The Ice House, Pier Restaurant, Ballina.

During a break in filming, Paolo and Tom Doorley decide to head West to The Ice House in Ballina. Even under the professional eye of Ireland's two top food reviewers, the Pier Restaurants stands the test. Here is a what they had to say.

From the road the Ice House looks like what it is, a Victorian house built for - you guessed it - keeping ice in. This was the ice that packed the Moy salmon which used to be exported in vast quantities to Scotland from Ballina. The original house has been sensitively incorporated into a new build, most of it invisible from the road. But from the river side you can see what an extraordinary piece of architecture it is. The spa and its relaxation rooms and suites are built so that the balconies open onto the river and at high tide the water laps right up to the walls. The hotel rooms are the other side of the Ice House itself, and like the spa side, the rooms have views over the river. The dining room also overlooks the river and part of it is the brick-vaulted chamber where the ice used to be stored.

Once inside the front door you find yourself in a world of chic. And I want to be clear here, not chic for Ballina, but chic as you might find it in Milan, London, Barcelona or New York. This is ultra chic boutique with high levels of design and finish. There’s a use of textures in the interior which I found delightful, amusing, interesting and unusual. Apart from the natural brick, stone and wood, there are wall finishes that had me touching them to see how they were done and I loved the occasional floor rug which looked as though they were made from river pebbles. Fine art adorns the walls, every angle holds a carefully composed feature of furniture, furnishings and objets d’art.

The dining room is called the Pier House, a part of it is the old ice storage room, a part of it is a newly constructed glass extension and a part of it is outside, where thick black limestone tables line the terrace overlooking the Moy and the Beleek forest on the far side. Although there was the odd splash of sunlight, we elected to eat indoors by the window.

Some years ago I ate in the Letterkenny Radisson, where I had a very good meal prepared by chef Gavin O’Rourke. I felt he was a little lost there, as he tried to bring innovative cooking to people who were largely uninterested. So when I saw his name on the menu I was pleased, firstly because I felt sure I was about to eat well, and secondly because the Ice House customers would be more likely to appreciate what he was doing.

There’s a simple day menu, which has many of the dishes you expect to find on a bar menu - soup, chowder, prawn cocktail, chicken wings, Caesar salad, burger and fish and chips, but that’s where the similarity ends. The presentation and execution of these dishes is well above the normal even though the prices are mid-range - for example the Ice House burger is €17 and traditional fish and chips with mushy peas is €18.

Apart from the day menu there’s a seafood menu. It’s priced by the course; starters are €15, main courses are €30 and three courses with dessert is €50. They way it works is like this: there are six kinds of fish listed; organic salmon, scallops from Newport, fillet of cod, wild seabass, tuna and fillet of brill. Six traditional sauces are listed; Provençale , beurre blanc, Hollandaise, salsa verde, shellfish sauce and sauce vierge. You decide whether you want a starter portion or a main course portion and what sauce you want with it, so that’s seventy-two possible choices. Tom chose the scallops to start and the brill for his main course and I had the prawn cocktail, followed by the wild seabass with an Hollandaise sauce.

There’s a fairly lengthy wine list of over 100 wines and among them there were plenty of good ones. Some of my personal favourites were listed, the Pieropan Soave, a good Albariño from Rias Baixas, Huia from New Zealand and the Firesteed Pinot Gris from Oregon. I handed the wine list to Tom and after just a little perusal he chose the Austrian Gruner Veltliner from Sepp Moser, a 2005 listed at €56.

Our starters arrived and the presentation of both of them was superb. There may have been only three scallops on Tom’s plate, but they were perfectly cooked and looked wonderful on the plate. My gamba prawn and crab cocktail looked like a work of art, the big prawns juicy and tender and the crab meat nicely flavoured with spicy horseradish.

The main courses too were well done, I got a taste of Tom’s brill which was served with a beurre noisette and capers - the big ones with a long tail. Like Tom’s, my fish was perfectly cooked and the Hollandaise which came separately was thick and unctuous. Both of our fish dishes came with a selection of vegetables and boiled potatoes.

We finished up with a traditional crème brulée between us which was a well made dessert. An coffees for each us brought the bill up to just over €100 for the food and €56 for the wine.