I missed Mint. Dylan McGrath’s Michelin star restaurant closed before I was lucky enough to land a reviewing gig. By the time midrange Rustic Stone opened, McGrath had grown into a full-blown and slightly scary celebrity chef. Fade St Social followed, and I hoped for echoes of Mint, undiluted Dylan, on the plates. But it didn’t happen. The chef with the country’s best palate was doing crowd-pleasing lobster rolls in a buzzy bar where it wasn’t about the food.
Dylan’s empire is a successful marriage of brand and business smarts. Who needs to reach for the stars when the “not about the food” joints seem to be what the market wants? Then last year he opened Taste. It wasn’t a return to fine dining, he said. Instead it was a place to experiment with high-minded ingredients and show us diners a thing or two about, well, taste.
Taste At Rustic, to give it its full name, is upstairs from Rustic Stone. It’s at one end of the turreted Victorian glory that is the Georges St Arcade, or South Street Markets as it was once known. You walk up through two floors of bar to a surprisingly lovely top room, glowing golden thanks to the mix of great lighting, lots of copper and those gorgeous red bricks stripped back to show off their character.
We get a table in the main room where chefs work at their stations behind an l-shaped bar. They’re dressed in black with headbands and earpieces like a ninja security detail. I imagine a Gary Larson cartoon of what they’re hearing through those earpieces. Whale sounds or the innermost thoughts of the diners, who knows?
The menu is exhausting, making me wish one of us had been here before so we could cut to the chase. Our excellent waitress takes us through it deftly with the air of someone who does this a lot.
And that’s me done grumbling. (Almost). Because most of what we eat is memorably good. Like the first delight: teeny cones filled with avocado, the freshest of scallions and sesame seeds, simple pure creaminess with the sting of sweet onion bound up in crunch with a nutty sesame cone.
Scallops are halved and then blow-torched so briefly they are still gorgeously and quiveringly raw inside. Each is separated from the next with what the menu tells us is avocado and yuzu puree but which tastes deliciously more apple than citrus. A promised black garlic crumb doesn’t seem to have made it onto the plate. I suspect it would have bridged the two kinds of sweetness pretty damn well.
Three nigiri are great, the best the kabayaki eel, meaty and rich with toasted sesame seeds. A pickled mackerel is good but doesn’t taste pickled and the tuna akami, the darker less fatty meat from the top of the fish, is small but luscious. Better still are the cup-sized bowls of dashi, one light miso with cockles (actually one lone cockle) and mushrooms. Its taste is listed as “salt” but it’s got a lot more to it than that. Fresh coriander still tastes of itself, added just before serving, finishing a rolling mouth filling set of riffs on mushroominess. The darker miso dashi manages to be both sweet and fantastically savoury. There’s no sign of pumpkin or tofu in the mix but we’re told it may have dissolved in the broth.
“Fermanagh blackened” is a six-ounce sirloin served on a pot-bellied stove with glowing coals on which the meat arrives still cooking. I’m happy to whip mine off to eat it rare juicy and sweet inside, bitterly scorched outside – the best steak I’ve eaten all year. We have the deep-fried sweetcorn beignets, gobstoppers of corn with liquid creamy corn inside. Two other sides fall flatter. A seaweed salad appears to be bagged leaves with a lone strand or two or seaweed. There are lovely ginger-marinated mushrooms to jazz it up but where’s the seaweed? Small potatoes baked in salt would have been better if a better variety of spud had been chosen. There’s a paprika foam in a bowl that seems out of place but good. A second bowl contains a red pepper jus so horrid it deserves to be cryogenically preserved and sent into the future to be lethally injected into our robot overlords by the human resistance league. It’s a jarring note in a delicious night.
I love my Japanese smoked cheesecake because the texture reminds me of the cheesecake I used to make as a kid, tipping white powder from its cellophane bag into milk and whipping it up into fluffiness. There’s popcorn ice cream that tastes properly like popcorn. But a doughnut stick is a plait of leaden dough with a salted miso dipping sauce that tastes a bit too much like a thicker version of the soup with which we started. It’s a dessert that smacks of something that started life as a great idea but slumped into an evergreen staple not always as brilliantly executed as it could be.
Those small dips aside, I really like Taste. It’s not too up itself yet not so relaxed they’re slapping it out. Dylan McGrath has pared the food back to where it matters: sensational tastes. And I’ll take flavour over flounce any day.
Dinner for two with tap water and mint tea came to €94.50.
Music: Nice low key
Facilities: Fine
Vegetarian options: Good
Food provenance: Limited to none
Wheelchair access: No
Verdict: 8/10 The Dylan machine takes things up a delicious notch
