Restaurant review: Fenn’s Quay Restaurant, Cork
It’s almost time to celebrate our Irishishness, our national saint and day with the usual self destructive abandon.
Maybe we should embrace the St Patrick’s Day festivities with renewed vigour because it can’t be too long more before we’re told that it is inappropriate, in a multicultural society where all traditions are afforded parity of esteem, that a legend around an enslaved Welsh swineherd with a non-inclusive attitude towards snakes and a message from God, can be elevated to such pre-eminence because it might cause offence to those of other traditions.
Could Paddy’s Day, just like Christmas in America, become a boring, beige, if-you-don’t-mind Happy Holiday?
Maybe it’s time for a Je Suis St Patrick campaign? One of the ways we could, but generally don’t mark March 17, is by celebrating our national cuisine.
Maybe that’s because our food traditions are so very amorphous and are today, the universal mix-and-match of modern and convenience food. It is hard to imagine an Irish person getting as passionate about a stew as a Frenchman might about pot-au-feu or cassoulet.
But as we, naturally enough and in so many ways, shy away from the poverty of our past it may take a generation or two more before our simple, yet complex food legacy is celebrated enthusiastically by all Irish people, not just committed foodies.
It was wonderful then to see O’Mahony’s collar of bacon with Savoy cabbage, parsnip puree and spiced walnuts on the Fenn’s Quay menu. It was, if memory serves, the very first time I’ve seen this Irish staple on a dinner menu in years, so the opportunity could not be passed — but more of that later.
We — colleague CS heroically answered the call — went early on a Friday evening and if the bums-on-restaurant-seats metric has any real economic significance then happy days are here again, the place was full and the atmosphere almost buzzing.
CS opened with chicken liver brûlée with Crozier blue cheese ice-cream and red onion compote and even if this reads as if it might be a dessert trapped in a starter — or a starter trapped in a dessert if you must be multicultural — it turned out to be an entirely successful adventure; enough novelty to provoke interest and enough reliability to offer assurance.
I chose cauliflower and potato spiced spring rolls with a yogurt dip and really enjoyed it. Lovely fingers of vegetable and tuber wrapped in pastry and all set off by a sharp dip that lifted the plate to a place far beyond the sum of its parts. I have not seen this starter elsewhere before, it showed invention and how simple food, matched with skill and confidence, really works.
For her main course CS had a fish platter, which so often is a description of a mixum-gatherum of all of the fishy bits careering towards obsolescence, but not so here. She had a mixture of hake, smoked salmon, fish pie and mackerel pate. Not a scale survived which must be the best endorsement of any.
As I mentioned earlier, my main course, (and even ordering it cheered me up), was collar of bacon with Savoy cabbage, parsnip puree and spiced walnuts and even if the Boys of Kilmichael — Those Brave Men So Gallant and True — had a different idea of what a plate of bacon and cabbage might be, this was entirely successful. All the taste and texture boxes were ticked and the meat was cooked to the point that it almost evaporated. It was pretty good.
Desserts — vanilla Carrageen moss with with seasonal fruit and Mimi’s gin-and-tonic dessert — were middle-of-the-road but easily finished.
It’s been a few years since I was in Fenn’s Quay and that last visit was memorable for all the wrong reasons; suffice to say the review was not used on the restaurant’s website.
Because of that it is a great pleasure to say that the place, the food and the service — and even the room — seem vastly improved. The meal represented excellent value too. All the hard work by chef Kate Lawlor and her team has paid off.
Three courses for two, a bottle of wine and a coffee cost €82.70, tip extra
Breakfast from 8.15, closes at 10, six days, closed Sundays.
The verdict
6.5/10
8/10
7/10
8/10
Fenn’s Quay Restaurant,
No 5 Fenn’s Quay,
Sheares Street,
Cork;
tel: 021-4279527,
www.fennsquay.net
