Restaurant review: Ballincollig café Good for the Soul lives up to the name
Good for the Soul, Ballincollig
- Good For The Soul
- 12, Tus Abhaile, Time Square, Ballincollig, Cork
- Open: Tuesday to Friday, 8am-4pm; Saturday, 8.30am-4pm
- The tab: €65 (including kombucha, excluding tip)
It takes No 2 Son and I, both equally disorganised and randomly careless, three attempts, including two fruitless treks across the city and beyond to Ballincollig, before we finally eat at Good For The Soul café.
The first time, we arrive on a day it doesn’t open; the second is a busy Friday lunchtime with an hour’s wait minimum for a table. The third time, I book in advance.
I book tables for restaurants all the time but I had been guilty of presuming Good For The Soul’s engaging casual ambience implied it was neither possible nor necessary to do so.
However, booking could also be part of the new regime since it was recently taken over by highly progressive restaurateur Paul O’Carroll (owner/operator of Bookshelf at the Elysian; Bookshelf Coffee House, on the South Mall; The Bookshelf Café, in Tralee).
Saturday, and I have a prime lunchtime table with Sons, Nos. 1 and 2, in what has always been a most charming haven, a delightful counterpoint to the nearby and near-bare cinema square, the most soulless part of Ballincollig.
Inside is an open kitchen, a chirpy hodge-podge of hanging plants and bric-a-brac is scattered around, and several shelves of gifts, cards and deli delights, such as West Cork Coffee and Harry’s Nut Butter, add cosy clutter.
The place is packed and the vibe is most pleasant, all in all, a fine transformation of yet another sterile, lifeless commercial unit into a space with real personality — and, yes, soul.
A couple of years ago I came here, lured by several good reviews, only to be presented with a shockingly cooked cheese and ham toastie, that still causes me to shudder to this day.
The place looked just as becoming then but it takes some doing, and not of the good sort, to ruin a toastie. Worse again, none of my servers thought to ask me why I had left it alone after a single bite but it was still pandemic-era and I had no stomach for kicking an already wounded soldier, so I abandoned both toastie and any putative plans to review.
Menus change at the weekend to all-day brunch so there is no chance to check on the state of the current house toastie as No 2 Son has volunteered to do, so he instead orders Fiery Benedict with smoky beans on the side.
It is two perfectly poached Ballyfin Farm eggs on toasted Arbutus sourdough with very nicely crisped slices of bacon, and hollandaise with hot sauce brings the ‘fiery’.
It is all top notch though No. 2 says the cannellini beans in a lusty spiced tomato sauce with smoky chipotle that plumbs depths are the making of his dish. He's not wrong.
Chilli heat is becoming more of a breakfast staple on Irish menus as many establishments geared towards younger, more health-conscious audiences ditch the traditional full Irish for ‘healthier’ tropes from the edible Esperanto of international Instagrammable brunch offerings.
That translates as No 1 Son signing up for Turkish Eggs … which he absolutely loves and rightly so.
Again, this reprises toasted sourdough and the poached Ballyfin eggs but this time served with spiced garlic yoghurt, chilli butter and fresh dill, to which he adds a few rounds of Clonakilty Black Pudding and crispy bacon, but it's the ‘Turkish’ elements that really float his boat, creamy, tangy yoghurt with garlic astringency and cleansing, fresh dill anise engaging superbly with chilli’s punch heat.
To be honest, I’d have looked no further than the same dish but ignore other variations on poached eggs — yes, the menu is cannily crafted to keep it simple in the kitchen — and opt for the brunch frittata.
A frittata is what too many Irish hotel breakfast cooks think is actually an omelette, a thick, fried eggy ‘pancake’ incorporating a whole load of additional ingredients.
This frittata is industrial strength, a vehicle for bacon pieces, chunks of black pudding, potato, spinach and a mantle of melting cheddar, served with a tomato-based relish.
It’s precisely the type of dish to be relished by a hungover student, primarily concerned with scarfing back suitably savoury and tasty ballast but it is all a bit much for this delicate soul, who always prefers a tad more finesse when it comes to his eggs.
A good start towards improvement would be to crumble black pudding into a size more morsel than monstrous, distributing dominant flavours and textures more equitably throughout the dish.
We finish with very good coffees, always a hallmark of O’Carroll’s establishments, and a varied selection of sweet treats: good lemon slice; decent chocolate chip cookie; almond croissant, severely deprived of almond paste; and a sugar-free muffin of oats, chocolate chip, raspberries, blueberries and maple syrup, that No 2 adores but is far too ‘healthy’ for this particular sybarite, though by now, utterly content and well fed, I am merely nibbling out of professional curiosity.
It is early days in the new regime and I fancy more innovation will reach the menu once the ship has been steadied to O’Carroll’s satisfaction but it is already mighty fine and, yep, very good for the soul.
- Food: 7/10
- Service: 7/10
- Value: 8.5/10
- Atmosphere: 9/10
