Meal Ticket: Idás Restaurant, Dingle, Co Kerry

Dingle is not short of good restaurants, with stellar seasonal and year-round choices from local stalwarts such as Out of the Blue and The Global Village. Last year, Idás Restaurant joined this fine company when they moved from their original premises in the Gaeltacht town of Baile na nGall to John Street in Dingle. The chef at the helm is Kevin Murphy, and it’s his great-grandfather, whose local nickname was Idás, whom the restaurant is named after. Murphy trained as an artist but found his way into cooking, a self-taught chef whose love of local becomes clear at a glance at his menu.

The standout dish on our visit is the seared scallops with braised pork cheek and kale, smoked garlic sauce and Pomme Annas (€29). Everything about this dish works. The pork is slowcooked and sticky with flavour, the kale sweaty with pork jus and the scallops caramelised yet soft and plump. The Pomme Annas, a kind of butter battered spud, are outlandishly delicious. The confit of wild halibut (€32) is a simply stunning dish, with Glenbeigh mussels seeped in buttermilk resting artistically on the pieces of fish, surrounded by sea vegetables.

The broth of foraged land and sea vegetables, wild herbs and Ballyhoura white beech mushrooms (€8) is a bit disappointing. I applaud its dashi base and relish the flavour of those Cork grown Ballyhoura mushrooms, but the Carrageen seaweed in the broth is too slimy in this context for me. The overriding taste is the bitterness of the gorgeously thick, green leaves that float in the dashi, whereas I was hoping for a more umami-based experience. Still, it’s one of the most interesting starters I’ve had this year and is pleasingly evocative of the wildness of this restaurant’s locality.

I’m intoxicated by the potential of the dessert of fennel poached pear, lemon and honey meringue and the restaurant’s signature nasturtium ice cream (€9). In the end, though I enjoy the dish, I don’t get enough fennel from the pear and the meringue is powdery rather than my personal preference of gooey interior and crisp exterior.

I love how Idás menu reflects what's happening in Ireland's food landscape today, with its sincere emphasis on foraged, local and wild ingredients. For a town that cares about food - a collective passion evident in the success of the annual Dingle Food Festival and the enthusiasm of the Dingle Cookery School (dinglecookeryschool.ie) – Idás is another strong calling card of the standard that the Kingdom of Kerry has to offer visitors and locals alike.