Restaurant review: Perfection from Jacques Restaurant and Farmgate Café
Restaurant review: Farmgate Cafe and Jaques Restaurant
- 23 Oliver Plunkett St, Cork
- jacquesrestaurant.ie
- The English Market, Princes Street, Cork
- farmgatecork.ie
Though fresh April thinks otherwise, Summer is apparently in the post and with it, the increasing likelihood of a return to some class of dining out in restaurants. All restaurateurs I talk to these days are as giddy and skittish as cats dancing on a hot plate, desperate to reopen, uncertain, even nervous of what lies ahead, but game nonetheless. For now, we’re still picking up the boxes and dressing up for staying at home.
This week we are ‘out’ to two Cork hospitality institutions: Jacques Restaurant and The Farmgate Cafe — old favourites between them conjuring culinary alchemy on finest local, seasonal produce for a grand total of 67 years. The plan is a blow-out Saturday night ‘out’ with Jacques and to then pick up the pieces on Sunday evening with a family dinner from Farmgate.
Considering the variety and volume I have eaten it may surprise to learn I am a butterfly upon first rising, preferring to break my fast with water, followed by black filter coffee, and no more for several hours thereafter — a habit long predating intermittent fasting fads. So, when I head off at midday on my trusty two-wheeled steed, the plan is to grab something in town. The Covid Velcro Conversations think otherwise.
What happens with the CVCs is you run into an old comrade and the pair of ye take to chattering as if fresh out of solitary — close enough to the truth — first parsing The Covid, and then on to life, the universe and all in between. Before you know it, an hour or more has passed. It has been one of the joys of The Covid, once more making time to truly talk.
I have four such CVCs and am dizzy on the ‘champagne of people’, but it is now past 4pm and I’d eat my own hand without salt. Wanting to save my appetite, I pedal home like a lunatic to commence laying the table and mixing the cocktails for either a very late breakfast or a very early dinner.
The Farmgate furnishes our first course: trout rillettes, delicious tender shredded cold fish, which we eat with soft white yeast bread roll, crisp, crunchy cucumber pickles with an iodine bite and a gorgeous dill and mustard dressing. Some starters are brief teasers for the main course but this is substantial. We idle, relishing tastes and textures, savouring the wonderful partnership it forms with a Picpoul de Pinet (Domaine de Mirande, imported by Le Caveau).
It is a fine opening act, befitting the main course from Jacques, a bona fide star: Castletownbere lobster, oven-baked with butter, mustard, tarragon and breadcrumbs. It is simply exquisite. Succulent flesh, creamy rich sauce arrested with mustard’s vinegar tang. I abandon decorum and set to work with fingers and a pick, the better to reach every last morsel. Such a diva of a dish requires little in the way of supporting players but a sublime potato rosti and fresh green salad, dressed in vinaigrette, play their parts to perfection.
A delicious crisp Muscadet Sevre et Maine (La Louvetrie, Jo Landron, 2018, from Jacque’s list) is a simpatico orchestra harmonising from the pit. After such a feast, dessert of unctuous Five Farms Boozy Tiramisiu is an encore received with glazed and blissed-out torpor.
Jacques should have celebrated its 40th ‘birthday’ last December (celebrations sadly lost to ‘The Covid’) but after all these years, it continues to deliver classic hits with the vim and vitality of a neophyte.
The Farmgate Cafe is about to unveil lighter summer menus but our family dinner is perfect for an evening requiring a roaring stove and a geansaí around the shoulders.
Cod Mornay is a nostalgic comforter, fresh cod chunks in creamy roux sharpened with dill and mustard, topped with crunchy breadcrumbs. Featherblade is tender and flavoursome with sweet roasted onion and gravy. Potato gratin is generous and fine while tender stem broccoli and asparagus (from Ultan Walsh, in Gort na Nain, in Nohoval), with melted herb butter is quite superb. Dessert is tart apple and rhubarb in crumble with ‘proper’ egg custard. It is food that spans the generations in its appeal, hearty, healing and with a very special taste of ‘home’.
