The delightful scenery is easily forgotten as you tuck in at Crockets on the Quay in Ballina, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
IT’S BEEN A LONG, beautiful road. We have battled the wind all the way to Achill and then been blown back to Mulranny where we started on the magical Great Western Greenway, the 43km stretch of bike-and-walker only pathway which is like a sunlit Fáilte Ireland widescreen advertisement. The round trip means I have pedalled almost 30km of this heart-breaking scenery powered by regular complaints from the three-year-old on the back seat of the bike. At this journey’s end, I have rarely been more hungry.
And it’s just as well we’ve gorged ourselves on views because when you walk into Crockets on the Quay in Ballina, you leave it all outside. We’ve resisted the strong urge to stop anywhere and eat anything and strapped the bikes to the car to drive to try this place. At first glance it looks like nothing special. It’s a low-ceilinged traditional pub painted bright orange outside with flatscreen televisions bigger than its windows and gilt mirrors inside. It has a big, barnish extension at the back with heavy furniture and a classic function room feel. In this dark interior there’s no view of the lovely rain-fat Moy flowing past the sunset outside. The only water on view is in an Olympic swimming pool on one of the huge screens.
None of this typically augurs well for what will appear on the plates. In bars like these all over the land, the food goes from freezer to fryer to fork with not a nod to notions of cooking. It’s food that nobody cares about, a soulless financial transaction. But here we get good bread and good olives as soon as we sit at the table and a menu with much more than the usual “all day menu-y” pub fare. A mackerel and horseradish salad (€5.95) is a beautiful plate of nourishment, the meaty fish given that gorgeous heat of horseradish, topped with good greens and circled with juicy capers and properly ripe cherry tomatoes.
The usual canon of kids’ meals are made with better ingredients – proper chicken breast in the goujons and a tasty burger with fluffy large chips, and wedges of garlic ciabatta with some penne pasta topped in tomato sauce that tastes home-made.
Liam’s main course of lamb chump (€22.95) comes as chunks of slow-cooked tender and gorgeous meat with a rosti potato, “layered Mediterranean vegetables”, which is a fancy way to describe a delicious ratatouille, all served with a rosemary and garlic gravy that’s been made by someone who knows what they’re doing. My smoked haddock ravioli (€15.95) is a plate with two saucer-sized discs of ravioli pasta sandwiching some great fish with chives and scallions chopped into it, all of it smothered in a terrific butter sauce with a perfect spear of asparagus and a poached egg on top.
The kids’ desserts are some woefully sugary warm iced doughnuts and ice-cream over which the boys swoon and I look on disapprovingly. They get two between three as an attempt to control the sugar surge. A pint, and a jug of squash for the boys brings the bill to just over €70.
Crockets on the Quay isn’t doing anything revolutionary. Like most pubs it’s working hard to do things other than serve pints: quiz nights, music, a bit of bingo. As one famished family, we’re glad that they decided to put plenty of thought into their food. To hell with the scenic stuff outside. That’s as cheap as chips in this neck of the woods.
Another great place for casual fare
Strandhill is the cool, wildly popular older sister in seaside Sligo with its army of black-clad surfers and dudes. Down the coast, Enniscrone is that bit more of an old-fashioned bucket-and-spade kind of place. It's a little less discovered, despite its gorgeous beach and a pier slipway, where you can a take a memorable swim at sunset, as long as you don't mind seaweed fronds twining themselves around your arms.
On our last night I met a woman in her 70s who was retracing her childhood steps along the stony shore. Enniscrone is that kind of place, a beach town where legions of summer visitors have been doing the same things for generations, only now we do them in neoprene.
I'm sure we're not the first family to take home a crab and discover him floating belly-up in the bucket of cloudy water next morning (sorry Crabby).
Áit Eile is a restaurant below a pub called Gilroy's in the main street, done in modern browns, with a tiled and timber floor. The walls feature photographs of those great waves that crash on the beach below. I had a great dinner here of turbot with garlic crab claws and a cream saffron sauce, for €19.95. Liam went for the €14.95 early bird of potato-y fish cakes and the beer-battered fish and chips, which turned out to be variations on a theme, but good ones. They do Enniscrone lobsters here for €25. The tank was empty the first night but we got one on another visit. Small but great.
The kids' meals were the usual, but homecooked versions. (If I never see another gouger, as we called the goujons, it'll be too soon). But this is a demand-and-supply issue. A shared sticky toffee pudding (€5.59) came studded with dates and covered in a hot toffee sauce with the pleasant contrast of ice-cream.
Casual dining is such a clunky phrase evoking chinos and golfing jumpers but whatever it is, Áit Eile is doing it very well. Three pints and a dessert brought the bill to €71.85.
Áit Eile at Gilroys, Main St, Enniscrone, Co Sligo, tel: 096-37222
