"HOW was your black bean soup?" I asked my companion as she finished her first course. "Really, really, really wonderful," she replied.
Two courses later, tinkering at the remains of a vanilla-bean and espresso creme brulee, I asked: "How was your lunch?"
"Really, really, really brilliant," she replied.
At three "reallys" to each course, that is one hell of a lot of accolades for the food in John Cooke's newest venture, The Rhino Room, as he has rechristened and redesigned the room above his eponymous cafe on South William Street.
But, in fact, it isn't an accolade too many, for the food in the Rhino is a masterful example of modern cooking with an exacting degree of attention paid to each ingredient. Our lunch was, indeed, brilliant.
Cooke's idea with the Rhino is to create a multi-purpose room where you can have a breakfast of muffins and creme fraiche with a lily espresso at 10 a.m., drop in after 3.30 p.m. for a chicken, avocado and cucumber open sandwich, and between times have lunch from 11.30 until 5.30 and dinner from 5.30 until half past midnight at the weekends. It's an idea the city has been waiting for.
Mr Cooke has realised this with a mixture of a complicated room and a simple menu. Dublin architect Simon Walker has mixed a collision of surface styles to arrive at a funky and richly textured room, the window side embraced by a banquette while the central tables are shielded one from the other by screens topped with glass.
The cooking area is a small cabin, where two cooks can strut their stuff, and the menu is based on what a grill-counter can achieve: a couple of pasta dishes; six main courses from the char-grill; a handful of vegetables and salads; a quartet of desserts, and starters such as the blackbean soup and my own starter, which was the Rhino salad.
Both the soup and the salad were impressive because of the elements of balance and control they exhibited. The soup was teased out with lime juice, which cut the starch of the beans, while a little creme fraiche and a few chopped scallions added a shot of colour. The Rhino salad, meanwhile, comprised mixed baby leaves with kalamata olives, sliced asparagus, artichokehearts, bright jade fava beans, a whole, ripe, split tomato, slices of papaya, circles of red onion, and a confetti of shaved parmesan. This is a mixture which is begging to go wrong, yet here everything was just so, with a basil dressing lightly counterpointing a vigorous variety of tastes.
Apart from the pair of pastas, the grill takes care of the main courses: tournedos of beef with parsley salad; grilled breast of chicken with pineapple, mango, papaya, orange salsa, and mesclun salad; red snapper with piquillo pepper and artichokes; our choices of whole lobster with citrus dressing and mesclun salad; and arragui - strips of fillet of beef with tomato, chilli, extra virgin olive oil and grilled ciabatta.
I have never eaten better lobster, anywhere. The roe and the tomalley were perfectly captured alongside flesh which was sweet, sinewy and voluptuous, a dazzling simplicity. A little bowl of salad was just right, with toasted pine nuts offering a smoky note.
The arragui - in essence a sort of stew-meets-stir-fry - is just the dish for anyone who loves garlic and chilli, for the sauce with the beef is teasingly fiery, and an entire bulb of roasted garlic, sliced just towards the root, is served with it. You lather the garlic on the grilled ciabatta, spoon up the beef, sip some Cabernet sauvignon, and it is a stunning summation of an entire complex of cuisines brought brilliantly to bear on one plate.
The steering-clear of butter and cream the menu cleverly achieves is abandoned with relish in the desserts, for the Rhino boasts the most tempting creme fraiche in town, made with rich cream and served so thick it can be shaped into quenelles. With the vanilla bean and espresso creme brulee - where the espresso is served at the bottom and is cooler than the vanilla bean mix above it the creme fraiche is squirted in the middle of a twin finger of meringue.
With his idea of a more democratic space which offers simple food that can be eaten throughout the day, John Cooke has assembled a wine list of almost 30 bottles, all available by the glass. To salute Australian effrontery, we had a couple of glasses of the dry Sauvignon Blanc which the Aussie firm of Hardys makes in Bordeaux, and its crispness suited the starters perfectly, while the excellent Spanish Cabernet sauvignon made by Raimat was perfect with the arragui. It all added up to a stunning meal.
John Cooke outpaced other Dublin restaurateurs when he opened his cafe. With The Rhino Room, he has done the same thing again.