The temptation to chintz up the tearoom must have been difficult to resist. What else to do with an ornate Victorian park shelter but stuff it with granny china, steaming piles of newly baked scones and clotted cream? The pavilion in Dún Laoghaire’s People’s Park became a tearooom in 1997 complete with hideous roll down shutters and branded red plastic bins dotted along its elegant length. But that has gone and there’s a proper grown-up restaurant in its place.
It’s a first. As a rule public parks are tearoom country, where everything closes at night after the man with the bell tolls the end of another day.
A year ago Dún Laoghaire council announced that Fallon & Byrne had been awarded the tender to operate the “soon to re-open Tea Rooms”. But they’ve done more than dust off the cake slices and refill the cream jugs.
Fallon & Byrne is a good fit for a gentile park that was designed in the 19th century to try to stop Kingstown (as Dún Laoghaire was then) sliding into shabbiness in comparison to other ritzier hoods.
Since their ambitious Exchequer Street shop, wine bar and restaurant opened in 2006, F&B has become as much a badge of posh as the paint with the same initials. Paul Howard and Anne Enright are among the writers to have written it into Dublin life. Love it or loath it, it's a byword for something.
It has a predecessor in Smyths on the Green. Smyths was Dublin's posh grocer in the 1960s, housed in the building where TopShop is now before it closed in 1975. In its heyday Irish Times food writer Mary Frances Keating said "you'll find well-made bottled lemon mayonnaise, dear but good".
There’s a big market for “dear but good” stuff and the People’s Park restaurant is a different animal to its city centre sister. It’s a stunner of a building, full of light from the big sky and seascape around us. Walls of plate glass face the handsome houses on the road side, and wood and glass to the front frame the view to the park and the sea beyond.
The interior is light, modern and matchy. There are no distressed mirrors. No shabby, just chic. No bentwoods, just beautiful, comfy upholstered chairs. There are tasteful cream accoutrements on the table and the napkins are linen. It’s like someone has unpacked it all from a box marked “Boom. The Return”.
We start with good bread and swift decisions on the short but appealing menu. Then there’s a meal where some dishes work and some don’t.
There’s a great Crozier Blue cheese salad. It’s supposed to have pear, but unless they’ve whipped the pear into the piped moussey cheese blobs, it’s a pear-free plate. Candied walnuts provide the crunch and impeccably fresh leaves survive their drizzling with “Chardonnay dressing” without losing their green flavour.
So far so good, but my salt-baked celeriac is dull. Too thickly sliced, the celeriac has the mouth feel of undercooked potato slices and while the salt-baking has held in the moisture, the flavours need more zing to get us out of the soil spectrum. There are good, crunchy confit shallots and blobs of great creamy ricotta, but a compost-coloured salsa of aubergine is muddy rather than smokey and adds nothing to the dish.
Oven-roasted cod is a the best dish of the night. The fish sits on bright orange cubes of squash and bright green long-stem broccoli, with a good sauce of fresh green herbs and finely chopped onions to finish it off. My Challans duck breast has a good buttery mash on the side, with a tiny portion of Savoy cabbage, but the meat is tough and salty rather than tender and melting. It still has a layer of fat under the skin. Better slower cooking might have rendered the fat through the meat to soften it into a different experience.
Desserts are a great rhubarb and ginger knickerbocker glory that only requires the removal of Chantilly cream (shudder) to make it perfect. A chocolate marquise is a good tearoom slab of sweetness with honeycomb ice cream on the side.
In a lovely touch, you can help yourself to bread at the end of the night. So much better than letting freshly-baked loaves go to waste, it’s something that sends you out the door smiling. So I love the building. They’ve nailed the service. Next step would be to make the food as tasteful as the place. Then we’d really have a gem in the People’s Park.
Dinner for two, with two glasses of grenache and a tea came to €74.
THE VERDICT: 6.5/10
A gorgeous building, but food could be better
Facilities: Small with tricky doors
Music: Background pop
Food provenance: Good; the Crozier Blue from the Grubb family farm, Goatsbridge trout and Carlingford oysters
Wheelchair access: Yes
