Dublin: Food does the talking

Cleaver East, Essex Street East, Temple Bar, Dublin 2; tel: [phone]; cleavereast.ie

CHANCES are you’ll have heard of Cleaver East. The Temple Bar venture is barely open two months, yet already it has torn across the media like a tornado. The most prominent coverage has not been about its food, but a flaming response by one of the restaurant’s head chefs, Oliver Dunne, to a review by critic Lucinda O’Sullivan.

There’s no need to rehash the saga here. Suffice to say that any potential diners googling Cleaver East will find it hard to avoid the story of a spat culminating in Dunne tweeting a violent image involving O’Sullivan’s severed head, and O’Sullivan reporting it to gardaí… and almost a million Sunday Independent readers.