Bring your own bottle and have a great dinner for two for €50, writes TOM DOORLEY
WHAT A HAPPY coincidence. Here we have a modest restaurant which does very good Eastern Med food at very fair prices and allows you to BYOB*.
And, just a few doors away, we have Louis Albrouze, one of the best wine retailers in Dublin (and where, incidentally, they always try to keep a bottle of every white and rose wine in the fridge). Add to that the fact that Keshk Cafe does not charge corkage and you have a very, very happy coincidence: the opportunity to drink good wine with decent food and come out with the kind of bill that most of us have not seen for a very long time.
I was a bit late in discovering this small, bright restaurant at the more pleasant end of Leeson Street, although I had heard occasional dispatches from the front line which involved a lot of breathless praise.
And I can see what they were getting at. The kind of food you get here – the likes of falafel and hummus and baklava – happens to be among my favourites, but it’s not the kind of stuff that reaches sublime heights. It’s not haute cuisine, for which let us give thanks.
This is, essentially, peasant food and it demonstrates, once again, that your average peasant, blessed with a sunny climate, has been eating a very pleasant and healthy diet for centuries. We got stuck on potatoes and buttermilk and developed a visceral hatred of fish and seafood.
For some bizarre reason – possibly the unusually clement weather – I was so distracted when I sat down to eat that I failed to do what everyone should do in a restaurant of this kind. Order hummus. It’s the acid test. And hummus is something of which I can rarely get enough.
However, seduced by the idea of feta fritters coated in sesame seeds, I spurned the good old chickpea purée and got stuck into the salty, tangy cheese encased inside its crisp overcoat. Our other starter was very decent goats’ cheese crostini, generous in scale, the cheese suitably goaty and properly melted.
And then on to lamb meshwe, a combination of slightly chewy, small cubes of meat that had been chargrilled and a red, mildly spicy but creamy sauce which was fragrant with cinnamon. At €15.95, with a generous helping of rice, it made a fine main course.
Our other main course was falafel, very simply presented with just a dollop of tahini sauce on top of each. Falafel gets a mixed press. There is the penitential falafel with which vegetarians shrive themselves for lusting after meat (usually sausages, they tell me). These resemble large, round bullets constructed from wood chips, sawdust and cavity wall insulation, bound together with beaten egg.
Then there is proper falafel. These are deep-fried cakes of minced broad beans, mildly spiced, crisp outside and moist, but moderately dense, in the middle. They contain a vast amount of protein, deliver a crunch factor, and are very moreish. Keshk’s falafel belong to this category and are very good indeed.
The tahini topping was, naturally, full of the flavour of toasted sesame seeds, but was cool and smooth, with a touch of sharpness and even a little tannin.
To finish we shared some honey-soaked baklava with crushed pistachios which was probably the best version I’ve ever encountered, certainly in this part of the world. So seductive was the baklava that, I regret to say, my concentration was knocked for six, and I can’t remember for the life of me what the espressos were like. But if they were consistent with the rest of our meal, they must have been good.
You get all sorts here. Some were enjoying cans of Bulmers, some were hitting the Concha y Toro and one may have been enjoying something from his own cellar.
The bill for the food came to €50.80 and we enjoyed a brilliant Rioja for €20, the likes of which would normally set you back about €38 at restaurant prices. tdoorley@irishtimes.com
THE SMART MONEY
There are two ways of approaching this. You could have a starter portion of falafel, tap water (which is quite good here) and a coffee and still come out under a tenner. Or two of you could have what we had and a bottle of Champagne and the bill would still be under €90.
* Bring your own bottle
WINE CHOICE
Louis Albrouze closes at 9pm. You can browse in advance at louisalbrouze.com. Just a few suggestions: the lovely crisp, fresh Château Les Tuileries (€12.95) is new wave Entre-Deux-Mers. Domaine du Montour (€12.95) a Sauvignon from the Côteaux du Giennois is better value than your average Sancerre. Domaine Tripoz Bourgogne (€16.45) is a juicy, fresh Pinot Noir at a keen price. Puelles Rioja Crianza (€16.45) is soft, spicy and moreish, while the Puelles Rioja Reserva (€20.45) is similar, but with more oomph.
Read Megabites, Tom Doorley’s blog on all things foodie, at irishtimes.com/blogs/megabites