Battling 'shellfish' kids for delish fish and baby potatoes in Clare

Linnane's Lobster Bar New Quay, Co. Clare, Ireland, H91 NWX6 Tel. [phone] www.linnanesbar.com Opening Hours: 12.30pm to 9pm, daily, seven days a week Joe McNamee Menu

Linnane's Lobster Bar 

• New Quay, Co. Clare, Ireland, H91 NWX6
• 065 707 8120 
• www.linnanesbar.com
• 12.30pm to 9pm, daily, seven days a week

We are at the tail-end of a wonderful camper van odyssey around the stunningly beautiful West, tumbling back down the Wild Atlantic Way, headed for home. 

With a storm due to make landfall the following evening, we fancy weathering this particular tempest in bricks and mortar, but have one night more on the road — and a profound hankering for fish and chips.

On a micro-tour of Clare last year with a posse of chefs, friends and assorted family members — during the Covid-free summer of 2019, truly another time and place — we fetched up at Linnane’s Lobster Bar one gloriously sunny afternoon for a languid, lazy lunch, flush with good food and great conviviality in a ridiculously exquisite location, by The Flaggy Shore. 

The pain of leaving was near-physical as I wrenched myself away to resume our tour for it had all the makings of one of those random impromptu lunches that morphs into an unplanned nocturnal skite.

It is a divinely sunny and bucolic evening, our terrace table perched directly over the harbour, peering out to Galway Bay. Before we even sit down I order a pint of plain — my first on licensed premises since last November (don’t ask!). Yes, of course, I order a second as soon as the first arrives and, at this moment, there is little or nothing wrong in my universe.

Linnane's Lobster Bar New Quay, Co. Clare, Ireland, H91 NWX6 Tel. [phone] www.linnanesbar.com Opening Hours: 12.30pm to 9pm, daily, seven days a week Joe McNamee Menu

Wild native clams are disappointingly rare on Irish seafood menus and co-proprietor, Conor Graham (in partnership with Mark Commins) sources from his uncle, Willie Nolan who is the only man around these parts with license to land them. 

These are gorgeous, playfully chewy, natural briny umami marrying well with garlic and wine.

Both No 2 Son and La Daughter mainline superbly achieved calamari, tender squid, coating crisped to perfection with the addition of coarse polenta. Dredged through bright garlic and lemon mayo, they are utterly addictive — Neptune’s crack cocaine. 

And parents brave regular rustling expeditions until progeny turn ugly: furious fork-waving, knives cracking knuckles, that class of thing.

The ascetic LD opts for plain tagliatelle with good tomato sauce, while No 2 Son parlays a starter of BBQ chicken wings into a main course. Though sauce is distinctly milder than his always preferred chilli-driven nuclear, he ploughs on with cheerful gusto.

My heart is set on Linnane’s fine fish and chips until I spy the special: sea bass, local seasonal veg. The sustainability of sea bass remains a moot point, though regulations have recently relaxed, but, it can be a sublime pleasure and that it is both local and legal is balm for the conscience.

Tender stem broccoli has a hearty chlorophyll crunch and I’d eat new season baby potatoes with butter ’til the cows not only come home but also clean up the house. 

(You might, however, require a boat or plane to hit a neighbourhood where sweet potato and asparagus at the tail end of August are ‘local’ and ‘seasonal’). The fish is simply delivered, dusted in seasoned flour, pan-fried, a fitting fate for a still guilty pleasure.

Linnane's Lobster Bar New Quay, Co. Clare, Ireland, H91 NWX6 Tel. [phone] www.linnanesbar.com Opening Hours: 12.30pm to 9pm, daily, seven days a week Joe McNamee Menu

After our prolonged spell on the road, dining al fresco each night, sheltering in a fog of BBQ smoke from the plague of midges blighting a sultry, pre-storm western seaboard, Current Wife is in the mood for Ritz glitz, and though still dining al fresco (and we wouldn’t have it any other way!) whole fresh New Quay lobster with garlic butter and baby potatoes is her blowout preference, especially when paired with a crisp, fresh and flinty Trimbach Riesling. 

Long after all other main courses are finished, we mine the furthest crevices of this captivating crustacean for rich toothsome flesh. 

I’m still worrying at a claw even as LD starts her ice cream and No 2 Son tackles dense, fudgy chocolate torte.

Having arrived at the tail end of the night’s final sitting there is little left to squeeze out of our Linnane’s evening but leaving is greatly eased by the brevity of our trip ‘home’, 20 metres along the pier to the van. 

And a nightcap of superb — and appropriately saline — Dingle triple-distilled single malt from my travelling drinks cabinet, supped on the quay wall as lights twinkle and dance across the water, is just about the perfect coda to an equally perfect evening at the end of a near-perfect holiday.