Back to Ireland, back to Dublin. The missus and I ate two high-end dinners in the city. By “high-end” I mean contemporary Michelin-bait restaurants. While Delahunt—unlike the second place—does not currently have a Michelin star, you will find it to be very much in a familiar one star genre now found pretty much all over the globe, particularly in the West. The setting is casual, evoking an unspecified vernacular aesthetic, while the cooking is fussy and mostly presented in the form of a tasting menu. This tasting menu seems spare—the one at Delahunt lists six courses—but unfurls to reveal a number of secondary flourishes and curlicues. The unkind might describe the effect of much of this as revealing a sort of culinary attention deficit disorder in the kitchen and encouraging it at the table. There is so much going on that it’s hard to be taken by very much of it. But this, as I say, is a problem with the genre writ large, not just at Delahunt. Nonetheless, it’s the general feeling we left the meal with, even as we enjoyed many elements of it. Herewith, the details.

Delahunt is located on Camden St. Lower, not too far from Mister S, or for that matter, from a number of other trendy restaurants (and also the decidedly un-trendy, non-Michelin bait Passion 4 Food). It was about a 20 minute walk from our house and the missus and I decided to build up an appetite on the way there and walk off some of the meal on the way back. Now, I should say that I don’t know how advisable these walks—especially the one back—were. The news was full of reports of petty street crime during our time in Dublin, and I did read later about a couple of incidents of people being harassed in that very area. Luckily, we didn’t encounter any drama of any kind.

The restaurant was not particularly full when we arrived at 8 pm, albeit on a weeknight, but reservations are recommended. We sat down and ordered a couple of cocktails. The missus got a Margarita, which had a slightly involved presentation and I had the Corpse Reviver. Both were mixed well. The tasting menu is all that’s on offer for dinner and so there were no choices to be made. We sat back and waited for the food, which then showed up in series of waves. The first course is billed only as “Snacks”; what we got were five different small dishes, mostly centered on pork (as you would also expect in this genre of restaurant). All were good but, given the size, none made more than a fleeting impression. I would have liked to have had more of one that involved a slice of headcheese (I think) but it was not to be.

This first course was also accompanied by a large loaf of bread and some house-made butter. Both were very good but there was also a fair bit of bread overload in just this Snacks course, with three of the other small dishes also having involved bread of one kind or other—and another was served as a mini-tart. As such we were feeling more full than we were expecting after a course billed as Snacks. But we were up to task of eating the main courses anyway.

Of these were there three, two centered on fish and one on lamb. Two of the three courses involved secondary dishes, served almost as afterthoughts or appendices but which we actually enjoyed more than the featured dish they came with. Such was the case with the first of these to arrive, billed as “Mackerel, Cucumber, Buttermilk”. The mackerel—grilled if I recall correctly—was done well and the other components were tasty as well, but it was the fish mousse on toast served alongside that we preferred. Similarly, the main plate of the last of the savoury courses, “Lamb, Artichoke, Courgette, Anchovies” was outshined in our opinion by the accompanying small portion of braised lamb (neck?). In between came our pick of the larger courses, “Wild Stone Bass, Mussel, Smoked Tomato, Farfalle”. The fish was cooked perfectly and everything bar one component worked really well. That component was the farfalle, which was completely superfluous from a flavour and texture standpoint.

Next was the cheese course which featured 24 month-aged Comte alongside a sorbet involving sherry. This was fine. We did not, however, care very much at all for the dessert proper, whose components were listed as “Peach, Hay, Pine”. I’m not sure if it was the hay and pine (in some form) that threw the flavour and texture of the sorbet (the second in two courses) off for us but we found the whole quite odd. You’ll never believe it but this also came with a secondary dessert that we liked better: a milk pudding of some kind.

For a look at the restaurant and what we ate and drank, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down for thoughts on service and to see how much it all cost.

Service was a bit of a mixed bag. Everyone was very friendly but our lead server had the demeanour of someone at a theme park restaurant and the server who brought out most of our food seemed to have very little knowledge of how any of it was made. After a few questions that seemed to befuddle her, I stopped asking for detail*. Both of these qualities seem a little out of keeping with the restaurant’s broader pretensions/ambitions.

The price, however, is not out of keeping with those. The tasting menu ran 80 euros per head and the cocktails and service charge took our total to just over 210 euros. Now we’d probably be fine paying that much for a meal like this one in the Twin Cities but my guess is you can do better at a number of places in Dublin for a similar cost. Indeed, we did much better at our second fancy meal out, a few weeks later. I’ll probably write that one up next week.

Up next on the food front, possibly another New York report tomorrow. On Tuesday I will have a report on the dinner the missus and I are scheduled to eat at Alma tonight.

*I should also say that I also didn’t track the details of the meal as closely as I usually do because not too long into it the news of Sinead O’Connor’s death came across our phones and she was all we could talk about for a while.