Deli delights with good value menu

A new market-menu restaurant delivers limited choice but excellent quality at low prices, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

THERE IS A very tall man in a very small kitchen cooking like a dervish. I’m sitting at a blue-painted table that used to be a bar stool, with more of the same tables crowding along the narrow tunnel that is this tiny restaurant. A tall stainless-steel bin is uncomfortably close to our table.

This is Rigby’s Deli on Dublin’s Upper Leeson Street. By day it’s a deli and sandwich bar. Three nights a week it becomes a menu-less restaurant. And everything from the mobile phone number for booking to the question from the waitress “Do you have wine with you?” (you bring your own) makes it feel a bit like a speakeasy.

The promise is that the food on your plate will be decided that day by what chef James Rigby has been able to get, not what came in the fine-food van delivery. Hence no menu, nothing decided with a purveyor’s price list in one hand and a calculator in the other. The nod to the restaurant experience is a choice between two starters and two mains. It’s as close as a chef gets to binning the sheet music and riffing.

A larger-than-life English chef (the smallness of this place emphasises his towering height), Rigby has embraced Facebook and Twitter to get his idea off the ground. I’ve booked a table by text. His Facebook page shows him in a moody grainy black and white shot, sitting in front of his window, cooking implements hanging down behind the glass on which a two-course for €19 offer has been scrawled. That has inched up to €21.

We ask what’s for dinner and leave to get our wine, getting a recommendation from Paul Drummond at Louis Albrouze Wine next door. Ten minutes earlier he had dropped off 10 per cent discount cards to Rigby’s diners, so we’re the first to test the symbiotic arrangement. With the discount we get nice wines at house plonk prices, a bottle of Croix Senaillet Saint Veran (€17) and a Puelles Rioja Crianza (€14.26).

Back at the vantage point of a table beside the small galley kitchen, I can see Rigby cook. And he does it with the focus of a professional. We can feel the heat from the plates being carried to tables. It’s busy and noisy. The lights dim, the candles flicker and the buzz of chat gets louder. Food is going straight from pan or oven to plate.

I get caramelised scallops with ruby grapefruit, apple and celeriac purée, sprinkled with micro leaves. At first glance it’s a generous plate of five scallops, but actually it’s two and a half scallops sliced in two. They’re beautifully cooked, sweet and fresh, and large enough for this not to feel skimpy. Chunks of crisp black pudding provide the bass note to contrast with the citrus zing of the fruit and the smoothness of the scallops. It’s a gorgeous starter.

Scott’s pea risotto comes with tasty slice of smoked chicken on top. (There are vegetarian options, but we didn’t explore them.)

Main courses are just as good as the starters. I get a plate of flavour and comfort: a rolled slice of lamb shoulder with a slice of lamb’s liver crisply pan fried in butter on top. I’m not a liver lover but this is delicious, cooked crisply to get over the liver texture to distil it down to a crisp slice of richness. A long slice of caramelised parsnip is balanced on top. The lamb sits on a creamy mash and a dark caramel-coloured gravy into which has been poured a fresh green pea purée that’s a great contrast of flavour and colour. The other main course, a monkfish dish, has wonderfully white and fresh-tasting monkfish with a vanilla sauce, perfectly cooked broccoli and two langoustines in their shells.

There’s one dessert (€6) and it’s such a crowd pleaser we get a portion each. A great brownie comes with a quenelle of orange chocolate mousse on top and warm berry soup spooned over, which reminds me of testing the jam as a child to see if it was done. Coffees are excellent and at deli prices of €2 and €2.50.

After the meal I talk to Rigby. It is a work in progress, he says. Coming from Kent, he has worked in fine-dining through what he calls “the balsamic years” when “22-year-old head chefs ruined the industry”. Here he wants to pare it back to cooking good food in a thinking chef’s fashion.

Can he make a living serving these kinds of plates at roughly half the price you can pay elsewhere? “A chef makes his money by what he doesn’t chuck in the bin,” he says. He will cook the roe from my scallops into a purée, pipe it and bake it as a garnish for another dish. As we chat, someone leaving thanks him for the meal. “Don’t tell me, tell all your friends,” he says. Later he explains he would like people to go away thinking: “I went to the strangest restaurant and it was delicious.”

That night I did. And it was. Dinner for two with coffees came to €58.50.

Twitter.com/catherineeats

Rigby's Deli

126 Upper Leeson Street, Dublin 4,

tel: 087-7939195

Facilities: Small and casual

Wheelchair access: Yes, but limited space

Music: A bit like the place, eclectic and loud