This is one of those places that only generous people share because when it gets too packed, we may not find a seat.
What a find. Most lunch days for the last few weeks you will find the Gobbler and a friend eating here. It’s tremendous. Olivier who owns Les Maison des Gourmet, the french patisserie in the middle of Dublin has turned his attention to gastro food and he shows just how it should be done.
Homemade chicken pie with a burnished golden pastry top arrives on a wooden platter with a perfectly dressed green salad. Artisan sausage is paired with bacon and potato and transformed with cream and herbs and a toasted cheese topping into real gourmet food (only €8.50 and almost too much for one person). Slow cooked lamb shank collapses the moment you cut it, Guinness and beef stew is meaty and melting, lightly fried fresh mackerel jumps from the sea onto the plate accompanied by a lightly cooked potato salad. Fish cakes are just €6 and you get four delicious crispy balls and a salad. Desserts won’t fail the sweet-toothed among you: summer fruit pudding and rhubarb crumble were delicious, simple and well-made. This is genuine food without pretension.
The dining area is in the main pub (with proper cutlery and linen napkins) and there is a finer dining area upstairs with tablecloths and full service at no extra cost. The only downside to sitting upstairs – and this is especially pertinent for those of you with pudgy tummies – is that one party has to sit on a low couch, cutting off the blood supply to your digestive system if you eat a lot. Which you tend to do with food this good at such reasonable prices.
The only thing that is keeping Olivier’s at Vaughan’s from being a rip-roaring success is the lack of a central personality – you feel sometimes that it has no centre as an eaterie, sitting as it does in a pub with no visible owner or manager present. The waiting staff are genuine and really lovely but they look a bit rudderless as if they are waiting for someone called Olivier to appear to prove he actually exists.
Wines are chosen by the former sommellier from Gilbauds – try the organic pinot grigio for a fiver a glass, it’s spot-on. Mr Gobbler and two friends and I had dinner on a Friday night, we shared two starters, ate four main courses, 1 side order of colcannon, two desserts, two coffees, a tea, 3 glasses of wine and a gin and tonic and the bill came to €105. So what are you waiting for?
Vaughan’s Eagle House, Vaughan’s Corner, Terenure Road North, Dublin 6. Tel: 01 490 1251
