Dublin Zoo is a hugely successful attraction, but the food in the Meerkat restaurant disappoints, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
I’VE TAKEN A bite and my throat has closed in protest at the idea of a second. It’s a stick of celery, cut into batons, with the ends gone chalky and brown. Ive dipped it in a small plastic pot of hummus with a pool of oil on the top. It tastes so vile I feel like putting up a large sign at the door. “Please don’t feed the humans this stuff.”
At first glance the celery and hummus seems like a good idea in the mass catering operation that is the Meerkat Restaurant at Dublin Zoo. The restaurant is one of the first attractions to greet you at the zoo, a place transformed in recent years. The keepers and animals have become reality TV stars. Playgrounds are everywhere. Dublin Zoo is our most visited tourist attraction. Last year almost a million people went through the turnstiles. And at almost every turn it seems they are offered a sugary or deep-fried treat. So for parents, pester mode is set to stun-level from the off.
It’s a sunny day at the start of the school holidays and the world and his clatter of children have come to the zoo. We’ve arrived at the restaurant in the mid afternoon and it’s a welcome place to sit down.
At one end, the meerkat enclosure is behind a glass wall and the inhabitants stand on the top of rocks like furry gunslingers scanning the horizon for trouble. I’ve brought a friend and between us we have five children who have run around and been told “no” at least 17 times as they asked for ice creams. They would now almost munch on a meerkat’s leg they’re so hungry.
Despite its high ceiling the place is stuffy and airless and a patch of the floor is sticky with dried-on spills. I head straight for the salad counter, which is full of plastic cartons and the offending celery-hummus combination. It’s all horribly over-packaged as if this was a railway station convenience store for commuters rather than a sit-in restaurant.
There are smoothies in plastic cups with domed lids. The surface of the pinkish gloop has started to congeal. One is a fruit smoothie. The other is a chocolate and fruit smoothie which is a greyish-purple colour. No prizes for guessing which one my four-year-old picks.
At the hot-food counter, Paul asks for the trout and is told there isn’t any. A chef emerges and points it out under a layer of dried breadcrumbs in an ovenproof dish, where a heat lamp has been rendering it unrecognisable. It comes with an oily potato and onion combination. The three older kids go for the inevitable chips and nuggets or sausages option. The smaller guys have yoghurt pots and the chocolate/fruit smoothie.
My salad is labelled a “healthy happy lion heart” portion and has had more thought put into the labelling than the contents. Barely ripe tomatoes have been quartered into too-large and tasteless mouthfuls. The usual offering of lettuce and some okay feta cheese, along with a too-sweet balsamic dressing, complete the experience. Tellingly it’s labeled “misc” on the receipt. At €6.50 it’s pretty bad value. Not as bad as the fish (which the receipt tells us is “roast joint”) and comes in at €9.95. It is “almost inedible” Paul says. At the bottom of this dried-out waste of food is a slick of stewed spinach that seems like a special kind of punishment.
The chocolate and berry drink has “no flavour” according to the four-year-old. It’s managing to taste of neither fruit nor chocolate.
The only pleasant mouthfuls were some watermelon cubes and a gorgeous fresh orange, just bought in its peel. It is as sweet and palate cleansing after all this dross as real food can be.
British food giant Baxter Storey runs the operation here. Its website is full of flowery drawings and worthy promises about local sourcing. Some of these ingredients could have been hand-picked by bare-foot nymphs in the Phoenix Park kitchen garden. But that wouldn’t change the fact that they taste as if they were prepared several hours earlier and then let die slowly under heat lamps and in fridges.
It is telling that outside us the zoo is heaving with visitors and we are almost alone in the restaurant. People seem to be voting with their picnic blankets. Which makes me think we should leave the meerkats in peace to scan the horizon for predators instead of making them watch us humans eat bad food.
Lunch and snacks for our group of seven came to €35.80.
Twitter.com/catherineeats
Meerkat Restaurant
Dublin Zoo, Phoenix Park, Dublin
Facilities: Adequate
Wheelchair access: Yes
Food provenance: None
Music: Some pretty nasty radio station rock when we were there