Restaurant Review: The Steakhouse, Kinsale, Co Cork

IF Percy French’s venerable sparring partners Abdul Abulbul Amir and Ivan Skavinsky Skavar still get together for a Christmas jaw-wag, to talk about old, old times when men were men, “when that son of the desert, in battle aroused, could spit 20 men on his spear”, it’s hard to think that those noble cuirassiers would go anywhere other than a proper, belt-stretching steakhouse.

It is hard, at least culturally, to imagine that the lads who might “... encourage the van, Or harass the foe from the rear, Storm fort or redoubt ...” would not want to discuss sword play, musketry or what kind of horse makes the bravest, steadiest charger while enjoying loafs of very red, red meat preceded by starters that would do ordinary fellas as a dinner, surrounded by enough vegetable matter to prime a biomass energy plant all washed down by an entirely robust if unpretentious Rioja (Marques de Riscal, Ardo, €25.50) well capable of doing its duty. And then dessert. And then songs. And then, well, to the victor the spoils.

Abdul and Ivan would enjoy the kind of high-impact, high-protein comfort food that the equally noble if far less violent Mrs Jorgensen, the stoical and wise mother figure in John Ford’s The Searchers, used to turn ordinary mortals into Texicans.