Eating out:I am haunted by duck confit. Ever since I decided to take a stand on this dish (which can be a squishy business) I feel duty bound to eat it, or at least try it, whenever I see it on a menu. And, yes, it tends to crop up quite a lot, writes Tom Doorley.
This is because it's cheap and so easy that even the least talented chef can rustle up an acceptable version of it. But nobody has to cook it from scratch these days. Most restaurants pay a little extra (and charge us more) for duck confit that just needs to be finished in the kitchen. And finishing, here, means heating it up. Too many kitchens ignore the necessity of crisp skin. This is part of the deskilling of kitchens. In time restaurant meals will be prepared in factories and plated up in kitchens where the wage bills are going to be a lot lower than they are now.
I wonder how many restaurants in Ireland peel their own spuds. A dozen? When you find a mysterious grey ring within your restaurant potato, this is because it has spent too long in the sulphur solution that keeps it from oxidising. I accidentally wandered into the delivery area of a very grand new hotel recently and found piles of trays containing various dishes, canapes and what have you, all marked "thaw and heat" or "thaw and chill". Interesting.
The point is that the vast majority of restaurants do a lot less in the kitchen than you might like to think, and we critics often find ourselves, unwittingly in many cases, reviewing food created by or for companies such as Pallas Foods. Some of it is very well done, and food is food and all that. But I sometimes wonder what is becoming of the chef's role.
I don't know where the duck confit at Hugo's comes from, and it may well be done from scratch on the premises. True, the skin could have been crisper, but I'm happy to report that it was well above average (the average being pretty dire). Its accompanying cubes of crisp potato were fine, a kind of chunky tomato ketchup a lot less appropriate.
Our other main course was pasta with a creamy "wild mushroom" sauce. In restaurantspeak "wild mushrooms" often means "not the usual stuff", in other words oysters and shiitakes that are found not by tramping through the woods but by phoning the vegetable supplier. The menu billed this very bland dish as featuring smoked paprika, which doesn't strike me as a good idea (and I may be wrong, never knowingly having tried the combination), but it was a relief when I was unable to detect its presence. One man's bland is another man's subtle, I suppose.
Our starters were pretty straightforward. There was a platter of otherwise reasonable charcuterie with a very bland pâté de campagne. And a salad of baby rocket leaves with pancetta that had been burned. The incineration was not confined to our pancetta but shared with other tables. We got some replacement pancetta, without asking for it, but our neighbours were not so lucky. The odd thing, though, was that the pancetta came as two streaky rashers, so to speak, draped over the salad.
We finished our red wine with a plate of Irish cheeses, all of which were in good condition - more than can be said for the biscuits, which had been out of their packets for too long.
Hugo's can be approached in two ways. You can treat it as a wine bar and hoover up some decent wine from the good and soon to be extended list, along with some pleasant nibbles, or you can approach it as a restaurant, with starter, main course, pud. I reckon it would acquit itself fairly well as the former and adequately as the latter.
Service is good by Dublin standards, but try to get a seat where you can avoid looking at the awful pictures in their "gilt" frames.
Hugo's Restaurant & Wine Bar, 6 Merrion Row, Dublin 2, 01-6765955
Wine Choice
A bit of thought has gone into this list. My pick of the bunch would include zesty white Château Haut Rian, from Bordeaux, at €23.85, the unusual white Beaujolais Domaine Terres Dorées (€29.90), Domaine Mittnacht Riesling, from Alsace (€33.15), Garafoli's Verdicchio (€22.50), the strangely named but lovely Austrian Laurenz V Friendly Grüner Veltliner, our simple but nicely mature Château Mercier 2000, from the Côtes de Bourg (€31.46), La Roubine Sablet (€29.25) - wrongly listed as a Gigondas - the crisp, fruity Cetamura Chianti (€26), Julio Bouchon's very French-accented Chilean Carmenère (€27.60) and Domaine de la Bastide St Vincent, from southern France (€29.95). I would avoid Herencia Remondo La Montesa at the crazy price of €76.90. It's just not worth it.