Review: Fumbally Stables best of brunches in a salvaged building in Dublin

Restaurant reviewing is one of the last journalistic gigs where you’re expected to drink on the job. Enough to get the experience, but not so much that your memory evaporates in fumes. Deciphering notes that dribble into incoherence is a morning-after lesson in pacing yourself.

I sit down to brunch in the Fumbally Stables feeling slightly under the influence. No drink has been taken. I’ve been stretching, breathing and chanting belly-deep oms in the yoga studio upstairs. Bear with me if that last sentence made you roll your eyes or reach for the holy water. At the end we lay under woolly blankets and tried to prevent stomachs rumbling too loudly. Now I’m at a long table hungry as a horse with happy juice coursing through its veins.

The Fumbally Stables is a son of the Fumbally, Luca D’Alfonso and Aisling Rogerson’s cafe on Dublin’s Clanbrassil St which opened three years ago. Since then they have bought an old stone building on Fumbally Lane. They peeled back the partition walls and suspended ceilings inside a dark grim room to reveal brick arches and vaulted roofspace. Now it houses what Luca describes as their playground kitchen where they have time to learn and have fun without a queue of customers waiting for Gubbeen eggs. Unlike its big sister, the Fumbally Stables isn’t open daily for food. There are regular drop in yoga classes and special brunches, lunches and dinners with visiting chefs.

There’s an upstairs loft for a resident chef, a yoga room and the downstairs dining room where a long table now seats 20 people. It’s all very Pinterestable with whitewashed stone walls and a beautiful length of wooden table. Stalks of hydrangea in brown papery winter garb sit in glass jugs. There are bottles of orange juice and small jars of housemade marmalade and nut butter.

The thrilling aspect is that Katie Sanderson is in the house. She's the cook-in-residence here, and she's a star. Her Living Dinners pop-ups have a fervent following. Last summer she decamped to Connemara to set up Dillisk, a temporary restaurant in a stone boat house. She's hungry to learn, a nomadic cook who shows no sign of wanting to settle in a place with her name over the door. This is a chef who makes her own salt. ('Does she make it from yoga sweat?' I'm asked when I mention this at home later) No. She brings a big cauldron of Atlantic seawater to shore and dries it down to flaky crystals.

These flakes are sprinkled over one of the first set of sharing plates, face-cream soft chunks of avocado drizzled in an artichoke oil and topped with fermented red cabbage. For sweet kicks there’s a bowl of granola with coconut creme anglaise, bananas, mint leaves passion fruit and seeds.

The soft bolus in the centre of the bowl is sprouted buckwheat groats soaked into a porridge consistency. Sounds virtuous. Tastes gorgeous. There’s a sharing plate of small chunks of aubergine roasted mahogany brown and threaded through with Connemara seaweed, a combination that takes seaweed from slime to sublime.

Then comes a softly poached egg on a crunchy soupy mix of taberu rayu, a Japanese chilli sauce made here with sesame seeds, peanuts, and a sweet element I’m guessing is honey. Two small croquettes of sprouted lentil and mung beans sit in a nest of bittersweet shredded beetroot with creme fraiche to link the earthy and sweet flavours together. And the food keeps coming.

“It’s like Christmas. You’ve got to eat past the full,” someone remarks. Room has to be made for a plate of what looks like kale sprinkled with popcorn someone blitzed to doll size in a blender. But hidden underneath is a nutty green paste – a tahini and pumpkin seed hummus given some zing with a topping of Mossfield farm yoghurt. Eat everything together, Luca urges as he brings the dish to the table. Try and dig down to get the full combination. And the popcorn? It’s amaranth – health food magicked to taste like delicious junk.

We finish with some amazake, a fermented rice used to make miso where a fungus to bring out the sweetness in rice without the addition of any sugar. It’s topped with a Calpol-pink rhubarb sorbet, soft and tangy. Lovage shredded on the top gives a celery ballast its delightful pings of acid sweetness.

Making food that’s great for you and tastes great is the future, and this makes Katie Sanderson one of the most exciting chefs in Ireland today. Her food is served in humble bowls but could sit proudly on large white plates with a price tag three times the size. This was the best brunch I’ve ever had. And that’s not the endorphins talking.

The two-hour yoga workshop and brunch costs €60

Facilities: Small

Music: None

Food provenance:Fine Mossfield milk and Connemara seaweed mentioned

Wheelchair access: No

Vegetarian options: It doesn't get better than this

THE VERDICT: Pleasure on a plate

In response to a review of Blas cafe, 26 King Street, Dublin 7, regarding the source of its chicken, co-owner Eoin Williams writes: “We are very conscious of the debate around free-range and battery chickens and have made sure from the start to only ever use free range chickens and eggs... A friend in the business recommended the Farmers to Market group as a source so we started ordering from them. Manor Farm is one of the group and the chickens we receive are from them, delivered by DC poultry. Each batch comes with a chicken trace code so we can find out the exact origin of our free range chickens.”