A young Irish chef brings Nordic cooking to a cafe in Dublin 8

It’s more like a family gathering than a restaurant. I’m sitting in a candlelit room full of warmth on a dank winter night. Some of the people at the shared table can date their friendship to low babies. By the end of the night the noise needle is at constant holler level.

I'm at a pop-up dinner in Dublin's Bibi's Café. Two friends, who also met at school, are running the show. One is Geoff, the brother of Maisha Lenehan, who runs this café in daylight hours. The other is Halaigh Whelan-McManus, a young Irish chef who worked at Noma in Copenhagen. Later this year he's heading to Japan.

Expectations are high even for this friendly audience. Cutting it as part of a team in the world’s best restaurant is one thing. Turning that into an enjoyable evening for a couple of dozen diners in a café back home is another.

It’s a €55, whatever-he-cooks-you- eat menu. The list of dishes is nordically gnomic. One is just listed as Bread and Ham. There’s a €25 wine-matching option that I’m skipping. Add booze to how warmly disposed I already feel towards this event and you might as well ask me to review my children’s end-of-school concert.

So in the spirit of a clear-eyed view let’s nail the bum notes first. Nothing arrives very quickly and we’re four dishes in before anything hot happens. Not hot as in trendy. That’s there from the get-go but hot as in hot dinner. Neither of these things is a huge let-down but on a mid-winter night the tepidness is probably what rankles most. But these are small gripes. The rest is a gush.

The first hot dish is a stunner, my dish of the night, a wedge of cauliflower that looks like a piece of cheesecake blasted with a blow torch. The approach is to roast the blandest of the brassicas like a joint of meat with the reverence and time you’d give to a piece of dead animal. The result takes cauliflower to a new place. It’s served with a perfectly fluffy cauliflower purée and a chest-thumpingly flavourful mushroom broth. It’s the kind of cooking that transforms vegetables into a dish meatier than most mediocre steaks.

Before that there’s been a nibble of glass-crisp roasted cavalo nero leaf slathered with a mussel emulsion and sprinkled with chives. There’s the coldest dish of the night, a rubbery chew of razor clam with crisp mandolined raw vegetables. The bread and ham is served as slices from a heavy handmade loaf with butter in a bowl. “I didn’t think butter could be improved on,” someone remarks. Turns out it can when you mix it into a rough paste with pink threads of smoked ham.

Next up are cubes of carrot and turnip with a buttermilk sauce that has tangy green beads of thyme oil to add a woody greenness to the delicate flavour. Pink crescents of the crunchiest pickled onions that are just the right side of nose-wrinkingly sharp save it from being too much mush and milk.

So we’ve had the bread and something hot and then the crowd-pleaser arrives. It’s a small slab of beef cheek cooked in ale long enough for the sinews to soften down to silk. There are clean crunchy slices of raw Jerusalem artichoke and an artichoke purée. Peeled white apple segments prove that apple and beef can be just as satisfying as apple and pork.

In case the meat wasn’t enough there’s a jug of brown butter to be drizzled over it for the full monty of mouth pleasure.

A poached pear in hay custard (not much hay flavour but still lovely) has a sprinkling of thyme on it to do that savoury sweet thing that layers dessert into an idea as well as a pleasure. And finally there are house-made iced gems, tiny rounds of shortbread topped with piped icing sugar splodges. The pink ones are rose water, the brown ones Cloud Picker coffee. And just like the originals you can bite the frosting off first and let the sugar melt on your tongue before tackling the biscuit.

Whelan-McManus has some more wanderlust to work out before he comes home to an Irish kitchen permanently. On the strength of this relaxed and friendly pop-up I’ll be queuing for a table when he does. In the meantime, you can try his food at pop-ups in Bibis every Thursday evening until the end of February. Book at eat@bibis.ie