Restaurant review: Welcoming old favourite Greenes back to Cork's VQ district
Greenes Restaurant, MacCurtain Street, Victorian Quarter, Cork City. Photo Joleen Cronin
- Greenes Restaurant
- 48 MacCurtain Street, Cork, T23 F6EK
- Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 4pm to 9.30pm; Saturday, 3pm to 10pm
- Tel: (021) 455 2279
- greenesrestaurant.com
This week, as part of Cork on a Fork food festival, hospitality stalwarts of Cork city’s VQ (MacCurtain St and ancillary surrounding streets) wined and dined 400 lucky punters at a highly ambitious Long Table Dinner on MacCurtain St. VQ is now unquestionably Cork city’s ‘food quarter’, sporting a mighty portfolio of restaurants, cafés and bars, and those involved in the dinner also included several of the street’s culinary ‘aristocrats’.
There was one conspicuous absentee — Greenes.
Brian Murray’s Glass Curtain is the street’s ‘star’, garnering attention and plaudits, even at a national level, yet, for many years, that was Greenes’ role, with successive chefs, in particular, Fred Desormeaux and Brian McCarthy, often turning out very good food.
And then there is the venue, impossibly blessed with the raw materials that make it one of the most attractive metropolitan settings in the land for a restaurant.
Walk through an archway, leaving the urban grit of MacCurtain St behind, Cask cocktail bar is to the left, Isaac’s hotel to the right.
At the end of the alley is a sheer rockface, five storeys high, with a waterfall cascading all the way down into an idyllic little pond alongside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the main dining room, a fine high ceilinged space in a converted former Victorian warehouse. Lit up at night, its magic never fails to warm the heart.
However, over those 15 years, heading inside Greenes was like running into Faye Dunaway heading to the bookies in a tracksuit, yesterday’s makeup smeared all over her face; a great beauty, shamefully neglected, when all that was required were mostly cosmetic changes.
More recently, that aesthetic lethargy gradually came to reflect an overall operation that had seemingly lost its way so it was no great surprise when it limped to a halt last February for a period of re-evaluation and reinvention.
Returning in May, it was transformed, a smart, simple and sympatico makeover employing a far darker palette to draw all focus to the light and beauty of the scenic window.
Comrade E and I fetch up on a rare sunny evening that means a fine cocktail from Cask is imperative, even in midweek, before heading indoors.
Word was the ‘new’ Greenes would be going back to bistro-style basics but the menu seems less sure. Beef and Beamish Stout Stew, Lamb Shank and pan-fried fish of the day could pass for bistro staples but steak on the hot stone reads like a Celtic Tiger flashback, while chicken supreme dates back further still.
Vegetable lasagne, the token vegetarian dish, might be an absolute stunner but recalls those dispiriting days of the 80s when begrudging chefs never strayed beyond vegetables and pasta for the veggies.
And even on summer days not remotely as clement as today, all those listed dishes are best enjoyed as classic winter warmers. Instead we dive headlong into the starters, though almost all are echoes of former Greenes menus.
Waterfall Farm Beetroot Salad is quite lovely. Ardsallagh Goat’s Cheese is light, creamy, its lactic tang marrying perfectly with earthy tuber, crisp green leaves and candied walnuts, a further joy.
Glenmar Scallops are sliced wafer thin and dressed in a coriander and lime sauce with a perky chilli lift, along with kohlrabi and crispy quinoa. It truly nails its time in the sun, literally and metaphorically, far and away the best dish of the evening.
Jack McCarthy’s always excellent Cork Spiced Beef is an old favourite on Greenes menus and is perfectly served at ambient temperature, dotted with colourful pickled veg, celeriac remoulade, and an emulsion of Coolea cheese.
Chicken Liver Paté and Duck Rillette, with Tomato & Raisin Chutney and Toasted Brioche may carry wintery heft but are still excellent.
We share one main course, Quigley’s Prime Ribeye Hereford 8oz, well cooked on the hot stone, lightly browned, a scarlet seam running through its heart. It comes with mushroom and onion rings, house fries, wild mushroom, creamy brandy peppercorn and garlic butter, all perfectly serviceable but quite overwhelming on a summer’s eve.
I order both desserts in the interest of professionalism. Sticky Date Pudding (with Toffee Brandy Sauce, Vanilla Ice Cream) is cracking but, a single nibble and it’s into the doggy bag for the teenage hounds at home.
Apple and Celery Panna Cotta with Apple Sorbet, Fennel Soup is far more seasonally appropriate, savoury celery notes, fennel’s anise and the apple’s tart acidity reinvigorating the palate.
New head chef Nicolas Javier Alegre Martinez is no slouch; all his dishes are on point, precisely delivered with good, strong flavours in balanced combinations, but I’d wonder whether it is entirely his own menu.
The current one reads as if put together by a committee of wildly differing opinions and too many dishes are near direct replicas of previous regimes; accordingly, it lacks coherency and definition, bypassing contemporary tropes to hark back to a point in time, though no one can agree what point in time that is exactly.
That is an even more glaring position to find yourself in when other practitioners, including near neighbours, are operating with real innovation, vibrancy and flair.
Chef Nicolas appears capable of so much more; time, perhaps, to give him his head to deliver a brand new menu truly befitting the rebirth of such a delightful space.
- Food: 7.5
- Wines: 6.5 (A lacklustre list, especially viewed alongside exciting contemporary lists of neighbours, MacCurtain Wine Cellar and Glass Curtain)
- Service: 7
- Value: 7.5
- Atmosphere: 8 (the new look is fantastic but the room is almost empty on a glorious summer’s evening)
- Tab: €140 (excluding tip)
