Here’s a restaurant that feels like it was dreamt up by a bunch of enthusiastic 11-year-old boys. I like it. Bread & Bones is a ball of energy, optimism and ninja moves. It feels like a place where an hour rarely passes without a high-five being exchanged.
A “group of food junkies” has put it together, according to its website above a set of profile pictures pasted onto martial arts magazine covers. It’s an all-bloke team apart from Sabrina (the “messer from Marseille”), who runs the front of house like a friendly seasoned pro.
“After trekking through eateries in Asia, London and New York the Bread & Bones crew have whipped up a menu inspired by dishes that grabbed them by the taste buds that need to be shared with the good folk of Dublin.” Cue a jaded eye roll and an urge to point them in the direction of Parnell St.
So I’m glad I visited before looking at the website. The place is calmer than its online persona. Bread & Bones is a very now name. Bones are big.
The ingredient that was simply a step to soup, now has its own billing and its own fanbase. Bone broth is this year’s kale. Talk of 48-hour boils gets the reverence that used to be reserved for meat hanging times. No such pretensions here though. The most you’ll be told about the soup is that it’s home-made. The rice noodle soups are on the “bones” part of the menu. The bread bit is bao steamed buns with various options for filling.
Bread & Bones is in a corner unit on Dublin's Millennium Walkway (now there's a name that hasn't aged well) between Strand Street Great and Upper Abbey Street. It's a bare bones space. The tables and benches are made from varnished pallet timbers. The concrete floor is painted grey, and white painted walls are decorated with original art. Inevitable filament bulbs hang from the ceiling. The menus come taped to vinyl album sleeves: Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell and Brucie's Born in the USA in our case. The records that used to live in them are glued to the back of the wall in the smallest room. I'm not sure how Mary Coughlan will feel if she arrives in for a bowl of soup and finds her album Tired and Emotional superglued to the toilet wall. But maybe that's how rock 'n' roll rolls these days.
Before the bread or bones, we start with bits. An onion kaki-age and a bowl of Roaringwater Bay mussels. I picture the tempura onions as plain old onion rings dressed up in streetfood speak. But they’re much better. It’s a big bowl of red onion quarters cooked to the point of their own sweetness, with small crunchy bits of batter speckled through the mix and an eggy yellow garlic mayo for dipping. Looks like a mess. Tastes spot on.
The mussels come in a foil parcel with instructions to ladle up the flavour from the bottom. It’s a huge portion of shellfish for €6.50 and while the chillis are whispering rather than roaring the seafood flavours are great. And there are chips: kimchi chips, which strikes me as a particularly Irish update on curry chips. It’s chips with a good dollop of slippery, punchy kimchi on top.
The buns arrive, two of them in a bamboo basket. They open like the mouths of glove puppets and you stuff their sweet doughy depths with chicken, not pale breast meat but gnarly brown bits from the thigh bones. My only qualm is that the menu doesn’t say it’s free range meat, just “Irish and fully traceable”. Restaurants, if it is free range, please tell us. If it isn’t, please make it so. There’s a pot of bacon jam and a bowl of fresh vegetables and coriander to add to the pockets. It’s good but a touch dry. A tangy soy and rice vinegar dipping sauce would have nailed it all together.
My beef soup is served not with the menu-mentioned brisket but with juicy slices of flat-iron steak, which could be a critic-spotting move. The meat is good. The broth is great, honest simple comfort food, slurped happily from a small plastic ladle long after I’ve given up on the noodles as they’re too flavourless and seem to swell in the bowl the more I eat.
Murphy’s ice cream, two scoops, one sea salt and one brown bread, at a nifty €2 apiece, finish us off.
Do they fulfill their mission statement of good food fast? Yes. I’ll be back. And next time I’ll bring my 11-year-old. Dinner for two with two glasses of wine came to €56.
The verdict: 6/10 friendly, fast and great value Asian food
Facilities: Manga art and vinyl
Vegetarian options: Fine
Music: Pop
Food provenance: Good. Roaringwater Bay Mussels, Murphy's Ice Cream
Wheelchair access: Yes
