Retro-bistro serves up nostalgia

LET’S START WITH the good stuff. It’s a creamy crème brûlée under a glassy lid of burnt sugar, big enough for two. Teaspoon-tapping delicious. It’s another new beginning for one of Dublin’s oldest cafes. There’s nice bread, superb staff and slightly odd bespoke wallpaper that rewards a good hard look. So it’s strange that the voice of this new venture is sending such a garbled message.

I am in Le Café des Irlandais on Dublin’s South Great Georges Street on a Tuesday night grabbing an early bite with my husband. He has been eyeing this place for a few nights now, liking the look of it. The venue has Dublin character in spades. The new name is in gold letters over the door of this Victorian cafe refurbished by Bewleys in the 1980s. After Bewleys served the last milky coffee and cinnamon buns here, the Café Bar Deli crew took over. Then they closed and now a new tenant is giving it a go.

The French bistro is a recession default setting, with its pared-down formula of simple, well-priced food. This is the heart of Dublin’s bistroland. Chez Max, L’Gueuleton and La Maison are a snail’s throw away. And the competition for bums on bentwood chairs is ferocious.

We are sitting in a corner banquette. Bread and chilled iced water have been brought promptly by a friendly waitress. There are lavender and rosemary sprigs on the table. The high ceilings, fireplace, candlelight and black and white tiled floor give it all a feeling of a faded old hangout. Good things should happen here.

The cutlery comes in napkins secured at the top with brown wooden clothes pegs. All the bistro staples are on the menu and there are lots of meaty mains at between €10 and €15 with not a sniff of a vegetarian option. I go for the French onion soup to start and salmon with a sorrel sauce for main course. Liam orders the foie gras with pear and the crubeen with girolles for main course. We have two glasses of the house white at €4.50 each, a drinkable Vin de Pays d’Oc sauvignon Domaine Ste Marthe 2008.

My soup comes suitably brown and beefy smelling, with plenty of well-cooked onions but topped with a too-large slice of sodden bread on top. The slurpy pleasure of French onion soup is tugging strings of cheese towards your mouth as soft onions hang off like notes twanging on rubbery banjo strings. A small round of baguette (usually leftover) is typically toasted to provide the island for the cheese. But here the slice of bread is so big it has bent in the middle in a bready bid to escape the bowl. Only half the grated cheese has melted.

Liam’s foie gras is terrible. “Foie gras for €11, too good to be true?” he asks. “Yes as it turns out.” It’s greasy and unpleasant and tastes of nothing. It’s like a sad, strange slice of protein substitute. The pear is leathery and grainy and also weirdly tasteless.

Always the optimist, Liam is hoping for redemption on the main courses. And his crubeen isn’t bad. The meat is tasty and soft. He hunts the girolles in a bed of mashed potato and comes up with a hard lump. Not a mushroom, unfortunately, but a disc of grey undercooked potato. He’s been given an outsize roast spud too, only it’s not crisp or crunchy on the outside. So that’s two kinds of potato, neither of them done properly. He also gets two chunks of caramelised carrot. My salmon comes with identical vegetable partners. The fish is nicely cooked, but has been sprinkled with an uninspiring chowder mix of mussels and shrimps. We switch to the red Pays D’Oc, a cabernet sauvignon Domaine Ste Marthe at €4.50 a glass.

Dessert is good because it’s textbook bistro crème brûlée, big enough for two. Service is faultless and I don’t want to rush to judgment. So I come back for lunch a few days later to take a second look. This time things feel slightly more assured. A chef is dinging a bell to indicate when dishes are ready. I order the roast lamb and it comes promptly. But there are the same spuds, same carrots and an inch-thick slab of lamb competently cooked, but tasting like a carvery lunch. The place is ominously quiet for a Friday lunchtime.

The wallpaper gives a hint at what is being attempted here – a shamrocks and icons print of Lady Laverys, Oscar Wildes and Gandon buildings. Look closely and you’ll notice Michael Collins striding beside a line drawing of the new Docklands Convention Centre. It’s the decor of a theme restaurant that you might find in Paris where homesick expats could sink into the arms of an old-fashioned Dublin dinner. Perhaps the idea is plain food now we’re a plain people once more. In a sea of bistros, maybe Le Café des Irlandais is trying to stand out.

Nostalgia may be a large ingredient. On our first visit, at the whiff of coffee Liam gets a visceral memory of a Christmas shopping trip with his mother and aunt and the Bewleys coffee pitstop surrounded by shopping bags. The long-gone Alpha cafe and its swollen-footed women in slippers dished up plates of dinner near here once.

But I think retro dining might be a schtick for better times when the ratings agencies are not regularly lifting our collective trousers to the light to see how threadbare the arse is getting. Are that many of us finding our palates jaded by posh cooking that we long for mash with a side order of roasties? I hope they do some major tweaks. In the meantime, go for a crème brûlée and a glass of wine and a breather from the busy street in a lovely old room.

Dinner for two with two glasses of house wine each came to €73.75.