Restaurant review: Uncle's Deli has a great concept but falls behind its English Market peers
Uncle's Deli, at the iconic English Market in Cork's city centre
Uncle's, recently opened at the Grand Parade entrance of the English Market, may be “just” a sandwich bar, but arrives with high expectations, coming as it does, from the same Cork-based hospitality stable overseen by Ciarán O’Regan and Colin Ryan and including Paperboy, GoodHood (included in our Irish Examiner Top 100 restaurants list earlier this year), and Hansum rotisserie chicken in the Marina Market.
Uncle’s most definitely looks the part, a faux-casual functionality uncannily replicating that New York sandwich bar look, and the menu equally nods to Stateside culinary styles, including “hot sandwiches”. However, on our first visit, another scorching day, we’d nearly take a sandwich directly from the freezer.
US-style sandwich bread rolls are good, spongy crumb with a chewy, almost crisp exterior. The Corker (€11) is built around spiced beef from my favourite butcher’s in Cork, O’Mahony’s. Uncle’s occupies a unit that was once part of O’Mahony’s, right next door.
The sandwich’s assembly, however, doesn’t serve it well, just four wafer thin cucumber pickles and not especially peppery rocket; there is little or no evidence of advertised tarragon mustard, and the overall impact is bland, even soulless.
Much better is The Morty (€11), with sweet, savoury mortadella, along with creamy burrata and more rocket.
As hot rotisserie chicken takes a starring role on the menu, I return on another day with No 2 Son, all round hot chicken roll aficionado. He orders the chicken and chips (€11.50), pre-warned that “chips” are in fact those tiny chip-shaped potato sticks that retail in the crisps and snacks category.
The chicken is good, succulent, flavoursome, no surprise, but in the minute it takes us to walk across to the park and re-open the stylish package, a class of sweet onion compote has combined with “chips”, becoming a soggy, salty sludge that sits baldly on top of the chicken, salt trampling over all other flavours. He is not remotely impressed. Neither am I.
The Balboa (€12.50) is a small butcher’s shop of cured meats on offer: Mortadella, finocchiona, and bresaola, along with mozzarella and, yes, more of that ubiquitous rocket. It is an improvement on the chicken and chips but could use more acidity and crunch than is provided by two small skinned, poached cherry tomatoes.
I love the concept of Uncle’s, but can’t help thinking that it is currently nowhere near the standards of its stablemates, possibly over-concerned with nailing a US-style concept rather than nailing a really good sandwich.
Still, if anyone can fix it, it is O’Regan and Ryan. They’ve got work to do.
