L'Ecrivain owner to open Epicurean fish restaurant

Award-winning restaurateur Derry Clarke is to take over the fish restaurant outlet in the Epicurean Food Hall previously occupied by Caviston's.

The food hall is on Dublin's northside and the walk-through mall links Middle Abbey Street and Liffey Street. The high profile unit is at the mall's entrance on Liffey Street.

Derry Clarke is one of the country's most talented and successful chefs who runs his high-priced gourmet restaurant out of a building which he owns on Baggot Street. His interest in the 550 sq ft northside unit would seem to be a departure for him as under Caviston's ownership, it was a fishmongers with a low key fish restaurant attached.

When Stephen Caviston decided to pull out of the food hall, its developer/owner Joe Layden made it clear that he wished the replacement tenant to be either a fishmonger or a fish restaurant. Clarke is clear that his new venture will be a fish restaurant with some fish for sale. The emphasis will be very much on the restaurant side.

"I haven't really got a clue how it will work out," says Clarke. "It's a bit of fun and I'll just have to see how it goes." An attractive feature of the deal he struck with Layden was a lease with a break option. "That way I don't have a lot to lose." he says.

Cavistons were paying a rent of £28,000 (€35.55) plus an annual service charge of £10,000 (€12,697). The relatively high service charges in the mall have been a source of contention among some of its tenants, but Clarke says that he finds them reasonable, given rents in other parts of the city.

His new venture will be called Cbar and will be under one of Clarke's own L'Ecrivain-trained chefs. While he takes over the lease this month he does not consider that the Cbar will really come into its own until next February.

"We will close down immediately after Christmas for major renovation," says Clarke. "You won't really get to see what the new operation will be like until we reopen in February. We want to be fairly low key until then."

One of the challenges in the redesign will be to overcome a difficulty that frustrated Stephen Caviston who says that if the place was bigger, he wouldn't have left. In its present layout it has a large fish counter and room for only 20 diners. It wasn't unusual for him to do as many as 100 covers in a day and to turn the tables at least twice during lunchtime.

As the emphasis is now off retail, the new layout will mean a much-reduced fish counter and more tables. Clarke will be hoping to at least duplicate that level of trade but to add to it with his increased capacity. His menu will include hot dishes such as wraps, fish pies, smoked fish and fish sauces.

When the purpose-built gourmet food hall opened in February 2000, it seemed to be in the most unlikely of settings. Its 24 open-plan units offered a range of food from crab claws to French pastries. At that time it was designed as a multi-unit gourmet take away with a small communal seating section in the middle. Since then, the focus has changed, with more seats being added for eat-in dining due to the lunchtime demands of the office and retail workers who throng the mall.

"It's a different place now than it was when it opened," says Joe Layden, whose other city centre property interests include the South City Market on South Great Georges Street. "We knew that the initial mix would have to be tweaked before we got it right."

There are plans to extend the Epicurean's opening hours to fit in with the clientele who will be attracted to the Cbar. Joe Layden thinks there is a huge pre-theatre market that the mall is not tapping into and is looking into the possibility of opening until 10 p.m.