It's a sign of a great book when you dine out on its yarns. I've been doing that with Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork, a history of people through the tools used to cook and eat food. There's the theory that our jawlines evolved when we started using knives and forks to cut our food into small morsels. BC (before cutlery) our ancestors' top and bottom teeth met like a clamp to hold and tear food. So the western overbite is a relatively recent evolutionary development.
In China they’ve had our modern overbite, with top teeth closing over bottom, like the lid of a box, for centuries. This seems to be thanks to a cleaver-like Chinese knife called a tou, commonly used across Asia to chop food into tiny morsels before it is cooked and served. It seems that not only were we what we ate but we were a product of how we ate it. The sweetest detail of all is that the anthropologist who discovered this was a man called Brace.
Finely chopped food makes sense in thrifty cooking. Dinner can be cooked quickly in a hot wok. The fine chopping also means the flavours meld more easily. Cheaper vegetable ingredients can be infused with meatiness with the minimum amount of actual meat and all of it is done with small amounts of scarce firewood. Reading about those cooking methods made me hungry for Asian food, so I booked at table at Saba.
This city centre restaurant does a brisk, business-like lunch trade. Saba means “happy meeting place” in Thai, according to the company website which describes the food style as “colonial meets contemporary.”
The menu sounds delicious, but first up is a starter that seems to have lost a bit in translation from paper to plate. The gingergrass salad mainly consists of ice-cube-sized cold chunks of butternut squash. I’m a huge fan of this vegetable, but served cold, it only gets plate space if it’s been Ottolenghi-ed into a dip.
Smaller, caramelised chunks might have worked, drizzled with a fiendish dressing to give that marriage of salt, sour, sweet and spice that makes Thai food such an addictive flavour hit. There’s a single matchstick of root ginger and a pink petal of pickled ginger hidden in the mix of leaves and cherry tomatoes. I don’t get lemongrass at all, or mint. To finish it off, toasted pumpkin seeds have been scattered over. It comes across as a mismatched plate of ideas.
Across the table there are two hoisin duck rolls, papery pancakes folded around tasty brown threads of duck meat with leek and cucumber. But it’s a dry mouthful that really needs a good dunking in the hoisin sauce to get to the sticky texture you’d like to get from the contents of the pancakes alone.
Main courses are much better. There’s a generous bowl of khao yai (the name of a national park in Thailand). This is fried rice – sweet, nutty and eggy rice grains clumped together and expertly spiced with just enough flavour from the chilli paste not to scorch a trail of fire through the mouth.
I have a great seabass fillet on some wilted greens perfectly cooked so the flesh is still soft and served pickling itself gently in a sweet and sour lime dressing.
Desserts divide into good and not so good. There’s a slice of cheesecake that doesn’t taste of cheese and a better dish of pineapple compote, chewy and jammy slabs of pineapple served with a Goldenhill coconut ice cream from Wicklow.
Saba is a hardworking restaurant with a business-like approach to food. The express lunch here is cheap and the place is certainly cheerful. Service is smart and friendly. But cheap doesn’t mean dull and in some of the dishes that’s what’s happening.
Lunch for two with sparkling water and two coffees came to €53.70.
