In hindsight the ominous signs were clear: a fur of dust on the clever “g” logo, the freezing, empty downstairs and the oil-filled radiator upstairs. I had a hearty dinner in Gruel in December. Days later the Dublin restaurant and its posher sister Mermaid closed their doors for good, with the owners citing sky-high rent as the reason. The lovers of Gruel were bereft. Much of what people enjoyed in Gruel was cooked in recent years by chef Siobhan Manuel, a graduate of the school of what she calls Mammy Cooking. It meant cooking everything from scratch and thinking day-to-day.
Five years ago, mother-of-two Manuel was working in accounts and administration, as well as being a keen home cook, doing dinner parties for friends. “I was very passionate about food, so I decided to leave my sensible, sane job.” She approached Ben Gorman, one of the Gruel partners, and he offered her a job as a waitress in Mermaid.
Along with waiting tables, she did weekly unpaid work experience in the kitchen of the Tea Room in the nearby Clarence Hotel. She worked her way from waitressing into the kitchen, learning on the job. Then last autumn she was head-hunted to set up her own cafe just months before Gruel closed down.
“I was asked by the people who own Tower Records to come and talk to them as they were interested in putting in a cafe. They wanted somebody to do something with food, as a complete set-up.” They didn’t want an anonymous chain to open up a concession. “I sourced all the furniture, covered all the chairs myself, and we made it very homely.”
“The thing I loved about was the home-made element, and not wasting food,” Manuel explains. “There were no menus set down for weeks, just one or two dishes made well and made from scratch. Yesterday’s roast was tomorrow’s soup and you were buying what’s in season. If your veg man had some soft tomatoes, you bought them cheaply and cooked them. There’s far too much waste in restaurants.”
The Tower Records Cafe is more of a lunch and cake venue, so Manuel found a good pastry cook in childhood friend Winnie Grant. The two friends met up again after losing touch with each other for more than 20 years. “She’d had four kids and started baking. So it really is mammies here.”
The third member of staff is former Gruel waitress Isabella Pachera, a music fan, who is delighted to have the playlist to her working day picked by the Tower team. In the meantime, Grant is tempted to buy them all Mad Men-style 1960s frill-shouldered aprons, but Manuel thinks that might be pushing the whole Mammy thing just a bit too far.
