Restaurants in Ireland


Chapter OneClare, if you would like to talk to me about your recent visit my number is xxxxxxxxxx. Regards, Ross.

Gulp. It was a direct message to my Twitter account from Ross Lewis, exec chef and co-owner of Chapter One. I’d tweeted a few very positive messages about my recent (and first ever) dining experience at his renowned restaurant, plus one tweet expressing [slight] disappointment with my steak. Could he really be upset about an honest tweet regarding sinew?

Far from it. Ross was upset about my disappointment, not that I tweeted about it. He told me the particular cut of steak on the menu that night is a “heartbreak” for him because while it’s the most flavourful cut it has potential to have sinew hidden deep inside the meat. Upon delivery he can cut the meat to check for sinew and see nothing; but later a steak sliced from that bigger cut could have a bit of the stringy white tissue that’s not visible on the surface but reveals itself only when the diner cuts into it. So the majority of people who order it will get the most savoury, beautiful steak they’ve ever had but a few might get a bit of tough sinew in their meat.

I could hear his genuine frustration that I ended up being one of those few; for the next 20 minutes we talked candidly about food and cooking like two people who spend breakfast talking about lunch and who eat lunch whilst talking about what to cook for dinner (read: obsessed!). It was a proper chat between two food enthusiasts and for that 20 minutes I forgot I was talking to a Michelin-starred chef. He was down-to-earth and sincere, and his passion and dedication to his craft was obvious. This is one chef who doesn’t rest on his laurels.

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Galway 15

Two weeks ago a food blogger in Taiwan started serving a 30-day sentence for writing a critical review of a local noodle restaurant. Known only as Ms. Liu, the blogger wrote that the restaurant’s food was too salty, which led to the restaurant owner taking her to court for defamation. The judge sided with the owner and in addition to the jail time ordered Ms. Liu to pay NT$200,000 (4,900 Euros) in damages to the restaurant.

I imagine some restaurant chefs and owners are secretly celebrating this “victory.” The relationship between food bloggers – most of whom are amateur writers with little or no cookery school backgrounds – and restaurant owners has always been tenuous at best. Many chefs cite bloggers’ no-holds-barred critiques as nasty and irresponsible while bloggers say they’re merely doing the public a service by offering straightforward reviews. Both arguments are equally compelling.

noodles

Even in Ireland, where the social norm would be to quietly accept mediocrity rather than complain, I’m seeing a real uprising among food bloggers who are fed up with lousy food and terrible customer service in restaurants. A local vegetarian food blogger relayed her disappointment at the “nasty” comments she received from her waiter – who clearly wasn’t interested in her vegetarian-related menu questions – at a popular Dublin café. “Next time you have a veggie customer, I hope you treat them better than you treated me,” she warned. Recently CheapEats.ie “named and shamed” a Dublin restaurant for “appalling” service and then launched a week-long series outing a variety of other offending eateries. The feedback from readers was generally positive; they, too, were fed up with the lack of good service and conceded that it was high time blogs called restaurants out for it.

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