Restaurant review: Oar fails to make a splash — but there's time to right the ship
Oar, in Doolin Co. Clare
I’d been hearing good things about Oar for some time, so it was very much on my radar and, on a cold, crisp evening in West Clare, the gentle welcome of an understated, softly lit room sets the tone. We get down to business.
A platter of amuse-bouches catch the eye, less so the palate. Oar’s version of the ubiquitous ‘fine dining’ crisp mini-cone contains smoked salmon, capers, crème fraiche — a failsafe combo but hardly innovative. A pretty violet-
coloured cabbage meringue is outmuscled by smoked Gubbeen cheese. Arancini are good, though too heavy to serve as an amuse-bouche; crispy rice and teriyaki jackfruit is a briefly pleasing curiosity, soon forgotten.
I never order soup in the evening, as it muffles the keener edges of my appetite for courses to follow. But as my dining companions having snaffled my other two choices, I choose soup of the day, French onion soup, an old favourite,
especially the ‘cheese toastie’. The soup itself is sound, carmelised onions, good base stock, but, instead of the traditional slice of baguette with melted cheese, just a scant few shavings of
parmesan.
Even the best onion soup flying solo is limited. I ask for a soup spoon; there are only dessert spoons. Eating soup without a soup spoon is messy business. I chalk it and a generally distracted service down to ‘first week back at school’ sloppiness, Oar having only just re-opened for the season.
Pheasant, chou farci, carrots, peanut is a potent combo. Cabbage stuffed with mince pheasant, bacon and onion sings a sweet herbaceous air, though it is only a side player to a very generous portion of delicious gamey pheasant, capped with roasted peanuts and seeds, sitting in a lusty and dense jus.
A generous serving of chicken liver pâté is buttery, sweet, and flavoursome. So generous, it could use more than the two toasted pecans and daub of pear purée, as overly toasted brioche is too thickly sliced, doughy in the centre, with edges black and bitter.
Red fruit-forward zweigelt (Funkstille Niederosterreich, Austria, €49) is fresh, juicy and lightly tannic, and just about holds its own around the various dishes.
Fish of the day is farmed salmon, so I opt for Hereford prime rib, pepper sauce, asparagus, homemade chips. The meat is certainly prime, both flavoursome and tender, perfectly cooked to order. Caramelised onion is undoubtedly caramelised, where the halved onion has met hot metal but the remainder borders on crunchy. A few weeks later, a Michelin-starred chef happened to see a pic on my phone of the ‘chips’ and cooed: “Oooh, ‘girder’ chips, I love them!”
Girder chips is a new one on me but the name fits, spuds sliced into rectangular logs bigger than a fat man’s fingers, stacked in neat pairs, four in all. They are too big to do what good chips do, crisping up on the outside, remaining fluffy and light within. Instead, these stray into the same textural territory as fondant potato — ‘steak and chips’ without the crucial cheeky ‘chip’ factor.
The general plating style more than hints at serious fine dining aspirations in the kitchen but, while minimalism reigned elsewhere, venison, parsnip, chocolate, Jerusalem artichoke is a 3-D construction soaring up off the plate. A moulded chocolate ‘canopy’ suggesting antlers balances on ‘legs’ of roasted parsnip towering over the meat and veg like a gazebo. The venison is well-cooked, iron-rich and tender, but the over-elaborate construction is like a dish parachuted in from an entirely
different kitchen.
Monkfish, mango, cannellini beans, coconut beurre monte recalls the fusion cooking of early Celtic Tiger years, this fever dream combo mashing together multiple elements of global cuisines — tricky at the best of times. Overcooked fish means the game is up even before it starts, while the rest of the dish’s elements jar incoherently off each other.
Of the desserts, an airy blackcurrant soufflé is best. Oar’s ethos, as stated on the menu, of ‘only’ using the very best of local produce is contradicted too often on the plate tonight. I find it hard to imagine this is local asparagus so early in March, and having eaten fine fish in a number of other local restaurants on my travels, surely Oar could do better than farmed salmon as fish of the day? As for mango, pineapple, coconut and, most of all, jackfruit?
This seems like a kitchen at a crossroads trying to travel in both directions at once. Is it going to turn out solid, rustic cooking of the produce of its hinterland or is it clamouring to join the rarified ranks of Michelin-starred fine dining. Those amuse-bouches, in particular, certainly suggest the latter but don’t quite have the technical precision or even, at times, balance of flavours, to qualify for elite status. Oar would be a far better restaurant if it could resolve that dilemma and truly embrace simpler cooking of the local larder.
- Three-course menu, €90 per person
- oardoolin.ie
