Eating out:'There is a touch of the old Cork County Club about this former Turkish bath', writes Tom Doorley
Jacobs on the Mall used to be a Turkish bath, and it appears to attract a lot of people who would have felt at home in its steamier incarnation. The great and the good of Cork seem to gravitate there, many of them in pinstripes. There is, as my companion commented, a touch of the old Cork County Club about the place.
I had a pretty good meal there once, way back in 1999, when it opened, but I've been disappointed in the meantime. This lunchtime visit, alas, did nothing to inspire me.
True, the salad of leaves, pear and Parmesan that I shared with the companion was decent enough. The leaves were fresh and varied (bar one that should have been in the compost bucket), the pear was ripe and sweet (which is what we would expect, being at the height of the pear season) and the Parmesan shavings were pleasant enough. Even the dressing was fine in a mild kind of way.
What beat Banagher was the price. It appeared on the menu at €9.80. Had I made it at home, only having to buy the cheese and the olive oil, it would have cost me about 50c. In a restaurant, with careful control of costs, I reckon it might have hit, say, a generous €1.20. Work in a bit for overheads and I suspect you would still have change out of €2. But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps it cost a whole €3 to place before us. That, surely, still leaves a lot of sheer profit. More significantly, it leaves a couple of customers feeling a bit ripped off.
The companion's 12-year-old daughter, obviously a nascent restaurant critic, was pleased with her tomato-and-basil soup. "It doesn't taste watery," she said. "It tastes like tomatoes that have been liquidised." And it did, indeed, have a pleasant degree of concentration.
She was not so pleased with her penne (a half-portion, kindly provided by the kitchen). "This is not kids' food," she said. Which is fair enough, this being an adult kind of restaurant, I suppose.
Then she said: "It's as if the chef just kept adding things until he thought it looked right. It's fiddly." Let's just say that the combination of cherry tomatoes, spinach, bacon, er, cream and what have you did not amount to a sauce that made one sit up and pay attention.
Her father's chips, however, were very good indeed. Made on site, I'd imagine, and of the large, muscular sort, with a crisp exterior and a fluffy interior. His inelegantly large fishcakes were light enough in texture and contained what seemed to be a lot of salmon and something that had been smoked. Mushy peas were, well, mushy peas.
Had Banagher not been beaten by the price of the starter salad, this innocent if not terribly exciting Offaly town would have been trounced by my potato gnocchi with a blue-cheese sauce and cavolo nero.
They had been produced in the kitchen rather than taken from a packet, but the packet version at least has the virtue of having the right texture. My gnocchi were, in effect, lumps of mashed potato. Gnocchi need flour to make them cohere; these were incoherent in every sense of the word. They had all the charm and allure of the steamed invalid food served in convalescent homes around the time of the first World War. The sauce was okay.
Our nascent restaurant critic was happy enough with the brandy-snap basket in which her ice cream nestled (and valiantly fought off the adults' attempts to sample it), but she reckoned that "this strawberry ice cream doesn't have any real strawberry in it".
With a selection of cheese, a couple of bottles of mineral water, a brace of none-too-pleasant double espressos and a bottle of very pleasant Spanish red, the bill came to €106.16. tdoorley@irish-times.ie
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Wine choice
This is not a very exciting list, but there are plenty of pleasant wines. Danie de Wet's Chardonnay (€26), from South Africa, is one of the more grown-up versions from the New World. Paul Beaudet's Fleurie is perfectly decent at €35, but bear in mind that Fleurie is always overpriced for what it is. Pighin Pinot Grigio (€27) is a pleasantly crisp, fruity take on this newly fashionable grape. Louis Jadot's Puligny-Montrachet is a bit dear at €95. Château Soutard is one of the great, old-fashioned St Emilions, with plenty of tannic structure that needs age. The 1996, at €110, should be just ready now. Our Guelbenzu Evo, from Navarra, is a chunky but smooth and oaky red for a reasonable €34.