Neon: A bright light on the street

Street food cooked as it should be - quickly, from fresh ingredients, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

WE HAVE THREE smudged and hungry street urchins on our hands after an afternoon in the park. So where better to head for an early Saturday dinner than a new Asian “street food” restaurant in Dublin’s Camden Street?

Neon is in a nicely designed box on the street that is turning into a kind of “hungry mile”, with restaurants, food shops and street stalls running down both sides. Sitting in the big window, you see the sign for Raw across the way, over the handsome stone-fronted building that is the pretend TV restaurant.

Neon is the brainchild of Emmet Daly, who has run the Café Sol chain for 14 years, and wanted to do something fresh. A team of Thai chefs, headed by Dusit Khangthan, cook the food. The place opened at the end of February.

Inside the building, which was the old Olio Café, it’s a street-meets-warehouse look, with a painted concrete floor, long benches of stripped timber, and a row of decommissioned red velvet cinema seats near the kitchen for those awaiting a table or a takeaway.

One wall features a huge photo of a woman selling cabbages from two large bike baskets and is captioned Hanoi 1997. We peer closely at what looks like a mobile phone in her hand and reckon, given the date, it’s probably a fan. Her image has been turned into a graphic on a paper placemat for the trays on which your food arrives.

The menu is Vietnamese and Thai food, with a spice guide to lead you through the grades of curry. There are no chicken’s feet or gristly bits of animal, so this is a western take on the Asian street. “If the meat is identifiable, then it’s not real street food,” as one friend remarked. The really appealing thing is a kids’ menu with dishes for under a fiver that do not involve chips or the “n” word. And yes “crispy breaded chicken pieces” are nuggets by another name, but at least here they come with rice and are made from pieces of chicken rather than reconstituted salted spongy mush.

The street-food principle at play here is food cooked from fresh ingredients quickly, in a wok or curry pot. It’s casual and quick. You pay for your meal at the counter and it arrives at the table in white cardboard tubs. There is a stack of white china bowls into which you can decant dishes, black plastic forks and spoons or chopsticks to eat with. Everything arrives at once, so there’s that sense of takeaway flurry, where everything gets tasted and shared.

Duck spring rolls have some good tasty duck inside, although the roll in which they’re stuffed is a little over-crisp. Some pork ribs are soaked in a super-sweet sticky sauce that has overtones of Christmas ham and are served boneless with layers of fat and meat.

A mild Massaman curry made with golden fried tofu, chunks of potato, pak choi stems, peanuts, frilly carrot (cut to look like a cog in a clock), courgette and green beans all bathed in a latte-coloured sweet coconut soup is delicious. It comes with tasty noodles that also have fresh lightly-cooked vegetables stirred through.

Liam’s crispy chicken wok dish is exactly that, tasty deep-fried starfish shapes of chicken with a sweet chilli sauce. The boys get satay chicken (or a chicken lollipop on a stick as we sell it to them), which is a very good, child-friendly take on this, and a portion of chicken fried rice. This has plenty of egg, chicken and rice in it and little or no salt, which is another reason to put this on the list of good, family-friendly fast food places. The array of high chairs at the back also gets the thumbs up.

The finale comes in the shape of Irish street food. Two ice-cream cones from a traditional cone machine which you serve yourself in your own Mr Whippy moment. These come free to the boys as part of the restaurant’s opening week experiment. So with two Singha beers for the parents, the bill for a family dinner comes in a smidgeon under €50.

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Neon Asian Street Food

17 Camden St, Dublin 2, tel: 01-4052222

Music: BellX1 and Bruce played while we were there

Facilities: Good

Wheelchair access: Yes

Food provenance: None