A hotel bistro that’s trying to appeal to all comers
PRESENTATION COUNTS for a great deal. If you serve industrial food with a bit of salad, but put the menu on a blackboard, it gives the impression that there’s someone in the kitchen doing a lot more than opening packets and putting things in a microwave.
There’s a certain honesty about a printed menu. I don’t mean one that you run off on the laser printer. I mean one that is actually typeset and professionally printed on card. What this says to me is that the dishes have been selected on a basis other than what’s available fresh from the markets.
The menu at Café Novo, the bistro downstairs at the Westbury in Dublin 2, like so many hotel ones, is printed. And like a lot of hotel menus, it tries to ensure that there is something for everybody.
There is an argument that only the very tired or the somewhat desperate eat in hotels and, like all wild generalisations, there is something in this.
But the fact remains that a hotel bistro has to attempt to cater for pretty much every type of human being while being part of a bigger entity. It can’t be easy.
Café Novo is certainly eclectic and there are some attractive ideas, such as a plate of both pata negra ham and prosciutto San Daniele (though I wonder why not one or the other) and a salad of shaved fennel and prawns. I’m at a bit of a loss to know what “Shepperd’s pie made from Coonamaragh lamb” might be, but it sounded as if it might be comforting. Crème Catalan with lemon and cinnamon also sounded rather good.
A Thai beef salad, described as being with “spicy chilli dressing, red onion and tomato” was a strange affair. The beef tasted of nothing and the dressing was as spicy as a bowl of porridge. There was lots and lots of red onion, which I like, and it was freshly sliced (all too rare, I find). The slices of hard, under-ripe tomato had marginally more taste than the beef. I ate it all, but was left wondering why.
Seared rare peppered tuna loin (I didn’t know that tuna have loins, but we live and learn) was suitably rare, to the point of rawness. This was just as well as, had it been cooked, it would have tasted of even less.
In a curious twist, it was served with a Niçoise salad that involved mixed leaves and hardboiled eggs, the yolks of which had that blue halo that is so easily avoided by cooling them rapidly, which is what chefs are taught to do.
Chicken kebabs marinated in saffron and yoghurt really needed the marinade because the rather spongy pieces of chicken breast had – and this is no surprise really – no taste of their own. Commercial chicken is tofu for meat eaters. The accompanying couscous salad was fine, even if it did taste of curry powder.
Against my better judgment, I rather enjoyed the West Coast Irish crab cakes, even if they seemed to contain an awful lot of mashed spud and a homeopathic suggestion of crustacean. Their coating was crunchy and they came with a combination of chopped hardboiled egg, capers, and what seemed to be thinned mayonnaise; that always does it for me.
We were so intrigued by the notion of an éclair costing €6.20, even if it did involve orange cream, that we wanted to see it in the flesh. And as éclairs go, it was huge. The orange-flavoured whipped cream would have enhanced the chocolate topping if the chocolate had not been so sweet. The choux pastry itself was rather limp.
Eschewing wine, we probably should have tried a pineapple power punch or something called the Immuniser (yoghurt, strawberry, kiwi, pineapple and honey), but smoothies just don’t seem right at lunchtime. Instead, we consumed a lot of Tipperary sparkling water.
The staff were charming, the room is a little gloomy, the food must have been more or less all right because we ate quite a lot of it, and the menu reads well, even if it doesn’t follow through on the plate. The bill came to €63.70, including service.
THE SMART MONEY
A starter portion of the crab cakes and a glass of house Sauvignon Blanc, as a light lunch, will set you back €15.20.