Restaurant review: Michelin-starred Restaurant Chestnut is warm and welcoming in Ballydehob

If Levis is a mini-Mardi Gras, then Rob Krawczyk and Elaine Fleming’s Michelin-starred Restaurant Chestnut is a softly lit Buddhist temple

Sat, 19 Nov, 2022 - 16:22

Joe McNamee

Restaurant Chestnut
Staball Hill, Ballydehob, Co Cork, P81X681
Tel: 028 25766
www.restaurantchestnutwestcork.ie
Opening Hours: November/December, Thursday to Saturday Dinner from 6pm

One of the principal reasons for Ballydehob’s recent revival is Joe O’Leary and Caroline O’Donnell’s Levi’s Corner House, a bijou country pub reincarnated as the Rio Carnival, and just about my most favourite bar on the planet. Having lied through my teeth about ‘kick-off’ time to tonight’s dining partners, SpouseGirl, and two old friends, Lady V and JB, who all share a ‘flexible’ relationship with the clock, I’ve managed to conjure up sufficient time for a pre-prandial aperitif in Levi’s and the buzzing, warm room on a crisp Friday night sets the tone for the evening ahead.

If Levis is a mini-Mardi Gras, then Rob Krawczyk and Elaine Fleming’s Michelin-starred Restaurant Chestnut is a softly lit Buddhist temple, a former country pub transmuted into a zen-like space of low wood panelled ceilings and walls painted a stilling deep moss green, yet it too is equally warm and welcoming, as if we’ve left the rowdy kitchen at a party for the comparative calm and comfort of the front parlour.

A pretty miniature loaf of soda bread is first, accompanied by cultured butter. The warmed bread, made with James Kelly’s wholemeal flour, flecked with Kelly’s oats, for my money, the best in Ireland, and tangy, funky butter, made with cream from Gloun Cross dairy, melts into nutty, sweet loaf.

Next is charcuterie and pickles. Rob’s father, Frank Krawczyk who lives in nearby Dereenatra, is the original godfather of Irish charcuterie. Now he and Rob make charcuterie from their own pigs, raised on nearby Lisheen Farm. Just three miles away, it is owned by Bradley Putze and Deirdre McElligot who sell their superb vegetables under the Lisheen Greens banner and have a symbiotic year-round working relationship with Chestnut. Pickled gherkins and asparagus arrive with the some of the nicest Irish salami you will ever eat, flavourful meat with plush creamy fat, pickles cleansing palate after each mouthful, Chestnut’s micro-local supply chain writ large in a few exquisite bites.

A crimped flower-shaped tuile is a nest for smoked mackerel mousse, punchy fish softened by creamed day cheese. Atop, pops of salty umami in pearls of Goatsbridge trout roe, then refreshed by peppery nasturtium leaf and pickled fennel buds as gossamer light tuile implodes into feisty mousse.

Crumpet is a soft bed for beef tartare, tender, emollient raw beef with high metallic notes of iron, seasoned with creamy, salty Young Buck blue cheese with a penicillin sting. Diced chives add onion’s bright astringency.

Next up is a lush, swollen langoustine, big and bould, brushed with head butter and wearing the charred scars of the grill across its back as it stretches out like an indolent sunbather on the ‘shoreline’ of a pool of silken creamy bisque.

I dredge the juicy, plump crustacean in potent sauce, and it makes for such compulsive eating, you’d put away 10 in a heartbeat as if they were chips. I scour the bowl to mop up every last bit of evidence.

JB has been a full-blown vegetarian for over four decades, and it is worth noting his alternative to our langoustine. Slow-cooked hen’s egg sits on umami sea lettuce, on top of that, grilled meaty, succulent oyster mushroom, then shavings of raw chestnut mushrooms, tender and fungal, the entire dish capped with a feathery dusting of grated Coolea cheese. Textures are mild, even playful yet carry in their own demure way similar heft to that our langoustines.

There is more langoustine, this time a buttery tartare on black squid ink prawn cracker with caviar, a blissful snack to be demolished in a single bite. Tomato water is a unique proposition, a savoury sweet cold ‘consommé’, a hymn to Lisheen Greens tomatoes. More snacks follow before the first ‘main course’ on the tasting menu: wild turbot poached in brown butter, served with a buttermilk sauce split with chive oil.

I had rather passed over ‘poached’, expecting the more forward bolshiness of pan-fried turbot, at that point in a tasting menu when most chefs lose their nerve and deem it best to start filling up the Gael lest said Gael isn’t completely sated and ends up filling up on chips on the way home later in the evening. Instead the butter-poached fish is tender and elemental, a gentle, contemplative pleasure as much as a delicious mouthful.

Skeaghanore Duck cooked on the crown over coals, is pink, tender, glistening meat, with a bedrock of savoury fat. ‘Uncle Eddie’s’ damsons interplay with piquant elderberries in a jus made from duck’s bones, charred onion adding its own sweet nothings. Alongside, grilled ducky hearts, chewy little nuggets infused with bay leaf. Again, flavours are big but not overly boisterous and what reads like a gut-buster instead passes the Goldilocks test: just right.

Mead Sabayon is made with honey from the Love family in Knockeen, served with toffee, meadowsweet and bee pollen, sugars immaculately calibrated to remain nicely south of excessive sweetness, a pleasing dessert.

Bay Leaf Sherbet and Dill Oil is, however, of a different order entirely, combining unctuous and sublimely tangy Velvet Cloud Yoghurt with fresh herbaceous notes of bay leaf, wood sorrel and dill oil. Is it a sweet or savoury dish? Definitely the former but to merely call it ‘dessert’ is to do this sublime creation a disservice. SG wonders whether it might be the nicest thing she has ever eaten in her life and is entirely sincere.

A few more sweetmeats, and we are done, yet there is none of that lumbering lethargy, the food coma so often the final legacy of too many tasting menus that leave you stuffed to the gills. We four are utterly sated yet blessedly shorn of excess ballast.

Krawczyk’s extraordinarily good cooking is ever-evolving but the template remains the same, a cycle through the seasons delivered with an ever-present delicacy of touch, an ethereal lightness brought to each dish, food that never feels the need to swagger around trumpeting its merits, when a few softly spoken and well-chosen words convey exactly the same message, of superlative produce gently coaxed into revealing its quintessence on the plate.