Restaurant review: Bocelli Kitchen & Wine Bar offers old-school Italian food in Cork

A pleasant evening in Bocelli reminds Joe McNamee of Ireland's nascent love affair with Italian food in the 80s and 90s 

Bocelli Kitchen & Wine Bar, Maylor St, Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

In 2023, I could take a foreign visitor and treat them to a prolonged and far-ranging gastronomic tour of Ireland to rival any gourmet global hotspot, showcasing superb produce served up with immense culinary creativity and technical skill. It wasn’t always like that.

Way back, before X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and all their subsequent devil spawn first ‘invented’ Irish food, dining out in Ireland in dark, pre-digital years was a very different proposition indeed.

OK, that’s not entirely true — there has been superb Irish dining to be had for many decades, at least as far back as the 1960s when Myrtle Allen first opened Ballymaloe House, but there just wasn’t an awful lot of it about.

Before the instantaneous immediacy of social media, trustworthy information about those rare outposts of epicurean excellence was much harder to come by. Newspapers and magazines weren’t crammed as they are now with wall-to-wall food coverage and good old famine-related Catholic guilt meant overly excessive discussion or even celebration of food and the act of eating suggested a body entertaining ‘serious notions’.

The biggest obstacle of all, of course, was a distinct lack of spare change in a country where recession was a national sport. In the heel of the hunt, scant supply exceeded even more minuscule demand.

But gradually — tentatively at first in the ’80s and then with enthusiasm in the ’90s — we began to embrace social dining with ever-increasing gusto. To begin with, most diners were simply happy to go out and eat something ‘different’ to that served up at home, all while having the craic — a class of pub with added soakage.

Weran Taher, chef & owner, cooking in Bocelli Kitchen & Wine Bar, Maylor St., Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

And nothing nailed different for the rain-sodden Gael like the sun-drenched inflections of ‘Italian’ food, even if the local rendition reduced a magnificent and multi-faceted cuisine made up of myriad regional specialities to a handful of dishes (lasagne, spag bol, and a very brief etcetera) with local ‘preferences’ (eg, steak, chips, chicken) welded on for the die-hards allergic to ‘foreign food’. No shame there, it is a model that has pretty much travelled the world.

There is something about walking into Bocelli that reminds me of those days and not in a bad way. I am not arriving in the hope of discovering some new clickbait culinary wunderkind in the kitchen serving up fireworks on the plate, to be pored over and digitally dissected as flavour of the month, then replaced in nano-
seconds by whatever new trend next zips through the ether.

I am going old school, out for a pleasant evening with family and in the hope of also eating something tasty. I hadn’t even planned on reviewing.

Decor is canny, soft lighting illuminates walls painted a dark and intimacy-inducing olive green, varnished wooden slats disguise the ducting overhead, and the overall impact is of a warm and buzzing room.

Crisp and molten mushroom and mozzarella arancini are my opening gambit and a very pleasant surprise. Sliced mushrooms in creamy mushroom sauce tagging along for the ride are common white button mushrooms but the predominant note, in both sauce and arancini filling, is the parping bass of funky, fungal porcini.

Goat’s Cheese Bruschetta stumbles at the ‘bruschetta’ stage, as the soft baguette has seen neither hide nor hair of a grill to deliver the anticipated crisp, toasted surface. But it is no hardship to instead use it to mop up after creamy, tart goat’s cheese and grilled cherry tomatoes, drizzled with pesto, served with olive oil and balsamico.

Toppings and sauce on a Margherita with added pepperoni are good but we live on an island where it is now possible to get world-class pizzas — while texture of the base is acceptable, it seems to have spent very little time proving and building up flavour.

SpouseGirl has a tasty Seafood Linguini, with a selection of fish and shellfish slow cooked in tomato, and lashings of olive oil, while I have a Mushroom & Pumpkin Risotto topped with crisped, fried shards of salty prosciutto — again the porcini punch is commendably to the fore.

'There is something very comforting about Bocelli'. Picture: Denis Minihane.

No 2 Son’s rosemary roast potatoes are a tad shy of both ‘roasting’ and ‘rosemary’, but the budding gym bunny is all about the protein and his 10oz chargrilled rib-eye is quite excellent, charred, carmelised and, when sliced, yielding to a juicy, tender scarlet heart.

La Daughter’s Tagliatelle Prestige seems designed to tickle local Irish fancies, nuggets of marinated chicken breast, with mushroom and peppers in a white wine cream sauce, which all suits her just fine. A true Gael, she supplements pasta with potato, cracking fries, sliced with skins on, crisped to a crunch, soft and floury within — these would have been superb with the steak.

For dessert, LD’s ice cream (dark chocolate, pistachio) and SpouseGirl’s Tiramisu are both worthy of further exploration if I had the real estate available in the belly.

A caveat: Bocelli also markets itself as ‘wine bar’ as well as a restaurant, but a generally anaemic and lacklustre wine list suggests otherwise. Of 19 wines available, including sparkling and rosé, just four are Italian, only two are red. I have a Sangiovese so flaccid and flabby, I couldn’t be bothered to even name it. With so much good and keenly priced wine available now in Ireland, rectifying this ‘blind spot’ is easily done without breaking the bank.

There is something very comforting about Bocelli that has me casting aside that too often obsessive professionally-driven food Fomo (fear of missing out) and appreciating the offering for what it is: perfectly decent, tasty fare cooked, assembled and delivered with precision and attention to the small details. They may not be reinventing the culinary wheel, but this is a kitchen that evidently cares about what it does every day.

The atmosphere is a similar pleasure. The crowd of diners — and it most certainly is a crowd, one that keeps on rapidly replenishing as each table is relinquished — is an entirely mixed bag of all ages and combinations, from family groups spanning generations to courting couples, to random friends and off-duty office groups, and every one is having a whale of a time, us very much included.

Everywhere I look people are smiling and talking to each other and, best of all, nobody is taking smartphone pics of their plates. Now that’s my kind of time travel.

The Verdict

Food: 7.5

Wine: 2

Service: 8

Value: 8.5

Atmosphere: 8

Tab: €165 (including soft drinks, wine, excluding tip)

Bocelli Kitchen & Wine Bar

1, 2, 3 Maylor St, Centre, Cork, T12 DX23

021 427 4537

https://bocellicork.com/

Open: Mon to Thurs, 12pm-9pm; Fri to Sun, 12pm-10pm