A friend in London is a member of a very select book club which meets once a month in an expensive restaurant. Everyone gets a turn to nominate a book and a place to eat, and God help you if you don't come up with a new and exciting venue as well as a challenging read. This lot have eaten at the River Cafe and the Ivy, and they also managed to get through Ulysses.
Our book club is a little tame by comparison. We also meet once a month but in each other's houses, around a platter of cheese and crackers and the odd packet of fancy chocolate biscuits.
This month, though, we decided to eat out, since some members are away - anyway, we deserved it after ploughing through Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. The plan was to go to Zafraans, that newish Indian restaurant on Lower Stephens Street with the big glass facade. We didn't book - figuring that if we had to wait for a table, where better to do that than the Long Hall pub across the road.
We pitched up at nine o'clock to find a big steel shutter firmly down over the door and a note fluttering in the breeze: Closed due to water shortage! A great pity since the menu is intriguingly long and incomprehensible and, by peeking around the sand-blasted bits in the window, we could see that it was pretty cool on the inside. Another time perhaps but in the meantime - where can five girls eat after nine o'clock without having to go into Temple Bar?
Mange Tout on Baggot Street might not have been the ideal location for a noisy book club, but it was open and it had a table so off we went. This used to be l'Ecrivain and, before that, Peacock Alley, so it is obviously a lucky place for chefs to start out in. Maybe the idea is that you do a few years there, become very hot and then get backing to open a tremendously chic restaurant elsewhere. If so, good luck to Brian Beattie who is a brilliant cook.
The restaurant is in the basement of a Georgian house on the corner of Fitzwilliam Street with black and white chequered steps leading down to the door. It brought us back to our Leeson Street days, as did the distinct smell of damp in the waiting area just inside the door. Luckily we didn't have to wait, but were shown straight through to our table, nicely positioned beneath a window and beside a radiator. The only other diners were a couple holding hands and a large group of Italian men who made no attempts to ogle us or pinch bottoms.
The room is painted a nice safe red and is certainly warm and welcoming, although that is more down to the attentive staff than any decorative touches. In fact, looking closer, it turned out to be a dull sort of a room with a handful of framed still lifes of fruit and pastoral scenes hung too high on the walls to disguise the fact that they are abysmal prints. A dreadfully dreary tapestry takes up a good bit of one wall, looking as though it might be covering up some more damp, or a crack. Still, the tables are nicely made up with damask cloths, starched napkins and high-stemmed wine glasses.
All a la carte, it is an adventurous menu that tries very hard to please and in most cases pleased us very much. The service is Michelin star level - charming and efficient without being oily and obsequious. There was none of that cheek that groups of women frequently have to put up with in restaurants. Last time I spent an evening eating out with girlfriends, the waitress swanned up with a batch of main courses, stood at the head of the table and roared "Listen up, ladies!"
Last orders are at 11 p.m., so we had plenty of time to peruse the menu. We were starving and had soon eaten all the tiny, warm, white rolls and dark brown bread. Starters are light, though I managed to find something more substantial with a richly coloured parsley, spinach and parmesan soup drizzled with oil and with, rather bizarrely, a poached oyster floating around in it. This is one way to get the incredibly sea fresh taste of oyster without having to look at its yawning innards.
The very rich soup was a sensational shade of green - they should match it on a paint chart and sell buckets of it on the way out. Fiona found her seared scallops a little less satisfying. They were delicious but very small, so tiny, in fact, that she compared them to buttons on a shirt.
Californian salad was a better choice - a heap of salad leaves with roasted tomatoes and a good dressing. Tomato and basil tart was a pretty arrangement of tomato, mozzarella and basil sitting on a disc of pale pastry, beautifully coloured and fresh tasting but a bit too loosely arranged to be called a tart.
Eivlin had not ordered a starter, but our waiter brought her some of the soup served in a demi tasse with a coffee spoon.
As she is a dainty type of girl, it was exactly what she wanted.
Between courses we got sorbet in champagne flutes. It was fluffy pink stuff that nobody could quite identify. "It's a bit like chilled Peg's Leg," said Eivlin. No, it was pink grapefruit.
Onwards to the main - I had been looking forward to my mille feuille of pasta with goats cheese filling. I imagined this as a creamy lasagne-like concoction but it was far more complicated edifice with a squiggle of deep fried pasta sitting on top of goat's cheese, over more fried pasta, then spinach, then tomato and the odd chopped-up olive.
It was all a bit tall and messy and complicated for its own good. The accompanying chunks of roasted fennel and red onion were the best thing on the plate.
Fiona's monkfish came teetering on top of a monumental pile of freshly cooked chopped vegetables, a medley of carrots, beans and spring onions but oddly no mange-touts. She found it heavy going, especially with only a small and delicate bit of fish to go with it.
Daube of beef came sitting on a similar array of veg, while a breast of chicken was stuffed with greens and perched on a heap of mash. All the vegetables were totally fresh and firm, and they came on the plate, not limply stranded on a side dish.
We certainly got enough vitamins to keep us going for a week. Two bottles of wine, a Shiraz and a Chardonnay, were polished off pretty quickly and, when they were empty, the waiter didn't try to push more on us, but kept the mineral water coming.
We had two desserts between us - a fabulously fresh stewed rhubarb with strawberries and a decent lemon tart with a blow-torched top to it. This came with a brandy snap basket that was all snap - we were lucky to escape with our teeth intact - filled with, of all things, basil sorbet.
This food is as good as you will get in Dublin and it's not exorbitant. But don't go there if you have nothing to say to each other because there is very little to distract the eye. The bill for five, with three large bottles of fizzy Ballygowan, coffees all around and two bottles of wine came to £144 without service.
Mange Tout Restaurant, 112 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2 - phone (01) 6767866. Open for lunch Tuesday to Friday and for dinner, Tuesday to Saturday
