Call me a cranky old dame but I’m starting with the uninvited guest at the table. It feels like it was born in snowy Connecticut, blasted across the Atlantic and over the Curragh plains before barrelling down to join us in this new Kilmainham restaurant.
Like a typical newborn, Union8 has a wind problem. The tunnel effect is so strong the demon wind outside this building at a crossroads makes the door a struggle to open. Once it does, the people at the first table (that is, us) get a chilly lick before the big door shuts it out again.
By the time you read this, the problem should be fixed. We made our feelings known at the end of the night. If not, bring a hot water bottle, or be sure to go deeper into the room.
So that’s the grumble done and dusted. Here’s the good stuff. Union8 is a handsome candlelit place, as Brooklyn-y in its decor as its name. Bricks are bare, flooring is concrete, wine is housed in wire cages, and the staff wear denim and leather-strapped aprons over white shirts. There’s a leather couchette and chairs and a bar-level table dividing up the room nicely. It’s a sister restaurant to another place with a number in its name: Catch 22, the fish restaurant on South Anne Street, which has elevated the city’s fish offering several notches.
It’s a Tuesday night and the place is full to its well-appointed gills. It’s the great mystery of Dublin dining. Where did all these people eat of a Tuesday night before Union8 opened?
The menu is typical of today’s mid-range Hiberno-Scandi-bistro formula, with lots of appealing ingredients. There’s even an exciting mention (okay, maybe I’m easily excited) of fermented carrot, which persuades me to order a lamb starter to be followed by the pork belly main. This will make for my meatiest meal in a while.
We ask about the fish special “fresh off the boat” and are told it’s salmon. Right. This is a bit bewildering given that restaurant salmon at these prices is farmed, so not exactly what I picture when I hear about something arriving fresh off a boat.
Anyway, these are good starters. There’s an artfully arranged plate of seared scallops with McCarthy’s black pudding and a smooth vanilla celeriac puree. The art has been making what, by my reckoning, is one and a half scallops look like more. But what it lacks in numbers it makes up for in flavours.
I get the spiced lamb breast rolled into a Swiss roll size piece, sitting in a puddle of glossy rosemary gravy with more herb kick than you could shake a spiky green sprig at.
Except, hang on, where’s my fermented carrot? A dribble of carroty liquid (like weaning food made by an especially anxious parent) seems to be the only carrot element on the plate. “In fairness, you’d be more upset than most people about that,” Ali points out.
The lamb has been cooked to luscious threads, crunchy outside with spice that tastes the same way my kitchen smells on an Ottolenghi lamb shawarma day, so I get over it.
There’s another “oh” moment when the sea bream arrives. The two fish halves are served on a mix of vegetables and small white beans, which look at first glance like sweetcorn or giant couscous. It’s nice enough, but lacks the welly necessary to swing this rustic combo. The soupy bean mix doesn’t taste like a set of ingredients that have spent long enough together to meld into something more. There are a few cubes of chorizo here too, but again they’ve kept to themselves rather than getting up close and juicy with the rest. Luckily, we’ve ordered a side of good skinny chips cooked, I’m guessing, in beef fat.
My pork belly is great, a trembling wodge of sweet fat entombing stripes of brown belly meat. Beside it there’s a mound of neck fillet mixed with black pudding, on top of a “toffee apple puree” that dings the burnt sugar fairground note squarely. The apple comes in chunks rather than pureed but all the better for that. An anaemic whole carrot that sits on top of buttery green herb spud mash is no consolation for the not-fermented carrot of my starter.
Desserts are of two halves, a good chocolate fondant with salt caramel ice cream and a not so good quince crumble tart. It’s great to get quince in its original form – chunks of deeply coloured fruit – instead of the typical brown jelly in which tartness has been drowned by sugar. But the fruit comes in an unimpressively biscuit-like square pastry shell.
It’s a meal that has blown hot and cold. There’s been excellence and mediocrity, sometimes on the same plate. Union8 is reaching farther than the cut-and-paste bistro menu and promising bigger and fresher ideas, which is a good thing. Service is excellent and the room is a great reinvention of an uninspiring building. The meat is superb. If other ingredients get the same thought and heart then Kilmainham will have itself a great new neighbourhood restaurant.
Dinner for two with sparkling water and two glasses of wine came to €93.80.
