RESTAURANTS:Ballycotton has a room with a view, and food worth the trip, writes Tom Doorley
IT'S STANDING-ROOM-ONLY in west Cork for German naturopaths, British film executives and intellectual US millionaires. The place is bursting to the seams with organic growers, alternative energy consultants and obscure but profitable writers.
I once dropped into a pub in Ballydehob and met, within half an hour, a distinguished rabbi, a famous actor, a film producer and a bloke who owns a great deal of Manhattan.
Well, I'm delighted for west Cork, of course. And I do sometimes imagine that I'll come upon a Customs post somewhere beyond Bandon as there is a strong sense of this part of Ireland being . . . well . . . kind of independent of the rest of the county, let alone the country.
But, as a long-term resident of unfashionable but very lovely east Cork, I sometimes wonder what this half of the county has done to be so shamefully overlooked. The cognoscenti, of course, have been coming to Ballycotton for years. It's a superior seaside village, possibly due to its lack of a beach. Ballybunion it ain't. It clings to the coastline in a picturesquely tenacious fashion and despite a rash of recent holiday homes, it retains a certain reserve. There's a sense that it's an inside-track destination; that visitors are more likely to pack On Chesil Beach than PS I Love You.
It used to have a terrific restaurant in the shape of Ivan Whelan's Grapefruit Moon, but Whelan has gone off to do his own thing, which includes working with his cousin Cully and with Sully, both of soup and pie fame.
Arun Kapil of Green Saffron Spices, who featured in these pages some time ago, advised me recently to seek out a little eating establishment within spitting distance of harbour. Nautilus, he told me, does excellent bistro-ish food, in a dining room off a pub. And he was dead right.
The dining room is a bit bungaloid, but the view is charming and the food, when four of us descended upon it on a sunny July evening, was remarkably good.
Our three starters included a chicken spring roll with a stupendously good dipping sauce that involved coriander, mint, chilli, ginger, ground peanuts and probably a great deal else. And there was steamed asparagus dressed with a fine dice of Kalamata olives (an unlikely but very happy combination). And there was a slice of pork rillettes with filaments of pickled beetroot and crisply toasted sourdough bread.
Excellent homemade, hand-cut chips, ready salted, accompanied a decent steak with Café de Paris butter, and some crisply battered whiting fillets were served with homemade tartare sauce. And there were lemon sole fillets with crushed new potatoes spiked with chives and garlic, and marinated fennel which had been through the mandolin. Our fourth main course was a tender, intense, slow-cooked curry of lamb with a warm, aromatic spice mixture sourced, no doubt, from Green Saffron in nearby Shanagarry village.
A mixed green salad was not just green, but the real deal: multiple lettuces, rocket leaves, mizuna (or was it mibuna?) and some mustard greens, all lightly anointed with a dressing that traded the usual vinegar hit for real subtlety.
A single pudding of a baby strawberry tart was a thing of jewel-like beauty. There was a perfectly crisp, buttery case of pastry filled with rich vanilla cream (rather like a liquid panna cotta), topped with strawberry slices, each of which was encased in its own glaze of dark, intense syrup. And on the side came a little jelly of what must have been close to pure strawberry juice.
Prices are, I suppose, moderately high for a little restaurant in a village perched on the edge of the sea in east Cork, but you can pay more in these parts for food that would not, to say the least, beckon you back. And it's a short season. I don't see how they could do it for less, especially when the raw materials are clearly so carefully sourced and everything is cooked from scratch.
The four of us ate three starters, four main courses and one dessert for €128.40 including a bottle of very decent Spanish white wine.
Nautilus was very quiet on the Thursday evening we visited. It thoroughly deserves to be packed every night.
tdoorley@irish-times.ie
There is a very short, but keenly priced list with few wines that are familiar to me. I know and love the zesty Vina Cantosan Verdejo Rueda (€21) and the chunky Javier Assensio Navarra Tinto (€19). There's a nameless Montepulciano d'Abruzzo for a mere €17.50, and it's rarely you see anything, even half-bottles, for that kind of price. There's also an Haut-Medoc that I don't recognise, but it's from the lovely, mature 2000 vintage and it's priced at €32.50. Prosecco del Montello Casa Bianca weighs in at €31, which seems a keen price for fizz.