Town Bar and Grill - a modern classic.

Paolo Tullio's Review

As an example of what's happening in the restaurant business this year, you won't find a better one than Town Bar and Grill. It's high profile, it's been newsworthy for weeks now and its current fortunes are symptomatic of what's happening, to a greater or lesser degree, everywhere else.

Just in case you missed it in print or on the radio, the story so far is this: Town has been a successful restaurant for quite a few years now and, towards the end of the boom years, its owners began to expand -- first to the Bridge Bar, then to South, a cavernously large space in the Beacon Quarter. As the recession began to bite, South fell, and with that closure came a bunch of bills. This put huge pressure on Town, which has now gone into receivership in order to continue trading.

Like many others, I've been following the continuing saga in the media. There seem to be two schools of opinion here: the one that berates Town for staying open; and mine -- which is that it should stay open. It's a complex story, but, to simplify it, there are two main options when a business gets into trouble. One is to close it down, pay what you can to your creditors and let all your staff go onto the dole. The other option is to try to trade your way out of it. You pay your creditors what you can and keep your staff employed. You'll notice that in both of these scenarios, the creditors don't get paid in full, but in one of them people stay employed. This is why I think the right choice is the second option.

Obviously, this works only if the business itself is viable once the debt burden is lifted. It's been a long time since I reviewed Town, so this week I thought I'd go back again to see how it was doing.

I arrived on a Wednesday night with Gerard and Deirdre Carthy to find a very full restaurant with no empty tables in sight. That in itself surprised me, since Wednesday nights aren't usually busy in the city. A full restaurant certainly gives the impression that, whatever else, people are still enjoying a night in 'Town'.

If you don't know the restaurant, it's on Kildare Street in a basement underneath where Mitchells Wine Merchants used to be. It's a space I've eaten in when it was Mitchell's restaurant, then when it was Bruno's, and now in its 'Town' incarnation. It's a long, narrow space but it's been quite cleverly divided, so you don't feel as if you're in a restaurant on a train. The tables are generously sized and spaced well enough to give privacy, the table settings are of good quality and the atmosphere is one of busy calm.

Town is a restaurant I've eaten in reasonably frequently, so I've had enough meals there to take a more balanced view than I have of restaurants I've eaten in only once. The food in Town has always been good, but not top-end gastronomy. High gastronomy isn't what Town is aiming at; it's always been aimed at diners who want good food that's well prepared at a price that's reasonable, and, over the years, its other great virtue has been consistency. If you like categories, put this place in the upper mid-range, both in gastronomy and price.

We arrived too late for the pre-theatre menu, which offers three courses for just under €30, so we chose from the à la carte dinner menu. The starters run from €10 to €15 and the main courses from €25 to €30. There's a wide choice of nine starters and 10 main courses, most of them in the style of modern Mediterranean cooking. Here are four of the starters to give you an idea of what they do: grilled red mullet fillet with fennel and orange salad; hazelnut crusted ballotine of foie gras; slow-cooked veal cheek with herbed potato gnocchi; and sautéed violet artichokes with chilli, garlic, parsley, soft quail eggs and shaved pecorino. You can see there's a modern twist to some classic dishes.

For starters, we ordered a seafood antipasto, the grilled red mullet fillet and the slow-cooked veal cheek. For mains, we chose clam linguini, rack of lamb and mushroom risotto. Then, turning our attention to the wine list, we had a glass each of French Sauvignon Blanc at €6.75, then ordered three bottles of mineral water at €5.35. Although we were doing the responsible thing and drinking just a glass of wine each, I spent some time looking through the wine list. It's one of those lists that jumps quickly up the price scale -- there are the four house wines -- two reds and two whites at €23.95 -- then the list hops to €30, €50 and more than €100. There's a good choice of Italian wines and a surprisingly large choice of American wines. Towards the end of the list you can find the big boys -- a remnant of headier days; wines such as Cheval Blanc and LaFite, up around the €800 mark. You wonder who's buying bottles like that these days.

While we waited for the starters we nibbled on the bread; well, more of a focaccia really, some of which was soft and some of which was hard, probably not on purpose. The starters arrived and all three looked very good. Deirdre's seafood plate had langoustines, prawns, chilli squid, gravadlax and oysters and was nicely presented. Gerard had the red mullet fillet, which came with a fennel and orange salad, and my veal cheek came with herbed gnocchi and a wholegrain mustard. All three of these dishes were well made, well flavoured and well presented.

The main courses were more mixed. Gerard had the rack of lamb, which came with slow-cooked shoulder and caramelised sweetbreads. The sweetbreads were spectacularly good, the lamb tender and succulent. The clam linguini, a variant of the Neapolitan signature dish spaghetti alle vongole, was less successful. The seafood taste that's so integral to the dish was hidden behind other flavours, and the pasta was a little too al dente for my taste. That said, my mushroom risotto was very well done; a good mix of mushroom, truffle oil, prosciutto and Parmesan.

We toyed for a while with the idea of desserts, which are mostly priced at €9.95, before eventually ordering a crunchy biscuit ice-cream to share between the three of us. The meal ended with two good espressos, both drunk by me, which brought the bill to €166.50 not including service.

If Town can weather its present difficulties, I suspect it will remain one of those restaurants that have the epithet 'institution' attached to it, since it's now so well known. Superb service made this evening pass by very happily.