Despite the furniture and not very bang-bang chicken, Waterford's 33 gastropub knows how to make tasty food, writes Tom Doorley
At the risk of sounding like Anthony Powell, whose diaries turned snobbery into more of a science than an art, I find myself compelled to comment on furniture. This doesn't often happen, and I'm very glad that my friends have so far been too polite to mention mine. When I notice furniture there's something wrong. Show me a Chippendale commode and I'll plonk a mug of tea on it. Tell me what it's called and I'll look for the chamber pot (which, I gather, is not the done thing at all).
So when I become aware that a lot of the furniture at 33, the new haunt of Waterford's affluentsia, is seriously tacky, I suspect it may be. Of course, you can't eat the chairs, so what the hell? I'm just mildly alarmed at the possibility that my yet-to-be-started diary may be peppered with waspish remarks about vulgar taste. Powell made a decent living out of it, so you never know.
Anyway, 33's eclectic collection of furniture, tacky or not, seems to have been chosen with a kind of deranged gastropub vision. Set on three small floors of a Georgian house in the heart of the city, this is more of a restaurant than a bar. But the food is funkily informal and reasonably priced by prevailing standards. Service is cheerful and efficient, and they seem to make a big thing of cocktails, a class of hooch that has never grabbed me by the lapels.
I sprang my eldest daughter from boarding school for the occasion; she chose to start with bread and dips, showing a commendable sense of frugality, as they cost a mere €1.95: decent white bread with generous pots of tapenade and red-pepper pesto.
My bang-bang chicken was more of a whimper: slices of chicken breast on a salad of shredded carrot, cucumber and onion, coated in a kind of bland satay sauce in a rather off-putting shade of beige. Bang-bang chicken, at its best, jumps with flavour and chilli heat. (The best one in Ireland can be had at Café Merlot, in Enniskillen.)
A sirloin steak, big enough for me but a bit small by, say, Dungarvan or Cappoquin standards, with thin chips (sorry, frites) and a slightly watery Béarnaise sauce was scaled to fit its €20 price point. But it was a decent piece of meat with good flavour, cooked medium rare as ordered. The frites, cut from real potatoes, were unpeeled, crisp, flavoursome and incredibly good. They came moulded into a kind of tower, a process that must have required some violence, as some of them had clumped together with an adhesive quality peculiar to the cooked spud. But they were good enough to overcome this indignity.
Chicken-and-leek pie was served in a cute rectangular dish, loose puff-pastry pieces forming both the topping and the, er, bottoming. Creamy and rich, with a good whack of tarragon in the blend, this was good, simple grub with oodles of taste.
Our shared pud had a fancy name involving the word "Viennoise" but, happily, turned out to be good vanilla ice cream, dark chocolate ice cream and rich chocolate sauce. I think my daughter had figured this out when she ordered it.
A glass of house red and house white - both for me, I should stress, just in case Sarah's headmaster is reading this - along with a large bottle of still Ballygowan and a decent Illy double espresso (fashionably served with a shot glass of water) brought the bill for this rather pleasant meal to €69.80.
And as I remarked to Widmerpool over a light lunch of gull's eggs and hock at the club next day, they have some quite respectable pictures. Okay, that's enough Anthony Powell. tdoorley@irish-times.ie
33, 33 the Mall, Waterford, 051-859823, no bookings
WINE CHOICE
Not a bad short list, with, very unusually, two seriously drinkable Roca Argentinian house wines at €16.50. It would be good to see this tendency catching on elsewhere. Ripe, red Cigales La Lagua is €19, Bergerie de l'Hortus Rosé, a great multipurpose wine, is €25, and Jean-Luc Mader's tingly Alsace Riesling is €29. Château Gloria 1988, from Saint-Estephe, is a mature cru bourgeois with grand cru attitude at a keen €75. Best buy is possibly the Languedoc red Domaine Clavel Le Mas, at €24, but Bricolo Merlot (€28) is a lovely, supple and elegant red from the Veneto.