It is a given that the French invented restaurants. But when? The accepted story used to be that restaurants were a by-product of the French Revolution, or so the story goes. When the aristocracy lost their heads, their newly unemployed chefs opened dining rooms for the plain people of Paris.
In his book The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik draws on the work of (mostly women) historians to debunk that myth. Yes, the French did invent them. But restaurants were born 20 years before the Revolution. The word "restaurant" was an 18th-century term for a dish, not a place. A restaurant was a chicken or beef broth which was served as a health food to fastidious diners who didn't want to share tables in the beery bowels of a tavern. The first French "restaurants" were the fro-yo bars of their day, prescribed by doctors and safe for women to dine in without being mistaken for an item on the menu.
Dublin’s Les Frères Jacques opened beside the Olympia Theatre on Dame Street in 1986. She has remained solidly there in the ebb and flow of restaurants, bars and Spars that have come and gone. Now silted up around her are a strip of fast food joints aimed at the passing tourist trade. Even Les Frères Jacques seems to have set out her stall to lure tourists with the promise of a two-course €18 lunch.
You go into this restaurant through a side door which heightens the impression of entering Madame’s Good Room. The kitchen is a distant invisible place, although the seafood and fish plate is presented raw by the waiter before you order. The central jewel in this briny crown is a live lobster who twitches when he’s stroked down the length of his exoskeleton.
The room is painted in a cocoa brown, with sepia photographs of French women on the beach in full black crinolines with black umbrellas, family gatherings, food markets and garden parties. Linen curtains finish off the look, and two tablecloths – one white, one beige – are arranged on the empty tables.
Les Frères Jacques has a reputation as an expensive place and when you look down the lunch menu, which is a mirror of the evening offering, you can see why. Yes, there may be a special two- or three-plate deal but there are enough extras to rival a crowd scene from Ben Hur. My native oysters are €10.50 extra. The "signature" dish, sole meunière, is a hefty €15 extra. So an €18 bargain lunch quickly turns into a €43.50 blow-out.
The good news is that wines with a Monday or Tuesday lunch are half price, only by the bottle mind, not by the glass. We choose a bottle of Rully, a French chardonnay which promises a palate of, among other things, “crushed stones, grapefruit, butter and nuts”, which gets a nomination in the Ridiculous Tasting Notes awards for 2013. Despite this, it’s delicious.
And the point is it’s not 2013 in Les Frères Jacques. With the food they serve here, you could be in Zenon Geldof’s 1920s Dame Street restaurant Cafe Belge (now a chipper), or in Jammet’s with a Beatle dining in one corner. We are in a place that is unapologetically, time-warpingly old-fashioned and as French as a Pixar movie about a French restaurant.
You can picture Quirke and Phoebe dining here in one of John Banville's 1950s Benjamin Black books. And Quirke would claim he's not drinking because he's only having white wine.
And they do the classics well. Warm French bread has the proper biscuity crunch to its crust and tastes a world away from the rubbery sticks we call baguettes. A duck confit (€3.50 extra, folks) on a potato galette with an onion marmalade has that sweet-savoury thing nailed, with salty, crisp-skinned duck and onions that have been sugared to ramp up their natural sweetness. I get six native oysters (one big fella and five tiddlers) with a pot of shallot vinegar and a muslin-wrapped lemon. They’re creamy and luscious as wild oysters – which grow more slowly than farmed ones – tend to be.
Sole meunière is the epiphany dish that set Julia Child on her French cooking adventure. That’s how classic it is. Here, it swims to you on a fish-shaped plate in a sea of melted brown butter with parsley. It’s a nice whole piece of black sole, but the side vegetables are a real letdown – green beans, broccoli and a peeled spud that tastes of dishwater. They’re veg of ye-olden-times when no one cared about veg. A beef en croute, with a lamb cutlet (€9 extra) is competently cooked meat, still pink in the middle of its crisp pastry lagging jacket. Sadly, it too comes with the Vegetables that Time Forgot.
A chocolate mousse served in a cupcake ceramic is grainy and tastes like it might have split, although it has a lovely smooth Cointreau crème anglaise in a jug for compensation.
“Who eats lunch like this anymore?” my husband asks, leaning back in a butter, cream and wine daze. The answer that day is no one, apart from us and a young female American intern (in an empty restaurant you hear everything, including the phone conversation the waiter has about the bins). You step back out into the laneway and the 21st century. Do they care about being dated and cartoonishly French? I think, like an Edith Piaf tribute act, probably not.
Lunch for two came to €124.14 (including another extra: the 10 per cent service charge).
Verdict: 6.5/10 Nostalgia food but at a price that puts it in the Michelin bracket
Les Freres Jacques, 74 Dame St, Dublin 2, tel: 01- 679 4555
Facilities: Down steep narrow stairs
Music: Michael Buble at one point
Food Provenance: None
Wheelchair access: Yes
