Before its extensive makeover, Avenue used to be a rather successful and rather suburban restaurant called The Courtyard. Tucked into a little courtyard just off the lower end of Donnybrook's Belmont Avenue, the transformation, which happened in the middle of last year, has been as startling a revision as I have ever seen in a Dublin restaurant.
The new room is big - with the bistro and cafe bar, there is seating for more than 200 people - and done in the modern style of strong, deep colours with wood and metal. It has been well done, too, with no expense spared, so the chairs are not just colourful and trendy, but also comfortable. It is a relaxing room, albeit one where the music should be better chosen, or perhaps it's just me who fails to see the logic in following Tina Turner with Schubert.
David Veal is the new chef, arriving in Donnybrook after most recently working in Scotland. His food is not merely quintessentially modern, it is a veritable statement of modernism, perhaps best exemplified by this dish: Rabbit and Pigeon Roulade with Apple and Thyme Marmalade, Garlic Confit and Aubergine Chips.
There, in a single plate, is every modernist culinary trick: the roulade made from a somewhat unlikely pair of savoury ingredients; the unusual marmalade; the fashionable technique of confit applied to garlic; and strange chips. It doesn't get more modernist than that.
Despite a curious hunger to know just how the chef would have pulled such a team of ingredients together, we ordered instead a Risotto of Wild Mushrooms with Parmesan and Green Peppercorn Cream, and Marinated Squid Salad with Mango, Grilled Chorizo Sausage and a Balsamic Reduction. The squid in the salad was served cold, the tangle of salad leaves it was resting upon circled by warm slices of chorizo, and there were sliced baby tomatoes danced around the plate as well. It wasn't a bad dish, but the flavours didn't greatly ally one with the other, and what it offered was a series of flavours - sweet mango, a creamy salad dressing on the mixed leaves, spicy sausage, cold squid - which might have belonged anywhere.
The risotto promised to be more logical, but here the dish was simply a rather dull, heavy circle of rice with unexciting mushrooms, and only half was eaten. Cooking risotto in a restaurant is always going to be a compromise, unless you can afford to have a member of staff stirring stock into a pot for 20 minutes, which no large-scale restaurant can afford to do. But this had not worked out a satisfactory compromise between the needs of the dish and the exigencies of the kitchen.
Our main courses were Pan-fried Sea Trout with Aubergine and a Vegetable Broth, and Braised Lamb Shank Served on the Bone with Crushed Root Vegetables, White Beans and a Rosemary Jus. The trout was served on top of a thick slice of aubergine, and while the fish was fine, the aubergine was undercooked and consequently, bitter tasting. A side order of sumo chips - simply big, fat chips - was extremely dull, with none of the zip and crispness which one is entitled to expect from good chips.
The lamb shank was properly cooked, sitting on a crush of root vegetables, but the small scattering of white beans arranged in the jus circling the meat and vegetables was undercooked and still crunchy. In both dishes a careless accompaniment - the aubergine, and the white beans - suffered from insufficient attention prior to the dish being sent out. After our plates had been taken, it was a further 20 minutes before any staff member came to see if we would like some dessert. Having finally achieved the attention of a waiter to take an order, we then waited a further 20 minutes before a hot chocolate souffle pudding and an orange and chestnut mousse arrived. Neither was worth the wait: the mousse was gummy, the souffle pudding with its chocolate sauce a study in browns which might have been interesting as a canvas painted by Mark Rothko, but which was distinctly unappetising on a plate. Again, the flavours were imprecise and unexciting.
Avenue is a restaurant with plenty of style in terms of design, decor and menus, but there doesn't seem to be any personality dictating what this restaurant wants to achieve in terms of cookery. This is, in fact, modern cooking by numbers, with all of the ingredients in place, but no vision operating to bring them all together.
With a half-bottle of Muscadet and a half-bottle of Jamieson's Run, a gin and tonic, and mineral waters, plus a 12-and-a-half per cent service charge, our bill totalled just under £78. If there had not been a service charge, I would not have left a tip, for the waiters' manner was adolescent.
Avenue, 1 Belmont Avenue, Donnybrook, Dublin 4, tel: 01-2603738. Open: bistro seven nights (pre- theatre 6 p.m.7 p.m.), cafe bar open all day, breakfast - late.