Food Game: Lotts to love in this game

Newly opened for supper, the Food Game is a tiny restaurant in Ringsend that's big on flavours, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

There’s nothing big about Food Game in Dublin’s Ringsend. No big shopfront, big-name chef or big production-line kitchen. From the outside it’s a teeny shop. Blink and you’d miss it. Even the plates of food are small. Chef Richard Gleeson worked in Yottam Ottolenghi’s cafes in London so I’m interested to see what he’ll do with evening meals or “supper” which they’re now serving four nights a week (Wednesday to Saturday). When I ring to book a table I’m offered a 7.30pm or 8.30pm slot. “We’ve about 15 people coming at 8pm, we’re going to be rammed,” the guy explains, which seems a pretty straightforward way of dealing with a rush in a small place.

The first thing we notice as we walk in is the smell of cooking. “It smells like Gruel,” my friend Paul says. He’s not referring to Dickensian porridge but the now-closed Dame Street restaurant. Gruel smelled of comfortable stock-based things like soups and stews, slippers for the soul. Gruel also, in truth, smelled a little like a damp bedsit by the end of its days but that isn’t a feature here.

We sit at a high bench where a couple are at the coffee stage. They have had a great meal, the kind that makes them want to tell two strangers about the treats that await them. They mention the pork belly with the air of people who can’t believe their luck. We, however, go for the lamb, a slightly ornery decision that comes back to bite us.

The handwritten menu has a“How we eat” note stapled to the front. Sharing is encouraged, and “please eat when you are served. All sharing plates will not arrive together.” The two “tasters” are well named and we order both. There’s a butterbean hummus, where a lone bean has survived the blender in this garlic-laced mush. It has cracker-crisp toasted shards of flatbread and a delicate chorizo and tomato salsa where the chorizo is cut so tiny it’s a whisper rather than the typical roar of this spicy meat.

The dish of the night is, for the first time in the history of this column, a salad. It’s not a big salad for €6 but it’s one that makes you glad to be alive. Tiny flying saucer shaped slices of Toonsbridge buffalo mozzarella are buried under thick leaves of mint, rocket that tastes freshly-picked, oily crisply-fried cubes of “torn bread” and thinly-sliced beetroot pickled with a citrus flavour that makes it sing. Other restaurants might combine these flavours in a sauce and pipe them on to a plate. Here they put them up to you fresh and whole. “And your mouth gets to be the blender,” as Paul puts it.

Next up are sharing plates, priced between €8.50 and €11. We get two cooked dishes, a hake and the lamb, and one assembly of cooked and raw ingredients. The latter is the best of the three, slices of sweetly roasted onion squash, Swiss chard, chestnuts and luscious curd-like Fivemiletown goats cheese. Fennel seeds, a pickled red onion and more of that sensational pickled beetroot finish off these wonderful flavours with complementing textures. My hake fillet is lovely with a saffron sauce smothering the fish and clams still in their shells topped with thinly-sliced fennel. Paul’s lamb shoulder is a little less swoon-inducing, the only wobble of the night, the meat strangely both fatty and dry. But it comes with a good lemony yoghurt soup and sweet potato and spinach.

A divine financier and a poached pear fanned with candied walnuts and a cardamom pannacotta are both a triumph and great value at €4.50 apiece. At the end of the night the shop fills with the smell of something fruity and spongy baking, presumably for the morning coffee crowd.

The Food Game may be fun and small but it’s a serious operation, putting flavour bombs on plates. Three of them will cost you around €25 and bite-for-bite they’re worth every cent.

Dinner for two, with four glasses of Guigal Côtes du Rhone (€6) came to €80.

Food Game

10 South Lotts Road, Dublin 4,

tel: 01 281 5002

Music: Lovely mix of 1980s and 1990s pop

Facilities: Funky paint-bombed walls

Food Provenance: Excellent,

Toonsbridge, Fivemiletown are among the cheesemakers. Lamb from Roscommon and pork belly from Crowe’s Farm.

Wheelchair access: Yes

SECOND HELPING...

Dublin has a new Hungarian restaurant on Bolton Street in the north inner city. The Sab Inn Café is a friendly place with blackboard lunch specials, none of which included goulash the day I was there. The Hungarian national dish is stew by any other name, so I had the beef casserole (€9.95) with traditional dumplings. A plate of meaty chunks in a dense tomato-based sauce arrived promptly. The dumplings were not the round type we see in English cooking but smaller knobblier versions – like gnocchi that had been knocked around a bit. They were good for soaking up the sauce with. There was a green peas stew, which sounds interesting and a shomlo sponge cake which seems to be going down a bomb with Hungarian expats, homesick for home cooking.

Sab Inn Café, 61 Bolton St, Dublin 1, tel: 01-873 3810