Restaurant review: Rush to Cush in Ballycotton and you won't want to leave
Cush, The Pier, Ballycotton, County Cork
Night has truly fallen as we head down the vertiginous little hill in Ballycotton, in East Cork, that leads to the harbour and along which Cush is located. Cush is divided into two eating spaces: dining room and more casual ‘pub’. The dining room is smart yet understated: wooden floors, exposed brick walls, low beamed ceiling; bold canvases featuring lobsters rendered in a pop-art style add colour, while large windows to the front frame the harbour’s twinkling lights and Ballycotton Lighthouse.
We mull over the menu while nibbling good breads, especially a nutty, seeded brown, but I knew my choice of starter even before arrival: potato velouté with smoked haddock and ‘crispy’ hen’s egg.
Fresh haddock is wood smoked each week for Cush by nearby Ballycotton Seafood. Warmed fish flakes bathe in a silky rendition of a classic potato velouté, infused with smoked notes from the fish skin. Sitting proud in the centre is a soft boiled hen’s egg, coated in panko breadcrumbs and finished to a crisp. Gentle prod of fork and it falls asunder, spilling viscous golden yolk into the bowl. Imperial Heritage Caviar is an optional extra but should be compulsory; sweet, briny roe flavours skim blithely over and through the deeply comforting troika of fish, sauce and egg.
It is the most popular item on the Cush menu, more than 5,000 sold each year, and chef Dan Guerin reckons it will be there long after he is gone. If it were scientifically possible, so will I, still eating this immaculate conception.
Current Wife has mackerel, slow-pickled in a Nordic fashion, over 48 hours, breaking down and dissolving pin bones to leave toothsome textural ‘bite’; the sweet tang of citric chardonnay vinegar and an array of aromatics make for spritely, bright flavours. The supporting cast comprises creamy saline taramasalata, picked crab bound with mayo and chives, refreshing anise of pickled fennel and tarragon and sweet blood orange and elderflower dressing. It is another good dish — though I’d prefer larger portions of mackerel to assert true authority over the interplaying elements.
Next, Norwegian hand-dived scallops, with no Irish counterpart available, and quality is evident. Guerin grills them medium rare, tops them with compound butter (spicy Nduja sausage and roast garlic), then flashes it under grill flame, a bolshie carmelised cap bestriding demurely succulent meat like a gleeful sinner leading the innocent astray.
We are in one of the country’s most renowned fishing villages, so fish main courses for both are a given, despite alternatives, including beef and Anjou squab pigeon. CW has Grilled Wild Irish Halibut, skin crisped to a golden ochre, pearlescent flesh, plush and meaty. It is served with almost carnally voluptuous spears of white asparagus, a stonking Grenobloise sauce of browned butter, capers, parsley, lemon, crisp croutons and foamy langoustine bisque fizzing with the tropical heat of Vadouvan spice blend, the classical French nod to Indian cuisine.
My grilled fillet of Wild Irish John Dory is better again, sublime fish in dilisk-flecked seaweed butter sauce, flavours resonating like subsonic bass in the lower register, served with velvet salt-baked celeriac puree, baby leeks with a milk tooth bite and more of that Imperial Heritage caviar because… well, why not?
A side of decadently buttered mash potato ensures desserts are ordered out of professional rigour rather than genuine hunger.
Salted Caramel Tart is well executed, topped with Grué de Cacao tuille and a quenelle of good vanilla ice cream. Velvet Cloud sheep’s yoghurt is a superb Irish ingredient so panna cotta of same is a no-brainer, especially when served with tender young rhubarb, rhubarb jelly and commendably under-sweetened meringue wafers.
Troupers that we are, we finish both. If you weren’t of a mind for a large dessert, then I recommend a golf-ball-sized choux pastry filled with chocolate and coffee ganache and Chantilly cream for the perfect short, sweet mouthful. We finish that too.
Though Dan Guerin began as a kitchen porter in Sage Midleton looking to make a few extra bucks for gallivanting: within three months he had found his life’s career. He arrived at the height of chef-proprietor Kevin Ahern’s 12-Mile Menu, sourcing only from within 12 miles of the restaurant — an enforced restriction that fostered innovation and ingrained primary technique but limited Guerin’s access to the traditional staples and recipes of classical cooking, further exacerbated by his decision to forgo culinary college.
His next move, to Garrett Byrne’s Michelin-starred Campagne, in Kilkenny, rectified that, rounding out Guerin’s kitchen education and broadening his knowledge of the wider world of food. Though you can discern the Sage years on his plates and in his selection of superb local produce, it is the influence of the latter restaurant that is more apparent in Guerin’s cooking in Cush, fluidly blending that local produce with premium imports.
His consummate technical skills are very evident, yet yielded with a direct and elemental simplicity of approach that eschews pretension and cheffy showboating, divining the essence of each ingredient, aiming for the heart of each dish.
That he should have earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand so early in his solo career is not that surprising after all, and the three-course set menu at just €36 must currently rank as one of the very best value food offerings in Ireland.
Next time, however, I’ll be heading for the ‘pub’ side of the house. On the Friday night we visit, all the action is there: same food, same prices but the energy coming out of that room is nuclear in comparison to the more sedate dining room. But that’s another story, for another night. Right now, let’s just celebrate Cush, the latest jewel in Cork’s increasingly lustrous culinary crown.
Food: 9
Service: 8
Value: 9
Atmosphere: 7 (in the dining room) — Geiger counter required for bar
Tab: €130 (Including wines, drinks, excluding tip)
- The Pier, Ballycotton, Co. Cork P25 FY94
- Tel: (021) 464 6768
- Opening: Mon, 5-9pm; Tues/Wed, 4-11.30pm, Fri, 4pm-12.30am, Sat, 12pm-12.30am; Sun, 12-11.30pm
- cush.ie
