The lobster at Linn Duachaill, Co Louth is a real triumph – they should put it on the lunch menu, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
SO MANY OF our buildings show a sullenness towards the sea. They sit facing resolutely away from the water, wrapping bricks around their occupants, as if the sea was an irritating source of wind and cold. The Glyde Inn in the tiny Louth fishing village of Annagassan looks, from the road, like such a building. It’s as traditional a pub as you can imagine when you stop in front of its redbrick facade. Inside it’s an old-fashioned, cosy nook-and-cranny place, where a tired fisherman could relax by a fire and forget the waves outside its walls.
But at the back of the building the Glyde Inn has a separate, newish wing which houses its restaurant. When you walk into it you get a view so spectacular that even my three year-old remarks on how “the mountains are falling into the sea”. Posters around the place show they’ve just “relaunched” the restaurant calling it Linn Duachaill, the name of the 9th-century Viking longphort, or ship camp, that once sat nearby.
The set-up is all very definite. None of your gastropub crossover nonsense. The pub is at the front, the restaurant at the back. I have arrived with a class of a booking, having phoned the place earlier that morning to book a table for two adults and two children. “That’s grand,” the man said. Did he need a name for the booking? The answer was along the lines of: “No. Sure that’s fine.” And as we’re early and the place is empty, it is.
It’s a big comfortable restaurant with lots of pine and a flat strand beyond the window that instantly reminds my aunt of her childhood trips to nearby Blackrock in Louth and the long freezing trek from beach to water, to swim when the tide was out.
The Cooley Mountains lie the other side of the water in their navy blueness and the view is a gorgeous Paul Henry with seabirds.
The other wildlife is the tank of lobsters spotted by the nine-year-old as we arrived, his eyes widening like he’d just seen a very large bag of sweets. The last time he ate lobster was at The Fish Shop in Schull in West Cork, the seasonal restaurant where lobster are sold alongside scampi and chips during the summer holidays. Like his mother (who was known to ask for smoked salmon in the 70s after being introduced to it on holiday), he has happy memories of a lobster lunch. The bar lunch menu doesn’t feature any lobster, so we ask if we can go off-menu and cook one of those babies. It’ll be €35, the waitress tells us. At that price, I’ll be sharing it with the lobster-lover so off we go to the tank to choose our victim.
While we wait for him to be cooked we go outside to get a close-up look at a lobster pot, on the gravelled garden outside. It would be a superb place to eat if the wind wasn’t quite so nippy. The pot has a small net funnel that collapses behind the lobster after he’s crawled in to get the bait. Once committed to his food there’s no way out.
Emer’s shrimp salad (€7.95) is so much more than the name implies. On most bar menus you’d get the pink fellas, farmed and frozen and all the more watery and tasteless for it. Here they seem to be the native variety, thready white meat, a little fridge-chilly, but delicious. There’s a good salad and a standard marie rose sauce. The triumph is the lobster, which could be better described as a seafood platter. It’s surrounded by plenty of butter-fried crab claws. The tail meat has been dressed with a buttery tarragon sauce and the kitchen has done all the fiddly bits by fishing out the claw meat. The head is perched decoratively on a bed of buttery mash. There’s a lot of butter here and it’s all good. A generous portion of good chips for €3 suits the three-year-old, who’s a bit freaked out by the lobster.
An unremarkable, warm chocolate fudge cake at €5.50 and a lovely pavlova, pale beige in colour like all home-made meringues should be rather than startling white, round things off. By now we’ve moved to the outside tables as the boys have clambered over the rock wall sea defences and gone skimming stones on the sandy muddy flats.
Linn Duachaill is in a very special place and the shift towards using the food around them is a welcome move. My unasked for advice? Keep it local. Put the lobster on a lunchtime seafood platter for two. And they’ll open the doors to a new generation of invaders.
Lunch for four with soft drinks, coffees and desserts came to €70.25.
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Good food, but a little chaotic
There's a touch of the chaos theory about the service in the Science Gallery's cafe in the Naughton Building at Trinity College Dublin. It's a great long space, filled with light and lovely curved white shared benches. Try to order at the counter and you'll be sent to your table to wait. When that order is taken is then anyone's guess. Granted we visited on a very busy lunchtime but there seemed to be very little method to the system.
The food, when it finally comes, is good. I got a delicious €6 bruschetta, three good wedges of bread topped with a generous tumble of garlicky and basily tomatoes. Unfortunately, the wedge of rocky road we had our eye on was gone by the time they took our order so we shared a piece of chocolate biscuit cake instead. There is an art to serving in a busy cafe and ordering at the counter would seem (to this non-rocket- scientist) to be a key component.
Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin 2, tel: 01-896 4138
