Bite: Cheap eats for big fish

Ronan Ryan’s latest endeavour offers diners good-value fish dishes – and a chance to do some celebrity-spotting

IF TYLER COWEN had dropped by Dublin’s Bite restaurant the other night he would probably have turned on his heel and left. The most-quoted quote from the author of An Economist Gets Lunch has been Cowen’s advice that, if you see people in a restaurant looking happy, “run the other way”. Misery, the economist claims, shows a certain seriousness about the food.

On the Saturday night I visited Bite, Ronan Ryan’s newest restaurant on South Frederick Street, people were not looking glum. Gobsmacked and more than a little giddy? Yes. But that probably had more to do with the Guess-Who’s-Just-Walked-In moment of the evening, more of which later. Ryan, late of Town Bar Grill, had a brief stopover in La Stampa before teaming up with concert promoters Brian Spollen and Anthony Remedy to open this place. The chef Malcolm Starmer has taken the short trip with Ryan from La Stampa to here.

Bite looks a bit like a computer shop from the outside. The dot on the “i” is a red Pac-Man symbol. It’s in the old George’s Bistro. On the way to our table (I got the last one, according to the woman who took my phone booking), we are led through the restaurant, through a covered courtyard, and into another room which used to be part of the Trinity Lodge Hotel.

The formula is all about tasty staples, fish and chips mainly – nothing too taxing to the wallet or the mind. And the place is hopping, in a way that makes me wonder where all these people ate before it opened just over a week earlier. Cheap good eats is a formula that’s trickier than it sounds. But if you build it (along with a good social media following), they will come. Just ask Joe Macken.

Our “waiter for the evening” gives us a bowl of buttery popcorn to nibble on as we read the menus, which almost need Braille subtitles, the lighting here is so dim. My friend Ali uses the torch app on her phone. Later we wonder if the dimness has been deliberate. Through the candlelight we see Louise Kennedy, artist Guggi and designer Michael Mortell at a table down from us. And then, as we are waiting for our starters, Bono strolls in. There’s a collective hushed jaw-drop and a flurry of texts in his wake. Wife Ali follows later, and actor Liam Cunningham. And then the very full restaurant decides to do that very Dublin thing of letting them get on with their night. We take a few surreptitious glances and concentrate on showing the most famous Irish man on the planet what a good time we’re all having.

And we’re helped by the food. Starters of pil-pil prawns and a potted crab with apple hit the spot, although the crab comes with some pale, flavourless fennel that looks like scrunched-up napkin. Two fish mains (€10.95 each), Ali’s lemon sole and my sea bass, come in manila folders. “Now who said the brown envelope was a beaten docket in Irish life?” Ali quips.

We tip the food on to our plates and the joke’s over as we wonder what to do with the oily paper. The contents of the envelopes, however, are excellent, my seabass trumping the lemon sole (which is breaded) for perfectly cooked fish, skin sweet enough to eat, and garden-fresh dressed rocket.

The sides are the real stars here: a bowl of crisp brown duck-fat chips, some luscious beetroot that “our waiter for the evening” goes quite misty-eyed about, and a brilliant lemon-roasted fennel, which is the best €3.95 I’ve spent in a long time.

We share a bottle of dangerously drinkable Cielo Pinot Grigio and then try two of the €7.95 cocktails with a shared dessert of rhubarb panna cotta. This has a biscuity, sugary crumble on top and is nice.

It’s loud and clubby in the place by now. We’re joined by a friend, who had always planned to come, even though she may have also received an earlier “come now, Bono’s here” text, which she assumed was a wind-up.

We share some green tea before leaving. Tyler Cowen would hate it. Everyone looks mighty happy.

Bite is somewhere between Crackbird for grown-ups and Joys with food. It’s the kind of loud, clubby place where bills will probably tip heavily towards the alcohol spend rather than the food. But this is proof that an economist can be wrong. You can have shiny happy people and good eats in the same place, with or without U2*.

Dinner for two with wine and cocktails came to €85.45.

* Sorry, couldn’t resist.

BITE

29 South Frederick Street, Dublin 2, tel: 01-6797000

Music:None in our area, though there was music elsewhere
Facilities:Downstairs mainly and nightclubby
Food provenance:None
Wheelchair access:Yes, but no wheelchair bathroom

Food for thought beside the Spanish Arch

My book club doesn’t meet in kitchens or living rooms, so no cooking or cleaning is involved. We meet in pubs and end up discussing plot and character in the heave of a late-night bar. When I found out that a fellow member was going to be in Galway recently, we convened a branch meeting over lunch in Ardbia at Nimmo’s beside the Spanish Arch.

A sparkling Corrib flowed by outside the little windows. This lovely place looks part vintage shop, part country kitchen. Our table had a drawer with scraps of poems on pieces of paper inside. The food was just as charming and delicious. A polenta cake with salad, lightly cooked courgettes and tangy leaves was a great healthy but tasty lunch, and Tara’s bowl of chowder was wonderful. A flourless chocolate brownie and a rhubarb upside-down cake finished the treat. Much more of this and we might move a motion to abandon pubs for tearooms. But then we don’t want to get too civilised.

Lunch for two with two coffees came to €34.70.

Ardbia at Nimmo’s, Spanish Arch, Long Walk, Galway, tel: 091-561114.

[ Twitter.com/catherineeats ]