It may well contain all 3,000 calories needed to complete the Wexford Cycle. For this dessert alone I would happily leave the motorway again.
It comes as no surprise to find out later that the chef at The Kitchen for the last five months is Ben Anderson, who was the chef at Donnybrook Fair restaurant in Dublin’s Donnybrook. The Kitchen is a great little restaurant that should put Gorey on the map for slow food lovers who don’t mind a bit of slow traffic.
Lunch for two with drinks and coffee (and that cookie) came to €30.85.
The Kitchen1-4 North Parade, Gorey, Co Wexford Tel: 053-9480541 Music: Nice jazz Facilities: Pleasant Wheelchair access:Yes Food provenance: A little bit sketchy apart from the Wexford mackerel Coeliac options: None specified but plenty of wheat-free dishes
A dog's dinner for a good cause
You have to be brave or bonkers to plan a barbecue these days but the two Kevin Byrnes, who run Mayfield and Union Square in Terenure are doing just that for this Tuesday night. It's a benefit night for the Dublin dog charities Dogs Aid and Dogs in Distress. The tickets are €10 to include the barbecue and a glass of wine or elderflower cordial. The tail-wagging begins at 6.30pm along with "surprise music guests" who are rumoured to include Cathy Davey and Neil Hannon.
Every dog has its day. But only the lucky ones get their own evening.
Mayfield Benefit Night at Union Square, Terenure Road North, Dublin 6W on October 9th from 6.30pm; tel: 01-492 6830
