PEOPLE no longer play safe, says Yoichi Hoashi of Blackrock's Ayumi-Ya Restaurant. When my mother opened the restaurant in 1983, people would often choose something like a chicken starter and then have a main course with beef. Now, they go the whole hog with the Japanese dishes. They want to try the sashimi and the sushi, to such an extent that the sushi chef we have working for us now is totally overworked.
During the 1980s, one of the most significant changes in eating out in the Dublin suburbs was the arrival of the ethnic restaurants. As the city developed its own breed of smart new places to eat, an array of quieter, less fashion fixated places opened their doors on the southside.
Some Indian restaurants such as the Eastern Tandoori began to open up suburban outlets, with their restaurant in Deansgrange, joining others such as Dun, Laoghaire's fine Krishna Restaurant, and the Al Minar in Dalkey while Chinese restaurants and take aways proliferated all around the city.
Their success has been founded not just on a growing appreciation for ethnic food, but also on the fact that they have wisely built a dedicated local business. David Hui opened the excellent China Sichuan restaurant in Stillorgan almost 10 years ago, and today, says Mr Hui, almost every customer is a regular. We have very many customers who come twice a week, every week. We know them, and they know Tim and Kevin and everyone, and they like the food, he says.
This familiarity gives an extraordinary ambience to the China Sichuan. In almost every way it is a conventional Chinese restaurant, but the rapport between the staff and the customers gives it a completely different character from any city centre Chinese restaurant. It is a true neighbourhood place, somewhere you go to almost as a matter of course.
Aside from the great food which, as Mr Hui points out, avoids the blandness of much Cantonese cooking, and yet is not too hot, I like it because I can dispense with the menu and simply ask them to choose a meal. Their dish of braised hot and spicy bean curd, for example, is one of the vegetarian specialities. But, if asked, they will also serve this with finely chopped beef and a dressing of coriander, a version which is closer in tone to the classic dish.
Others like it precisely because they can eat the same dishes time and again, confident that the exacting standards of the restaurant will conjure magic monkfish with cashews or the simplicity of some stir fried bakchoi, perhaps the intensity of fried shredded pork filled with garlic sauce, and the delightful almond bean curd.
"They know they can trust the food," says David Hui.
What is especially significant about the China Sichuan, however, is the fact the the food is very pure. This is not the reworked Cantonese food which most Chinese restaurants trade in, but genuine Sichuanese cooking, and it demonstrates how our taste for ethnic food has become more demanding.
In the mid 1990s, our hunger for authenticity has begun to strike sparks among the ethnic restaurants.
This is a feature which Yoichi Hoashi has also noticed in the Ayumi-Ya. "We are getting a purer type of customer, often people who have eaten Japanese food in London and perhaps in Japan, and they will choose totally from the a la carte, and have the squid legs and the noodles and dishes like that. Consistency has also been a hallmark of the Ayumi-Ya, and as its customers have developed, so has the restaurant. "This makes it more fun for us, says Yoici Hoashi.
"The timidity is disappearing, and so we have broadened the menu. There has been a sea change in people's attitude. We had three Japanese businessmen in last night and their guests were three Irishwomen. The Japanese men ordered, and the women loved it."
The longevity of these two restaurants is proof of Mr Hoashi's theory, that food should have no boundaries, and people nowadays are willing to try anything.
