Escape routes for restaurant critics are more important than you might think. When you have had a disastrous meal the last thing you want is to be interrogated by the chef, hence the dash for the last bus or, on occasion, an apparent outbreak of bladder constriction necessitating a brisk trot to the loo.
The latest escape, however, came to me in a dream. The route was via the back door, up past the vegetable garden, into the woods, up a farm track, skirting a big field of barley and over the border into Waterford. You see, I had explained to Marian Finucane, on air, that Cork has far fewer good restaurants than it should have, and my subconscious must have been of the opinion that flight would be necessary. You mess with the collective Corkonian ego at your peril and there I was, in my dream, gazing down at Ballyduff like a Colditz escapee contemplating the sanctuary of Switzerland.
Anyway, I'm happy to report that the only response to my claim, made in the Cork studios of RTÉ, has been a deafening silence and I am still residing, unmolested, in the county.
In the meantime, the city has seen the opening of a new restaurant which would be worth a gander if for no other reason than its having been created by Domini and Peaches Kemp. These sisters, you will recall, have boosted the sum of human happiness in Dublin 4 with their Itsa4 restaurant in Sandymount.
Table, their new venture on the top floor of Brown Thomas in Cork, is a daytime restaurant where you can adjourn for morning coffee (with excellent sweet things), a brief solitary or leisurely chatty lunch, or a pitstop in the afternoon (it being the only place in Cork where you can have handcut chips with aioli and a glass of wine at 4.30pm, as far as I can tell).
We had a modest but very pleasant lunch, starting with a shared starter of moist and tasty chicken goujons in a crisp buttermilk batter. This is the kind of thing that could be so easily ruined: by poor raw materials, clumsy handling or that all-too-common phenomenon, murky oil in the fryer. Mind you, at €9 for six bits of chicken breast, it would need to be bloody good.
Two small fillets of plaice were perfectly cooked on the pan and topped with a disc of tangy lemon butter. They came with a decent salad, which involved rather a lot of pickled cucumber. Our other main course was less successful but I would be misleading you if I didn't point out that we cleaned the plate.
This was, the menu claimed, Thai fish cakes with a Szechuan slaw. Now the fish cakes were, I think, cod and salmon (with that slightly musty taste I always associate with the farmed stuff), amalgamated with mashed spud, turmeric and chilli. I tend to think of Thai flavours as involving ginger, galangal, lemongrass, lime, coconut and what have you, but I live a sheltered life. The chilli and ginger dip struck us as being rather like a spicy Marie Rose.
The slaw was rather good and, perhaps, rather original: crisp cabbage and carrot dressed with sesame oil and other stuff which forensic scrutiny failed to identify. But it worked with the curious fish cakes.
We enjoyed bracing double espressos with a shared slice of very dense, silky chocolate tart which had a layer of caramel incorporated somehow within it. With two large bottles of San Pallegrino and a glass each of reasonable white wine, the bill came to €74.80 before service.
We felt this was a little steep but I daresay Brown Thomas take a yield-per-square-metre view of these things and when you're used to selling Jane Birkin bags and cosmetics that cost their weight in caviar, food has to work very hard to please the accountants.
All in all, Table is a pleasant spot and Cork, praise the Lord, has one more restaurant where it is no great hardship to eat.
Table, Brown Thomas, Patrick Street, Cork (021-4805555)
Wine choice
The is one of the oddest wine selections I've seen in ages. The sort, indeed, where I've never heard of many of the wines. And the market is turning back to Europe while this list is virtually all New World. Our Californian Sauvignon Blanc was adequate, but no more, at €7 a glass. No Albarinho is worth €48 a bottle but Esprit de Nijinsky from the O'Brien stable in Provence is a decent, simple and fruit-driven red at €25. Four Sisters Sauvignon/Semillon (€28) is described as having "delicious melon and peach fruit flavours and subtle use of French and American oak which adds background depth and complexity." That kind of tasting note has a farmyard quality: it's complete and utter bull.