The main road end of the pier where Beshoff’s has always been, has now been completely re-vamped. The shop has now become a very smart seafood emporium, nicely laid out and containing an oyster bar, a fresh fish counter, organic vegetables, wines and gourmet foods. Right next door they’ve built a brand new restaurant named Ivan’s after a Beshoff forebear.

I arrived outside the new place with Stephen McAllister, a chef you might know from his appearances in the kitchen of RTE’s ‘The Restaurant‘. Ivan’s looked inviting from outside, the windows allowing us a clear view of the bright interior. Just inside the door we bumped into one of Ireland’s best known restaurant reviewers, and shortly afterwards another arrived - you’d swear it was planned.

Actually Ivan’s had nothing to fear from this influx of reviewers, they do a very good job. A good front of house staff is as important as a good kitchen, because the front of house sets the tone. Their job is to greet you, seat you and make your evening go as smoothly as possible. In Ivan’s you’re met by Aidan Meyler, who cut his teeth in L’Ecrivain and more recently in The Mill - a consummate professional. Couple this with the good food that I’m about to describe and you have a winning combination

Now if you’re sitting in room that’s called an ‘oyster bar and grill’ you really have to try the oysters. So Stephen and I began with a couple of oyster shots - you get three for €7.50. They make an interesting change from oysters au naturel, which would be my usual choice and let me encourage you to try the ‘ponzu’ - truly delicious.

And so to the menu. The starters are mostly seafood as you’d expect, running from €6 for the fish soup to €14 for shavings of pata negra, the very best Spanish cured ham. Scallops, peppered squid, gravadlax, mussels and crab cakes are all listed and Stephen chose the scallops to start and I chose a starter portion of bouillabaisse, one of the main courses..

There are eleven main courses to choose from, three of them meat based. We were both keen to try fish straight from the sea so Stephen chose the whole black sole at €36 and I chose the skate wing at €21.

The wine list runs to about fifty wines and there are some very good wines on it with a fair mark-up. Red wine drinkers aren’t disadvantaged either, there’s an even spread to choose from. We settled on the Albariño, a pleasingly spicy wine from Spain’s Galicia, which was listed at €29.Three bottles of sparkling water completed the drinks order.

The starters were good, Stephen had perfectly cooked scallops which came with a parsnip purée and boned out chicken wings, an interesting dish. My bouillabaisse was not like a soup or stew, which is how you’d get it in Marseilles or Provence, but was four varieties of fish served in neat pieces standing in a fish stock. Not traditional, but very good.

The main course were a triumph of simplicity. It may seem counter-intuitive, but cooking simply is in many ways harder than cooking with a multiplicity of ingredients. When you’ve reduced a dish to its bare essentials, you have nowhere to hide of things go wrong. It takes great skill and some courage to produce a dish as simple and as perfect as what was placed before us. Stephen’s black sole was presented on the bone and deftly filleted at the table. It was cooked to perfection, moist and firm, and served with nothing more than beurre noisette - butter with hazelnut flour. My skate wing came with beurre noir, or black butter, not actually black but browned in a pan with a dash of lemon and capers. We had a couple of side orders to go with these dishes, a rocket salad and green beans, but we needn’t have bothered. There was an immensely generous amount of fish on both of our plates and we finished what we had with some difficulty.

It’s been a long time since I had seafood as good as this. Not just really fresh, but so well cooked. It was encouraging that my chef dining companion felt the same way as I did both about the quality of the cooking and the simplicity of the presentation. Later, after coffee, all three of us reviewers and our companions ended up at a table together comparing notes. Seems that whatever was ordered was a success, not a complaint between us. A bill for €135 without service seemed good value for a meal as good as this