Cafe Mao started its life in Chatham Street where it carved out a niche serving really good reasonably priced Asian fusion food. Then it closed for unfortunate reasons and when it re-opened, it had thankfully lost none of it’s oomph. There is now a Mao in the Dundrum Shopping Centre just beside the water feature, which literally springs to life while Bocelli is singing in time to the spurts. If you sit outside the cafe it can feel distinctly moist on a May Day but would be delicious in Summer. The cafe menu offers a good mix of lightly spiced starters and main courses with starters of crispy squid and spring rolls and main courses cooked as stir-fries and curries and freshly made salads, noodle and rice dishes covering every part of the Asian experience from India to China to Vietnam to Thailand
The food is stunning: we had a mixed platter of crispy vegetarian spring rolls moistened by soft golden nuggets of butternut squash; roast baby back ribs and juicy chicken satay skewers, all cooked fresh with the crispest salad sitting underneath (18.95 euro). The dressings (a sweet honey, then a chilli, then a sour saltier one) were just right offering the salty, sweet and sour flavours that are a fundamental plank of Asian cooking. We shared this and a Coconut Lamb Korma (17.95 euro) which came with coconut jasmine rice. The meat was soft and plentiful, the sauce sweet had a light chilli warmth though it but the rice didn’t taste any different than plain rice. Service by our Hungarian waiter was charming and he negotiated with the bar to get us a glass of wine from an opened Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc bottle instead of selling us those awful quarter bottles that they insist on offering instead of wines by the glass. The other diners were relaxed shoppers or people who work in the shopping centre taking a break after a hard day standing on their feet all day (what a daft phrase, what else would they stand on).
We would have to rate Cafe Mao in Dundrum highly for the price, the service and most of all, but an increasingly rare commendation for restaurants in the mid-price-range, we recommend it for the food.
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