Annamoe, Garryhinch, Co. Laois.
Even frequent meals out can become a chore after a while, albeit a luxury one. I put this down to a lot of sameness. Paolo recently remarked over lunch that it is now possible to go into a restaurant and not bother with the menu, instead ordering some thing like, “I‘ll have whatever you do with goats cheese to start, followed by your version of pork belly and whatever crème Brule is on today”
Occasionally something surprising happens, and you find a great meal where perhaps you weren’t expecting it. Step forward John and Martha Davies who own a restaurant in Portarlington Golf Course called Courtfields. I got an e mail from John a while back and took a look at his website. All fairly standard golf club stuff until I noticed the dessert menu. It’s long, it’s perhaps a seventies revival and its all home made. If they can make all this from scratch, I thought, we have to try this.
The golf club is about a mile outside town, and it is a modern clubhouse. The restaurant is on the first floor, overlooking the eighteenth green. The décor is nice, the room is airy and the welcome is big. We took a table by the window on a warm summer’s day and took our menus.
There are about eight starters and include things like prawn cocktail, melon fan, chicken liver pate and breaded mushrooms with garlic dip. Main courses are a little more exciting, there’s bacon and cabbage, cod in batter, salmon en croute, pan fried fresh hake and a couple of steaks. Deirdre doesn’t want a starter, so I pick the prawn cocktail and for the main courses Deirdre goes for the cod, while I choose the hake with two sauces.
We got our drinks and while we waited we watched the players approach shots to the eighteenth, which amuses me no end, and even my golf averse wife gets into it. The starter duly arrives and from here the afternoon changes to delight. OK, so a prawn cocktail is a prawn cocktail, but on this one the lettuce is really finely chopped with cucumber and the sauce is freshly made and tangy and delicious. It comes with home-made brown bread, which is easily the nicest I have had in years.
The main courses continue to surprise. Deirdre’s cod is in a light crisp batter; it’s cooked to perfection, has delicious mushy peas and doesn’t come with chips at all, but the most delicious home made potato and bacon rosties. My hake is scattered with browned breadcrumbs, and sits atop a little rostie. The seasonal vegetable isn’t the boiled to death version, but the oven cooked with sesame seeds and garlic version. The two sauces are a spectacular hollandaise and a very nice cream and chive, the hollandaise being the winner here. The fish was of course perfect.
Then it’s on to the desserts, and from a long list of favourites we decide on a terrific sticky toffee pudding for Deirdre and rhubarb and apple tart with custard for me. Both were great.
Over the last few years food has been driven by fashion as much as anything. John and Martha have produced a menu at odds with that, but with John being a great pastry chef, and Martha having a great touch with fish, they have raised some old reliable to a very high standard indeed. This is one of the best meals I have had this year and I heartily recommend you give them a try if you are in this neck of the woods. Fabulous food.
