Restaurant review: Paradiso At Home felt just like being out
Denis Cotter hands over a takeaway order to customer Pascal Rossignol, from the window of Cafe Paradiso, Lancaster Quay, Cork. Picture:Â Larry Cummins
It’s Saturday night and we’re sizzling. Current Wife is dolled up to the nines and I’ve busted out the party cologne. It may be Lockdown 2.0 but we’re off ‘out to a restaurant’ for the first date since quarter past forever and are quite giddy with excitement.
The Progeny have been fed, watered and then banished to the darkest corners of the universe, fully girded with parental credit card details and all restrictions removed from their electronic babysitters. Not quite, but if that’s what it took, well...
The ambience in the ‘restaurant’ is exceptionally welcoming. All dishes and pots washed and put away, overflowing laundry basket shoved out to the hall. The lights dimmed sufficiently that you almost don’t notice at all the great pile of boxes recently relocated from the garden office, currently being reroofed.
Yes, tonight Paradiso has relocated to our kitchen-dining room where we shall dine on their ‘Finish at Home’ menu, ordered midweek, collected earlier that day, all prettily parcelled in fully compostable boxes and containers. Desserts are self-explanatory but each savoury course comes with detailed and very negotiable instructions for reheating and plating up and a link to their YouTube channel, paradisoathome.
We begin with Hazelnut gougères, savoury baked choux pastry ‘dumplings’ with a deconstructed smoky peperonata: succulent sweet flesh of roasted whole pepper anointed with sherry vinegar; and an immaculate pepper purée, bright, clean and with a paprika fillip.
'This is just like being out', says CW, a complete stranger to the kitchen and cooking in general. How’s that, says I, standing at the stove. 'I don’t know', says CW, 'it’s different—it’s not your cooking'. And she’s right. Each course takes me mere minutes to reheat or finish and plate up instead of what can sometimes take several hours of culinary toil to turn out a date night special. What’s more, the flavours are as novel to me as they are to her.
I just pop something in the oven, turn up the heat on a pot or two and am soon back again at the table, slugging fine wine and making woo across the table. I am so relaxed, I nearly burn a silken cauliflower purée, part of our next course of Grilled Cauliflower, with spinach, mustard and pickled raisins, the spicy kick of creamy cashew korma finding the true range of a gorgeous Barbera (Brich 2019). (From our own ‘cellar’ via Le Caveau wine distributors, who also supply many of the excellent natural wines on Paradiso’s takeaway list.)
The contrasting textures and distinctive flavours of Aubergine parcels of kale and Knocklara cheese wend their way around each other, each mouthful piquing the taste buds. Free of meat yet this dish remains as fundamentally comforting and filling as any steak dinner. Oily rich aubergine flesh encases nutty kale and tart cheese while a ‘beurre monté’ of Sungold tomato butter is paradoxically airy and unctuous. Spiced walnut crumb adds crunch while purple potatoes, seasoned just so, are flush with flavour. Lentils may be the punchline to some of the stalest jokes about vegetarianism but I prize them above many other foodstuffs and these beluga lentils are perfect, enriched with sweet beetroot reduction. Toothsome verdant green broad beans complete a mighty dish.
After all that, the notion of desserts is akin to heading up Carrauntoohill after summiting Everest: we know we’re more than capable but only after stretching out for a spell on the restaurant’s sofa in front of the stove — which is how it should be in every top restaurant from here on in.
Soft, buttery pastry houses sweet set lemon curd sporting a bracing citric sting. It is served with an equally sweet rooibos meringue cream and honeycomb, while gossamer-light chocolate mousse comes with a blackberry sauce and chocolate crumb, both desserts well-delivered renditions from the classic hits playlist.
We are both remarking on how much we love this new ‘restaurant’ when another ‘customer’ starts causing a scene, disrupting our lovely evening. Specifically, said customer is making cheese on toast and, worse again, insisting on discussing the logistics of his next post-lockdown haircut: date, time, location and the gradation of ‘fade’.
While CW takes to muttering wildly about boarding schools and prison camps, I become maître d' and turf the bum out on his ear. A bit more social distancing from the progeny, say locked up in the shed for the night, and we could get very used to this restaurant indeed.
Available Thursday, Friday, Saturday for collection between 4pm and 5pm.Â
Order from Wednesday morning at 10am and last orders can be placed before 4pm the day before.
