The Weir Restaurant, Ashford, Co. Wicklow.

The Weir Restaurant is a new restaurant in the Ashford House in Co. Wicklow. This is a joint venture between chef and food entrepreneur Laragh Stuart and Ashford House owners Patrick and Tracey Phelan. The idea here is to bring cool, casual dining to the good citizens of Wicklow and beyond, with a menu high on local ingredients, carefully sourced and prepared with care and flair.

The town of Ashford has been by passed in recent years, so it has been a while since I actually drove into it. The Ashford House is the first big building on the right as you come into the town from the Dublin side, and is absolutely hard to miss. This landmark licensed premises was rebuilt over ten years ago and has been an integral part of the town since.

The whole building is divided in three; at one end is a Chinese restaurant, the bar in the in centre and the Weir Restaurant takes up the final third of the façade. Just inside the door is a nice hallway, and the dining room is in on the right hand side. On first inspection it is bigger than I expected, with really high ceilings and feature laps hanging from the ceiling. There is a square bar jutting out from one wall, and marble topped tables run down the centre of the room in settings of two or four, but no doubt get squeezed together if a larger group arrive. There are a series of booth along the back wall and the colour scheme is grey, with feature mirrors breaking up the space.

We took a seat in the centre and set about looking at our menus, an early bird, which relay runs for most of the night and the A la Carte. Our waitress brought us a jug of sparkling water, free for as much as you want, and a bottle of the Connolly’s f blackcurrant and apple juice, which I haven’t come across before, but which is very good indeed and made on a family farm in Abbeyleix.

The menu features and interesting selection of dishes, with plenty of seafood and unusual salads. We could choose from potted crab and sourdough toast, spicy crab cake with salsa verde, scallops friend in chilli with horseradish cream, poached pears with tallegio cheese as starters, while the scallops were available as a main course along with pan fried monkfish in a coconut broth, hake with puy lentils, a choice of steaks from a local farm herd, a massive burger or a steak and Guinness pie with horseradish dumplings.

My friend Peter and I were pretty hungry, and were taken with the potted crab and the poached pears with tallegio cheese. Tallegio is an Italian soft cheese, perhaps one of the oldest; it’s certainly been around since the 15^th century. It has a very pungent aroma, but the taste is milder, almost fruity, and it complimented the cardamom poached pears admirably. The potted crab was delicious on the sour dough, so all in all we were off to a good start.

Next up was Peter’s main of chilli fried scallops, which worked very well as the chilli gave a little kick to the tender scallops, while my main course of lemon crusted pork was tasty, moist and pretty delicious, with an excellent, and not too thick, saffron aioli. In spite of  us being fairly full, we managed a dessert, a portion of the upside down plum tart which was really delicious, and finished our umpteenth jug of free sparkling water. (Did I mention it’s FREE)?

We liked The Weir a lot. The service is very good, the prices are reasonable and the food is top notch. Each dish has a twist, so while everyone does a steak and Guinness pie, they don’t do horseradish dumplings. The salads which accompanied each dish are exceptional, and the produce on offer throughout was certainly more in keeping with a restaurant with a higher price point. Well worth a detour off the N11 at any time.

P.S. They do home made pizzas. Properly. In a proper oven, and a fiend tells us they are brilliant.