No 5 Fenn's Quay, Cork
If everyone in the restaurant business achieved the nuts and bolts of cooking and serving food as simply and as successfully as Eilis O'Leary, her chef Bernadette Harrington and the rest of the team in Fenn's Quay, then the country would be up there banging on the doors of Sydney, New York and London as the epicentre of the restaurant world.
They don't do anything very complicated in Fenn's Quay - what they do is pretty straightforward, but what I like about this awkwardly-shaped restaurant in the beautifully restored Fenn's Quay, close to the main strip of Cork's Washington Street, is the focus and clarity with which they work.
The second you sit down, for example, a glass of iced water is placed in front of you. This is a simple and obvious touch, and it struck me recently, finishing a book about the running of a restaurant, that it is one of the key acts that should be performed when a customer sits down in a restaurant.
They do such things in Fenn's Quay seemingly without having to think about them. So, for example, they take your order quickly after you have been greeted and seated, and if you order a bowl of spinach and tomato soup, as we did on a Friday lunchtime, it is served promptly, and at the correct temperature, with some fine, sweet white bread and butter to go with it. It wasn't the sort of soup to send the tastebuds into the stratosphere, but it was well-judged and well-made, a hearty, soulful autumn soup, and we enjoyed it.
The lunchtime menu is on a single, laminated sheet, with a small selection of lunch specials - the soup; smoked chicken salad with roasted hazelnuts and walnut dressing; roast fillet of salmon with potato rosti and roasted tomatoes; the day's sandwich, and an extra dessert. We chose the salmon, and, with an obviousness which reveals my love of bistro food, I chose a dish of Toulouse sausage with an onion confit mash and jus.
This was a spiffing dish, with a cracking sausage - carefully sourced from Armin Weise's Continental Sausages, near Killarney - and a delightful mash, with the slow-cooked onions folded throughout good, floury potatoes. The jus was sweet and rich, and the dish was a thunderous success: simple, clever, totally effective cooking.
The salmon was a good fillet of fish, sitting on top of the grated potato rosti, with a scattering of crisp leeks on top and flecks of pesto dotted here and there, and the oven-roasted tomatoes were arranged around the plate. Again, what this dish showed was a cook who knows when enough is enough: all the flavours were complementary one to the other, and, as with the Toulouse sausage, they worked together to achieve a cleverly composed, extremely enjoyable dish.
The culinary influences shown by this cooking are obvious - it's modern-Med-bistro food - and they are not trying to do anything novel in Fenn's Quay. But such precise execution deserves the greatest respect. Our desserts rounded off what was a perfect lunch: a marvellous sticky toffee pudding with toffee sauce and cream was spoonsome and unapologetically indulgent, while my own little chocolate pot with ginger cookies was as more-ish as one wants from a chocolate dessert.
We drank half a bottle of the splendid Chateau Bonnet, had two fine espressos, and the £30 which our lunch cost was a definition of money well spent.
Service was as polite and efficient as anyone could hope for and the room was buzzing with busy folk who obviously know what a good bet Fenn's Quay is. We will be back just as soon as we can.
No 5 Fenn's Quay, Fenn's Quay, Cork tel: 021-279527 Open: Mon, 10 a.m.5 p.m.; Tues-Sat, 10 a.m.- 10 p.m.; closed Sun. Major cards.