Dandelion needs to flower

The new restaurant at Dandelion has its good points but will take a while to become a food destination, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

IF YOU REMEMBER Dublin’s Dandelion market you’re unlikely to have stepped into Dandelion. It’s a Venn diagram with little or no intersection. In one set are the former patrons of the 1970s market where U2 played on Saturdays and Sundays at 3pm, (admission 50p). In the other are the kids (and possibly grandkids) of that generation who go to the massive bar space that is Dandelion beside Dublin’s Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre.

The most telling touch in Dandelion’s decor is the mock gilt frame that surrounds the flat-screen TV over the bar. The theme is bling and booming music, a place of the future rather than any monument to Dublin’s dusty old past.

But now Dandelion (there’s no “the” according to the press release) has had a restaurant dropped into it, whose name does come with a definite article. It’s called “The Library”. And it has (brace yourself) “ambitions to become a dining destination in its own right”.

A new restaurant on St Stephen’s Green is always going to be interesting. The first problem with this one is that the big hanger of a bar is still fronting onto the Green. The Library is at the back in a windowless space. It’s understandable. When sweating a large real-estate asset on the Green, the accountants probably need you to keep the bar to the front.

Put the right food in and a whole new type of customer (non fans of the kind of bar where everyone looks eerily Californian) might pass through into this new place.

And the restaurant space is large and wide with smart tables, real napkins and a linen runner down the middle. There are tea lights, comfy buckety chairs upholstered in a kind of nippled red leathery hide. So far so fine, but then we get to the wallpaper, which features pictures of leather-bound books in fifty shades of beige. This fake fustiness is topped off with a job lot of actual hardbacks down the end and a jumble of them on top of the wallpapered walls. Instead of library silence (or, let’s face it, the decor here is going for silence broken only by the ponderous ticking of a grandfather clock) there is the loud overspill of music from the bar, which is getting busier by the hour as the restaurant around us remains steadfastly almost entirely empty.

The food sounds good. And the service is excellent. A starter of dressed Irish brown crab (€9) is competently cooked. A glossy large duck-egg yolk sits in the middle of the plate, its white covered in a nest of crabmeat and micro greens. The crab is slightly underflavoured. There’s no sign of any “buttered sea greens” and I cannot detect any lemon oil dressing.

Maol has a very good haddock risotto (€7) which is topped with a crisply fried quail’s egg and is richly flavoured without being too salty. We get nice breads, a tangy fennel and tomato, Guinness, curry bread and nut and raisin one are on offer, with soft pats of butter.

We’ve brought a gin and tonic each from the bar and get two glasses of the house Soave (€7). A chilled bottle of tap water is also served.

The mains are a little more muddled. My “Cootehill chicken” supreme, which I had to order as the daughter of a Cootehill woman, is fine in a pub dinner kind of way. There’s an “escabeche of artichoke and carrot”, a term normally used to describe a marinated fish dish. On the plate it’s chunks of artichoke with a sweet gravy with a couple of swirls of pesto in it. The chicken leg comes on a splodge of mustardy mash.

The same mash is on the top of Maol’s fish pie, which is volcanically hot. Under the mash there’s a mix of salmon, a smoked white fish and some anaemic pink shrimp in a milky thin broth. “A little more stirring and you’d have a chowder,” is her verdict. Each main dish comes at a hefty €17 apiece.

Desserts of a cherry clafoutis (€7) and some balls of lemon sorbet (€6) are tooth-achingly sweet. We round off with a peppermint tea.

“They’re trying,” is the verdict we both end on. And in some places they’re succeeding, primarily the service and the starters. But the dual-personality of the venue – the music gets louder and bar more packed as we finish up – needs a kitchen working a bit harder on simple cooked-a-few-moments-ago dishes to win over a different clientele. Authenticity is absent on several levels. The old Dandelion Market was never a food destination and The Library at Dandelion has a bit of a way to go before it can stake that claim.

Dinner for two with two gin and tonics and two glasses of house wine came to €93.60.

[ Twitter.com/catherineeats ]

Cake Cafe's seaside cousin

Once you know that the couple behind Shells Cafe in Strandhill, Co Sligo, once worked in Michelle Darmody's Dublin Cake Cafe it makes perfect sense. Shells is a Cake Cafe on-sea, the same cheery oilcloths on the tables, quirky decor and simple well-cooked food. On this back-to-school weekend, we have stored up happy memories of a sunny visit there for a surfing weekend. So hot was the sunshine through the window that two wetsuited boys stripped to their waists to eat, probably not the first patrons to do so. The place was heaving. I had a tasty chicken couscous salad with light cucumber yoghurt dressing (€9.50). Liam had a good chicken burger (€9.50) and the boys enjoyed a chicken sandwich (€3.90) and cowboy burgers (€5.50). The lemon bar (€2.20) is a homage to the Cake Cafe lemon slice, a little bit of Dublin gone west. Single balls of vanilla ice cream at €1.50 each for the three boys rounded it off. Dinner for five came to €56.80.

Shells, Strandhill seafront, Co Sligo, tel: 071-912 2938