A.A. Gill quotes a chef who
dreads getting a Michelin star because his restaurant would fill up with
“people with faces liked smacked bottoms” who complain about everything. I’m
sure that’s true.
Personally, I find the tyre
company’s food guide so inconsistent that I’m past caring about what they say
but I’ll concede that Michelin doesn’t throw stars round like confetti. It’s
highly significant, then, that there are two chefs in the kitchen at Cleaver
East who have that recognition for work elsewhere.
Oliver Dunne has his star for
Bon Appetit in Malahide and Rory Carville got his at Locks.
So, there’s serious talent at
Cleaver East (which was given that name, by the way, because Oliver Dunne says
he “just liked the sound of it”). The motif is picked up in the décor which
involves a vast number of artistically arranged meat cleavers covering the
walls and even the windows of what used to be The Tea Room at the Clarence
Hotel.
Cleaver East is all about
small plates for sharing, that come in the order in which they are ready. This
is very much the coming thing and I applaud it. If you’re a meat and three veg
person who likes quantity, you’ll hate every minute of it.
The current menu is quite
short (no doubt it will expand a little in time) and there seems to be a slight
tilt towards seafood. It is certainly eclectic, inventive and impossible to
pigeonhole in terms of style.
For example, there was our
dish of lobster dumplings (large, meaty, silken skinned) with a brilliantly sharp
broth of lemongrass scented coconut milk, tiny Chinese mushrooms and baby pak choi leaves. It was an exercise in combining richness and lightness, a really
successful exercise in plucking elements from oriental cooking.
From the short section called
“twisted classics” we enjoyed the Scotch egg – a soft-cooked quail’s egg in a
ball of naturally smoked haddock flesh, but didn’t finish the beef curry which
was a mini-steak of rather flavourless beef marinated in very bland curry spices and
served with tiny pickled vegetables. It’s not a bad idea but it seemed a bit
timid and imperfectly thought through.
Then came the really inspired
dish – lamb breast which had been clearly cooked very slowly to render most of
the fat (this is a very fatty cut) and render the meat itself meltingly tender. The top
involved a thin layer of perfect crispness, the interior a flavour of deep,
rosemary scented intensity. It was fabulous. Lightly glazed in its own jus, it almost didn’t need the rosemary
aioli (although we were glad to have it) and glazed infant turnips.
And you know what? As soon as
we had finished it, we ordered another. It seemed like a good idea at the time,
and so it proved.
Small as all of these dishes
are (they are, if you insist on dimensions, somewhere just shy of the average
starter) the lamb is very rich and so we decided to finish with something
light, delicate and full of taste. This
was a carpaccio of Dexter beef with Parmesan shavings, capers and flecks of
some kind of clear, savoury jelly. It was as good as it sounds. Wafer thin
slices of meat, sharp little explosions from the capers, Parmesan that seemed
as if the taste of a whole wheel of the stuff had been concentrated into a
single flake.
We declined pud but were
given one anyway by Oliver Dunne: a beautifully presented and correctly
textured (i.e. very loose) pannacotta topped with blueberries and raspberries
and (oh joy!) honeycomb (think of what’s inside a Crunchie).
With a bottle of mineral
water and a bottle of house red, our bill came in under €80 (there being 20%
off the food during the first month). Service was outstanding (friendly but not
intrusive, helpful, efficient).
Cleaver East is an original
in several respects. All restaurants know that they won’t fire consistently on
all cylinders as they get on their feet (and I happily mix metaphors). But they
all charge full whack all the same.
Cleaver East has broken the
mould in this respect. They have discounted prices by 20% for the first month
(you have a week left, by the way).
They deserve support for this
gesture alone (a first, I think, in Ireland) but add the exceptional, refined
cooking being applied to what is essentially informal, fun, food and you have
something delightful. Cleaver East is going to be a sensation.
Cleaver East
East Essex Street
Temple Bar
Dublin 2
Phone: 01 531 3500
WINE CHOICE:
Apart from a range of
cocktails, most of them at €8.95 and a collection of proper beers, there’s a
virtually 100% European wine list. Our €22 Tempranillo was fine for the price
and Rocca Antica Primitivo is worth €26. I can’t say the same of Ca’ di Ponti
Nero d’Avola at €29 – it’s the house red in lots of places. There are some very
serious and expensive wines here which may be rather out of kilter with the
style of the restaurant.
THE SMART MONEY:
Two dishes, a glass of wine
and an espresso would do me fine and weigh in around €30.
AND ANOTHER THING:
I gather that the number of
“celebs” per square metre is quite high.
Published in the Irish Daily Mail, August 2013
