Paolo's Reviews

When it comes to Italian food I’m a stickler. It could be a genetic thing, maybe a cultural prejudice, or perhaps nothing more than culinary bigotry. But whatever it is I like Italian food to be genuine and authentic. And that means sticking to the recipe if you’re going to make a classic dish, using the right ingredients and cooking the dish as it’s supposed to be cooked. As personal prejudices go, it’s not outrageous. In fact, as an expectation, it’s quite reasonable.

Despite the apparent reasonableness of my expectations, it’s surprisingly difficult to find an Italian restaurant in this country that serves food as you might get it in Italy. Over the years I’ve talked to restaurateurs as to why this is so and the answer I get tends to go along this line - ‘You can’t serve food as you would in Italy, the Irish customers don’t like it. You have to adapt the recipes to suit the Irish palate.’

I have a problem with that answer, and it’s this: I don’t know any Irish people who have been to Italy who prefer Irish Italian restaurants to the ones in Italy. When they get the genuine article, they like it just fine. So what imaginary palates are these Irish restaurants trying to please by bastardising the recipes? Cream in carbonara is just the tip of this monstrous iceberg of culinary inauthenticity.

Couple this attitude with a huge number of restaurants that are Italian in name only, restaurants whose chefs think that a drizzle of pesto turns any dish Italian, and you can see why the real deal is so hard to find. Yet just occasionally I get what I’m looking for. Last year I found Via Vento in Enniscorthy, which really ticked all the boxes, and another time I ate very well in La Banca in Lucan.

I’d been at a reception at the Italian ambassador’s residence, which is the very beautiful Lucan House on the banks of the Liffey. After the reception about thirty of us, including His Excellency ambassador Savoia, went to La Banca, which is just outside the residence’s gates. Good food and a great Neapolitan group making music turned it into an enjoyable night and I decided that I had to return for a review meal.

My daughter Isabella is turning into a bit of a foodie now, ever since she started working in the Food Game in Stillorgan. She’s become quite passionate about quality foods and the shop keeps her interest up by constantly sourcing the best food products. I thought this was one review she and boyfriend Dave O’Hara would enjoy, so with a table booked in the name of O’Hara we set off for Lucan’s Main Street.

The last time I’d been, we’d taken over the entire upstairs, but this time we were downstairs. We were shown to our table and handed menus and there we sat for twenty-five minutes with no bread, no water, and no one to take our order. This did give me a chance to study the menu carefully. On the starters I found Caprese salad, described as tomato and mozzarella drizzled with basil pesto served on a bed of rocket. Call me a boring old pedant, but that’s not a Caprese. Pesto shouldn’t be there, leaves of basil should. A bed of rocket shouldn’t be there, and God help me, if I see ‘served on a bed of rocket’ again I think I’m going to scream. What did we do in this country before we discovered rocket? And yes, among the pizzas was pizza with pineapple. Not good omens for authenticity.

When we finally got to order, Isabella had the carpaccio (served on a bed of rocket) Dave had the Caprese salad (served on a bed of rocket) and I had the mussels. Main courses had presented a problem as there were just four - a fillet steak, a sirloin steak and two chicken dishes. With a high probability that the chickens were battery reared and steaks not being much Italian, we had to do the non-Italian thing and have pasta as a main course. Very Irish, not Italian. Isabella had the butterfly pasta with prawns, Dave had the penne with salmon, and I had the seafood pasta.

The wine list is pretty good. There’s fifty or so wines from most of Italy’s regions and they come with a fair mark-up. With our seafood pastas in mind I ordered the Fiano di Avellino, a fragrant white from the excellent Campania winery of Mastroberardino, which was priced at €28.50

When the starters arrived I realised I needn’t have been so fussy about the rocket. They must have run out, as both Dave and Isabella had shredded lettuce in place of rocket. We got a decent carpaccio, an ersatz Caprese that needed both salt and olive oil, and a plateful of rather average mussels with no finger bowl.

The pasta dishes were acceptable enough, no better than you’d get in any one of the hundreds of Italian restaurants in the city. My own dish - the frutti di mare - was probably the least successful, as the prawns, which formed a major part of the dish, were as hard as little bullets.

Three rather thin espressos ended this meal which left me feeling somewhat let down. Average food and worse than indifferent service meant that one more hope of finding a real Italian was gone. It occurred to me as we were leaving that probably the way to get a really good meal in La Banca is to go there with the Italian ambassador. A booking in the name of O’Hara doesn’t seem to work. To end on a positive note, La Banca isn’t expensive. Our meal for three, with one of the more expensive wines on the list, came to just €106.85.