(30 Jan 2009)
Irish Independent February 2006
I’ve always liked Kilkenny City: in fact
30 years ago I almost went to live there, before settling
in the end for the Wicklow Hills. I liked its buzz, the fact
that it was just big enough to have all the benefits of a
city, but small enough to have none of the down-sides. Even
then the city had a cosmopolitan air, which was a rare enough
thing in the rural Ireland of the 1970s.
These days it’s changed with the new Ireland:
there are new hotels, good wine shops and restaurants, as
well as a comedy week, all of which has made the city a weekend
destination for many Dubliners. If you were to believe everything
you read and hear, it’s also one of Ireland’s
most expensive destinations.
I was there this week with my son Rocco, who surprisingly
had never been there before. We parked beside the handsome
Kilkenny Castle and walked up Patrick Street to Zuni, which
is both a small hotel describing itself as a ‘townhouse’,
and a restaurant.
The restaurant is at the back of building so you walk through
the hotel reception area into a large rectangular room, decorated
in clean lines and divided by large leather-covered screens.
The tables are larger than is normal in Dublin
restaurants, the seats comfortable. One of the long sides
of the room is opened to the kitchen through a large service
counter, and from where we sat we had a fine view of a kitchen
hard at work.
Zuni was busy on the night we arrived. Most
of the tables were taken up with large groups of men –
a sight you rarely see in Dublin. Almost every restaurant
that I ever visit has an overwhelming majority of female diners,
so finding a room almost entirely filled with men was unusual.
Certainly the menu looked interesting. The starters
were all priced under €10, except for the scallops and
the prawns at €11.95. Also among the starters were mushroom
soup, a smoked salmon risotto cake, pasta with goats’cheese
and mushrooms, battered prawns, a Parma ham salad and scallops
in beurre blanc.
The main courses were priced from €22 to
€29 and included spiced duck breast, tandoori cod, braised
lamb shank, teriyaki salmon, pasta with seafood and smoked
salmon, a vegetable risotto, chicken Maryland with corn cakes
and chargrilled steaks, both fillet and sirloin.
The wine list is modest enough, with some 50 or so inclusions.
That sounds like plenty, but when you take away the very expensive
and the very cheap wines, the middle ground was a little thin.
Unfortunately for Rocco he’s allergic
to wine, so while he ordered a Guinness, I turned to the half-bottles
and found the excellent Marques de Riscal Reserva 2000 at
€17.95, which is drinking superbly now with that bottle
age. It smelt so good that Rocco risked a sip, exclaiming,
“it’s wine like that that I miss”. It’s
tragic to be allergic to something you really like.
For starters Rocco had ordered the scallops,
which came with a mesclun salad composed of really tasty rocket.
The scallops themselves were cooked just so: tender and subtly
flavoured in the beurre blanc. I’d ordered the salmon
risotto cake, which was like a large suppli, a rice ball that’s
been breaded and deep fried.
I really enjoyed this dish, there was a hint of wasabi in
the cake that blended perfectly with the cucumber and smoked
salmon. It was an original and very successful dish.
For a main course Rocco had the tandoori cod,
which came with roasted vegetables and minted yoghurt. The
tandoori had given the cod a red tinge and just as with the
starters, the flavourings were delicately used. I’d
ordered the lamb shank, which perfectly exemplified the phrase
‘it fell off the bone’, it was so tender. I’ll
describe its appearance, because it was a good example of
how dishes are presented in Zuni.
There was a base of mashed potato around which
a port wine jus was drizzled. It was topped with buttered
leaf spinach and on top of that the lamb shank was placed
nearly vertically, a sprig of rosemary protruding from the
bone. The effect was a tall dish, of the kind that Conrad
Gallagher made famous, and which we don’t often see
any more.
By this stage in our meal, when four out of
four dishes had been well made, nicely presented and efficiently
served, we found ourselves in that rare condition of comfortable
ease after a meal. It also meant that whereas we would normally
have stopped right there, we were tempted enough to try a
dessert between us. We chose a lemon meringue tart, which
was well made and good. Two espressos completed the meal.
I was well pleased with Zuni. It’s always
a pleasure to find a restaurant that tries hard and serves
good food, but Zuni rises a step above that by making good
food with imaginative twists. Couple this with brisk service
and a pleasing room and you get a recipe that’s hard
to improve on.
I would have liked to find a longer wine list
with more choices in the mid-range, because I believe that
food made with this much care needs an equally careful choice
of wine to accompany it. The bill for the night came to €123,
which included three bottles of mineral water.