Review: Restaurant Forty One

Restaurant Forty One doesn’t do spontaneity. At least that’s how it feels when I phone at 7pm on a sunny Wednesday and get a recorded message that their bookings have closed. So I dial the option for the club. Am I a member, they ask. No, but could we sit in the garden and eat from the restaurant menu? It seems we can. I grab my dining companion and we hare off to town.

My last meal in this St Stephen's Green building was several years ago. It was lunch, at a time before they started growing some of their own produce for the kitchen. Chef Graham Neville has been wowing people since. So I'm looking forward to dinner.

But there’s a glitch. The table I’ve finagled is in their courtyard so we have to eat the bar food. Oh. Right so. Then as if by magic everything changes.

“We’ve freed up a table for you in the restaurant.” A flurry of people visits us. My friend’s eyebrows disappear into her curls when a small flower arrangement lands on our table. Claire Browne (my name for the night) has just been rumbled.

It’s perfectly easy to book a table in Restaurant Forty One as long as you do so in office hours. So they must be knee-deep in organised eaters right? But the rube to royalty schtick at the sight of a critic’s mug feels puzzling as we head upstairs past empty tables. What kind of restaurant shirks off the paying public, even hapless duplicitous ones like Ms Browne?

Anyway, the great news is what the bookings policy lacks in logic is made up for by Graham Neville’s wonderful food. We are sitting in a panelled glamorous room which manages to be both grand and cosy thanks to ankle-deep carpet pile, table linens so heavy they should have a tog rating and an overstuffed silk-upholstered cushion on the banquette.

It begins, as all great meals should, with perfect bread and a sweet round of Cuinneog butter that falls onto the knife and almost spreads itself. An amuse of chicken and mushroom tortellini looks like a yellow rose in a puddle of brown mud. But this mud has depths of mushroom, meat, butter and booze flavours that only hours of cooking and tasting can turn from idea into reality.

My plate of the night comes next. It’s a collapsed parachute of silken yellow courgette flower wrapped around chopped prawns and scallops. A frothy soup of lovage gives a mineral edge to the sweetness and puts you into the garden smelling those celery-like leaves. A teaspoon of caviar balanced on the thumb-tip sized courgette is a touch of bling that this utterly lovely dish doesn’t need.

Across the table there's a clock face of Annagassan smoked salmon with an inner dial of Clogherhead crab meat on top, finished with a Jenga game of apple slices. Arranged around it are a mise-en-place display of knife skills: 15 tiny mounds, three each of five things – egg white and yolk, capers, red onion and fish roe.

My friend dips her gorgeous garden green beans in the Béarnaise sauce several times before trying her Nore River wild salmon main course. It’s fish so far removed from the heavy farmed fish we now know as salmon that it’s like another creature. You can taste the river in its quivering flesh. It’s a sit-back-and-think mouthful of food.

I have a hefty portion of duck, thinly sliced and arranged in a hurdy-gurdy of peppered and honeyed meat that sits over a tangle of cabbage into which shards of bacon have been tucked. A fig spills its sweet thready guts alongside it and there’s a silver pot of butter-coloured mash to add to double the spud count with the tiny fondant rectangles.

We share an apple tart tatin. The chunks of Irish dessert apple are cut thick so that all their Irish apple tang remains in the centre of each chunk. There’s a scrape-it-with-your-finger circle of buttery caramel. A quenelle of bourbon ice cream (which tastes to me like vanilla but that’s more than fine) is placed on top at the table. A disk of masterful puff pastry sits at the bottom of this fine dessert to give an unsweet ballast to the flights of sweetness above.

There’s nothing not to love about Graham Neville’s cooking. Everyone should try it. And if one must book during office hours, then so be it. You’ll be glad you did.

Dinner for two with a bottle of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc came to €156.40.

THE VERDICT: 8.5/10 A delightful dinner, once we got there

Restaurant Forty One at Residence, 41 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, tel: 01-662 0000

Facilities: Fine

Music: Nice

Food provenance: Good places rather than providers are named

Wheelchair access: No