The cost of sitting at the wrong table

EATING OUT:Lunch at a Residence with views of Stephen's Green, if you're lucky

IT'S PECULIAR THATDublin turns its back on one of its loveliest assets when it comes to dining rooms with a view. Anyone lucky enough to overlook Stephen's Green is more likely to be in an office at a desk than in a restaurant at a dinner table.

And this is one of the reasons Restaurant FortyOne is a good thing. The restaurant is in Residence, a handsome members’ club opened by those shop-till-they-drop Stokes twins, now in new hands. Restaurant FortyOne is open to everyone. A second restaurant, The Lounge and Terrace, is the members-only area.

My first encounter is with the website, which is suffering from some unforgiveably flouncy language. “Well-being restored, the mood of the company is buoyed into conversations laced with good intent, peppered with a genuine gratitude for the embrace of contentment,” wrote someone who should have been quietly taken out and dunked in the duck pond.

But enough carping. I arrive on a sunny Friday to meet my colleague, wine writer John Wilson, and find him like a forgotten 50 cent coin, as the website puts it, “deep inside a velvet-soft sofa”. The long, grey chesterfield is his seat at our table for two in the back room of the restaurant. As lunch progresses, he sinks ever deeper and by the end is feeling unhappily like a boy on the naughty step. My chair is one of those Louis XV ones that you see in magazine-spread bedrooms with white carpets. But at least it’s a chair.

The set lunch menu for €28 looks impressive and there’s a good choice of tasty-sounding dishes. A “wet garlic and Maris Piper velouté” turns out to be a potato soup with swirls of young green garlic puree in it. We each get a nice weighty soup spoon, mine to eat the “light coral bisque”, a foam by any other name, that comes with my scallops and confit chicken wings.

As we start to eat, it dawns that we may as well be in a room on the Naas Road for all the view of the Green we get. Sunlight is pouring on to a table in the front room, but here in the back room it’s grey-painted walls, candles burning and lots of people arriving late for a shirtsleeves lunch that looks like it’s going to be a long one.

So, a room with no view. And between couches and big blousy chairs, it’s a little claustrophobic. But service here is excellent and our hot white plates arrive with good-looking food on them. My “scallops” turn out to be a lone soldier smothered in a peach-coloured foam and two tiny chicken wings with crisp confit-ed skin on. They’re moreish in a fried-chicken kind of way and the scallop is fine. John’s potato soup is tasty. There’s something sweet in the soup flavours and those pea-green swirls of garlic. By the end of the bowl, it’s a little bland, with interest waning as the sweet and garlic contrast gives up little else.

The wine expert gives the list the thumbs up as a “reasonably priced” one. So at least the manageable food costs haven’t shifted margins to the liquid part of the meal. We order a glass of Pouilly Fuissé (€12) and a glass of Côtes du Rhône (€7).

My beef is a small portion of sliced meat lying on a parsnip puree and surrounded by the trimmings. It arrives medium-cooked with a hint of pink in the middle, on a parsnip puree encircled with pearl onions, generously-sized gnocchi and a pepper sauce. The flavour of the meat is strangely flat and by contrast the parsnip has too much flavour, that bitter top note that parsnips typically have when beaten into submission with lashings of cream. It’s a competent meal, but not outstanding.

John’s Atlantic red mullet with a mash of finely diced aubergines, tomato and red pepper is good, with olives and thyme lending flavour to what is essentially a posh ratatouille. He gets perfectly-cooked courgettes, “a difficult thing to do, mine always go to mush”, bright green and cut like mini-turtles around the fish.

For dessert, a champagne rhubarb with Breton shortbread has slices of the early rhubarb crop looking gorgeous and otherwordly, as if they’ve been snapped off a coral reef. But they’re a little on the rubbery side. John’s cheese plate is three slices of cheese with a separate grape and walnut plate, and is “very so-so”.

We both marvel at how this can happen a grape’s throw from Sheridans on South Anne Street, where one of life’s joys is to wander in and choose your cheese based on asking what’s good today. It turns out Sheridans is the cheese supplier here, so their heart is in the right place. It was just a poor choice of cheeses on the day.

Would we be in better form at the end of this had we dined at a window table? Probably. But even a view would not have turned the food into something we would both rush home to tell friends and family about. Others who know their onions have loved what they ate here. And it may be that someone was having an off-day. But there was just a hint of resting on laurels, and that’s not something anyone can risk these days.

Lunch for two with a glass of wine each came to €75.

Restaurant FortyOne

41 St Stephen's Green, tel: 01-6620000

Facilities: Small but perfect

Music: None

Wheelchair access: No

Food provenance: Limited enough, although Annagassan smoked salmon, Wicklow venison and "Atlantic" red mullet are mentioned

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