Tom Doorleyreviews dylan hotel, Dublin 4
Being a reasonably responsible citizen, I'm getting worried about my carbon footprint or whatever it's called. And so I found myself walking to lunch the other day, a matter of only a couple of miles, but the ironic thing is that I spent the journey worrying about my car, a four-wheel drive that is on its last legs and must be replaced. I had been doing frantic sums in my head when I met the lunch companion, who told me, in the course of one of those conversations that we all have these days about the excesses of the Irish economy, about the "two kitchens". It seems that the more affluent among us now have two of them; one in which food is actually prepared, the other in which the family sits down and eats.
I concluded - and not for the first time - that I live on a different planet. This sensation was heightened by our lunch venue, the dylan hotel. Note the lower-case initial letter. I live in a world where proper nouns start with capitals, but clearly the fashionable rich are not bound by such conventions.
This hotel was once the nurses' home for Baggot Street Hospital. Lynne Truss, of Eats, Shoots & Leavesfame, missed a great example of mispunctuation that was, I believe, legendary in Dublin in the 1940s. On one occasion, when the hospital was holding its annual flag day, the printers omitted an apostrophe and so produced a poster with the alarming injunction: "Please Help Our Nurses Home".
Anyway, the restaurant at the dylan (bob or thomas?) is curious. It features what appears to be several dozen chandeliers, rather finicky crockery and unusual chairs. Some are relatively normal. Some have backs about two metres high. And others have no back worth mentioning, so if you recline you may well end up on the floor.
But, overall, the design theme is timid. It's as if the brief was to be bit like the g hotel, in Galway, without being too over the top. But the food, despite a heavy hand with the salt, is not bad.
A carefully composed green salad was, amazingly, largely green, and dressed with a degree of sensitivity not shared by the hotel's interior designers.
Ballotine of chicken was pleasant enough: a few discs of chicken mousseline enriched with mushrooms and dished up with a concentrated stock reduction. A generous seasoning of tarragon gave the whole thing a bit of lift.
Canelloni of "woodland" mushrooms was, in fact, a very salty collection of sauteed fungi, including horn of plenty, enokis and something I failed to identify (but it might have been the lesser chanterelle) loosely wrapped in three sheets of rather good pasta and topped with one of those "foams" that seem to be compulsory in restaurants that are keen to follow the zeitgeist. I needed a litre of water to counteract the saline nature of this somewhat silly dish.
Confit of duck was okay. It was crisp-skinned, but the flesh was less than melting. The beetroot accompaniment was fine, but I've begun to object to this simple, cheap, bistro staple appearing in restaurants with pretensions to grandeur.
We shared one of those variations-on-a-theme desserts, this time based on pineapple. Chunks of the fruit, cooked with rum, reminded me of pineapple upside-down cake as cooked by my very late granny; a pineapple sorbet would have been better described as a granita; the pineapple parfait was overly sweet and bland, but slices of pineapple marinated with chamomile were really rather good.
With coffees, infamously expensive Voss mineral water from Norway (which brings us back to the carbon footprint) and three glasses of wine, the bill came to €113.45.
Still at dylan, Eastmoreland Place, Dublin 4, 01-6603000, www.dylan.ie
Wine Choice
Handsomely bound but curiously light within, the wine list is large but random. Our glasses of wine were Albert Pic's decent enough Chablis (€10), the rather neutral Danzante
Pinot Grigio (€7.50) and the one-dimensional and overoaked Matua Valley Pinot Noir (€11.50), from New Zealand. Marc Bredif Vouvray 2004 (€33) is fine, but Tyrell's Vat 1 Semillon 2004 (€37) is too young, as is Château Cheval-Blanc 2001, at a mere €630. Bouchard Père & Fils Corton-Charlemagne 1998 (€185) is probably starting to open up, and Château Lynch-Bages 1995 (€270) tasted pretty good but still a bit closed when I last tasted it. Jim Barry's Lodge Hills Riesling (€34.95), from Down Under, is a decent enough buy.