Food

Chips, steak pie and deep-fried Mars bar: New Dublin restaurant to take the chipper upmarket

Six by Nico to open next door to The Ivy with six-course, €45 menu inspired by chef’s Scots-Italian heritage

The Chipper: Six by Nico’s fine-dining take on chip-shop classics

Marie Claire Digby
Tue Nov 2 2021 - 14:53

An opening date and launch menu have been revealed for Six by Nico, the restaurant group with branches in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland that offers a modern take on fine dining by offering six-course menus that change every six weeks and are inspired by “a different place, memory, or idea”.

The restaurant will open on November 30th in the former Pain Quotidien space at 1 Molesworth Street, next door to another UK import, The Ivy. Bookings are being taken for the restaurant’s “The Chipper” menu, inspired by chef Nico Simeone’s Scots-Italian family heritage.

The Chipper menu features upmarket, modern interpretations of chips and cheese, scampi, steak pie, fish supper, smoked sausage and deep-fried Mars Bar. There is also a vegetarian menu. “Most people are familiar with the tastes and scents of their local chip shop, and we wanted to take the idea of the everyday chipper menu and reinvent it to create a playful food experience that Dubliners would recognise and be amazed by,” Simeone says.

Posted earlier today on the Six by Nico Dublin website, the menu initially featured Scottish-sourced ingredients, including Scrabster monkfish cheek, Speyside beef shin and Shetland cod. The references to Scrabster and Speyside were later removed; a spokesperson for the restaurant says that Kish Fish and Mourne Seafood will be suppliers to the Irish outlet and that talks with suppliers are ongoing.

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Chips and cheese: Parmesan espuma, curry oil and emulsion, crisp potato terrine.

Scampi: Monkfish cheek, dill emulsion, gribiche, peas, beurre blanc.

Steak pie: Beef shin, burnt onion ketchup, mushroom duxelle, ‘meaty salsa’.

Fish supper: Cod, pickled mussels, confit fennel, samphire, beer emulsion.

Smoked sausage: trio of pork, apple, black pudding, salt baked celeriac, choucroute.

Deep fried Mars Bar: Chocolate opera, Irn Bru sorbet, chocolate soil.

The current menu starts with snacks of “sourdough bread, shellfish butter, filo cannelloni, taramasalta, lemon gel, Keta caviar”, and each of the six courses that follows each has between four and five intricate elements on the plate.

The menu, which will be served from noon each day from Tuesday to Sunday, costs €45, with an optional wine pairing for an additional €39. It will run until January 2nd, when an entirely new menu will replace it. The Chipper, or The Chippie, as it was called in the UK branches, is the menu Simeone has used to introduce the concept across his restaurants in Glasgow – where the first branch opened, in 2017 – Edinburgh, London, Manchester Liverpool and Belfast.

Food MonthNico Simeone