Restaurant Review: Dublin's Glas has the blas for meat-free dining

"The room is nicely appointed with comfortable banquettes and good lighting and was almost full on a Tuesday evening."

Sat, 06 Apr, 2024 - 02:00

Leslie Williams

Glas Restaurant
16 Chatham Street, Dublin 2, D02 FV50
GlasRestaurant.ie
Open: Dinner, Mon - Sun - 5-10pm; Lunch, Fri - Sun; 12-3pm
The Tab: Dinner for three including starters, mains, sides and desserts plus a bottle of wine cost €213 (€71 per person).

Tom Stobart's Cook’s Encyclopedia tells us that an acre of soya beans “will keep a man alive (but not necessarily contented) for 2200 days ... but just 75 days if he lived on beef [from cattle raised on the same acre].”

While I adore mapo tofu and similar dishes, I’m really not sure I could live on soy. I also won’t eat those highly processed fake ‘meat’ products. If I’m honest I don’t quite understand why anyone would give up all meat. Intensively reared meat I fully understand, but a mountain lamb or a grass fed cow dispatched humanely are far too tasty to miss out on.

So, yes, I’m a committed carnivore and will happily skin and gut a rabbit, pluck and draw a pheasant and cut a live lobster in half (far more humane than boiling). But then I also adore Denis Cotter’s Paradiso and enjoy the extra creativity required in cooking for vegetarian and vegan friends (using Cotter’s recipes, of course).

Cork is incredibly lucky to have Paradiso and Dublin has long needed an equivalent place where the lack of meat on the menu goes unnoticed. Glas opened five years ago with that in mind, and I did visit in 2019 but felt they were still finding their feet so opted not to review.

A fifth anniversary and a new menu drew me back and I brought a vegan opera director friend and at the last minute his 23-year-old son agreed to join us. The room is nicely appointed with comfortable banquettes and good lighting and was almost full on a Tuesday evening.

The Glas menu is pleasingly short with four options offered for starters, mains and desserts, with a choice of two courses for €43 or three courses for €49, and sides costing an extra €6. Of the 12 menu items, eight were vegan and all sounded enticing, although in a couple of cases more detail would have been useful (eg which of the 12,000 species of seaweed was in that ‘Seaweed Fritter’).

The first thing to say about our starters is that they were beautifully plated and pleasing on the eye. Goat’s cheese mousse was delicate, creamy and fluffy and some hazelnut brittle and sweet earthy cubes of beetroot ‘jerky’ added texture. However, chicory kimchi really needed more heat and pungency.

Oyster mushroom croquette was perhaps a little light on mushroom flavour but cauliflower ‘couscous’ and a garlic-rich ramson remoulade more than compensated. Glazed radishes were nutty and almost fruity and I scraped up all the peanut cream underneath. The buckwheat ‘granola’ on the side had good flavours but was teeth-breakingly hard.

Starters had proved interesting but we were not yet wowed; that changed with the main courses, beginning with the caramelised onion tart with its lusciously sweet mushrooms on a savoury ‘shortbread’, a salty, fruity, blue cheese sauce and a garlic emulsion adding contrasting and complementary flavours.

Charred roman broccoli atop a rich umami mushroom ‘cake’ and a pistachio crumble was equally impressive, while baby Tokyo turnips and butterbeans were tasty but needed their richly flavoured roast onion Mexican mole which had a concentrated earthy flavour and a decadent velvety texture.

On the side, polenta fries (€6) were another success, crisp and textured with a properly intense kimchi aïoli for dipping while patatas bravas were crisp outside and fluffy within with a garlicky roast vegetable pesto.

For wine, I chose ‘Torre dei Beati’ Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (€44), bright and fruit-driven, and a good match with our dishes. The list has several options by the glass and is fairly priced with eight wines under €40 and some good options going up the scale. However I’d love to see a couple of natural wines and maybe a pet-nat or two as they would suit the food and clientele.

The hits kept coming with our desserts. My pear and polenta cake was crumbly, lightly sweet and topped with in-season poached rhubarb. Dillisk meringue and pea ice cream added intriguing extra flavours and textures.

Caramel apple and tiny candied squash chunks came with a light coffee cream sauce and a stand-out mint sorbet to bring the flavours together.

White chocolate ganache could have been a little creamier perhaps and the ‘candy beetroot’ a little less earthy, but I adored the liquorice-flavoured crumble.

We left happy and sated and Glas is warmly recommended with creative and innovative cooking, intelligent saucing, good use of seasonal ingredients and not a soya bean in sight.

THE VERDICT: