Fitzpatrick's Pub in Carlingford

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I had reason to dip into that long-defunct food blog, The Fat Expat, this evening. I found my recipe alright, but I also found an old review of Fiztpatrick's fine public house near Carlingford.

And it made me wonder for how much time I managed to make - back in the day - for posting things to blogs: my way of compensating for the journalism I was no longer doing and the book writing I had paused as I worked out what the hell it was that publishers actually wanted (something I still, clearly, find challenging).

Anyway, this is the review I wrote of Fitzpatrick's back in 2009 - just as valid today as it was six years ago...

Eating in Ireland is truly a roller-coaster ride that lurches easily from (if you’ll excuse the term) feast to famine. When it’s good, it’s very, very good but when it’s bad it’s usually so bad that it’s an experience in itself. Sometimes the simplest things delight – bacon, cabbage and potatoes, the national dish, sounds awfully plain, but at its best it’s a revelation: a golden ‘floury’ spud, tranches of steaming pink, tender bacon and a pile of slightly crunchy, slightly salty cabbage cooked in the bacon water and running every gamut of green from the pastel light green of sun shining through winter surf to the deep green of the fresh fields in the spring.

Parsley sauce is a love it or hate it experience, but I love it, curly parsley chiffonaded into a butter-rich creamy thick sauce that drops rather than pours.

And then there are the awful disasters – these days from Irish chefs treading the same well-worn paths of wretchedness that the Brits have already blundered along - stupid cack-handed melanges of ‘Thai-style’ spices imposed on ingredients that deserve more respect, awful attempts at food with ‘molecular’ influences and, unforgivably, ‘nouveau Irish’ food – piss-poor attempts to serve classic Irish dishes in plates of clashing flavours and colours that revolt rather than delight.

This, then, is the gastronomic wilderness that is Ireland post ‘Celtic Tiger’ - it’s a dangerous place, people, a country in transition... You will always find Cork’s Ballymalloe, the mother-lode of Irish cookery, a place of wonder.

But I found an almost equally wonderous thing near Carlingford – a pub that looks so cod-Irish from the road that anyone but an American would shudder and pass it by. And yet the locals flock there in their hundreds, Les Routiers has slapped its mark on the place and so many awards decorate its walls you can almost see them in the sea of mad memorabilia that covers every surface – horizontal and vertical alike. And I include the ceiling – you have to duck at times to avoid being brained by low-hanging beams festooned in brass pumps, irons, cameras and, well, just stuff really.

Fitzpatrick’s pub should be a disaster. It’s famous, bang on the tourist trail and decorated outside with flowerbed jokes, bicycles, baths and bedsteads. They pour Guinness with a flourish of shamrock on the ‘head’, for God’s sake. Eat there. It’s expensive (you’d better be ready to shell out €30 for a main) but I loved it. When food makes me laugh, I know I’ve ‘arrived’ – and I laughed my way through dinner at Fitzpatrick’s.

We ate in the restaurant (a small area to the back of the huge, labrynthine pub) which has its own separate kitchen and a ‘local’ chef. The main kitchen had a chef from Newry, but we decided not to take the foreign food. Service to begin with was a bit patchy – our Sancerre came warm and with a lot of mucking about with the glasses, but eventually things settled down and the Fleurie that followed was a delight. The wine list is basic, smartly compiled and good.

Breads were offered around, Irish brown, white, garlic and others – and then the kitchen sent out a tiny bowl of vegetable soup as an ‘amuse geule’ – a little taste of warm, mushroom-dominated thickness that was just right for the rainy night. I took a starter of pan-fried scallops and black pudding, purposefully courting disaster. I have always hated ‘surf and turf’ dishes, believing (perhaps perversely) that if God had intended beef and shrimps to be in the same place he’d have arranged things that way rather than separating the two environments quite so effectively.

It was really good. It would have been stunning and world-class if the scallops had been slightly less cooked, had spent a couple of minutes less on the pass under lamps. But the black pudding was rich, crumbly and served with a creamy slightly sharp sauce that did it proud, almost a béarnaise but not quite. I was grinning by now, and it wasn’t the excellent Sancerre alone. Other starters taken included breaded mushrooms with garlic mayonnaise, which were pronounced good but would have been better fried and served dry rather than buttered as they were. Odd that you could get a black pudding scallop starter right and muff a breaded mushroom dish, but there you go.

My main was classic stuff – an 8oz fillet steak served on a celeriac mash (note no horseradish addition to the mash, thank God. Horseradish mashes are an invention of the devil) with a black truffle sauce and foie gras. I thought I’d go for the light option, obviously. It was impeccably executed – a delight. The steak beautifully done and the little decorations of foie gras were fried off so they were crisp outside and yet wobbled, the sauce was rich and dark, pungently contrasting the rich, buttery mash and it was all topped with crisp onion rings in a light batter. The fries that came along with it were fat, crisp and floury when cut. A bowl of crisp, green spring vegetables with a rich cream sauce and another of new potatoes in butter arrived for each pair of diners. Others had sirloin steaks, a plainer serving of huge and beautifully cooked steak and then there were plates of fresh sea-bass.

Desserts came with an attendant cardiologist. I passed and selflessly ordered an Irish coffee (yup, a shamrock of brown sugar was dusted on it. I forgave them) but others took silly things like a walnut and banana crumble tart: rich, warm and gloopy, swimming in a crème Anglais, apple tart and ice cream and the ‘special’, organic strawberries and strawberry ice cream served in a little brass bucket alongside strawberry compote and cream. It looked outré, chi-chi and crass and tasted divine.

We went off to the bar for icy glasses of Tyrconnell (Ireland’s finest single malt and a whisky that eclipses much that Scotland offers, IMHO) afterwards. Because if you’re going to be this indulgent, you might as well go mad. Good wine, outstanding food and our insanely opinionated waitress, Carrie - part entertainment and part expert guide to the menu, women's hurling and the delights of working in a restaurant with the boyfriend (‘the boyfriend’, the barman, was of course stopped and shown off to us, to his horror) meant that we all agreed our evening in Fitzpatrick’s was a one-off, a memorable evening of excellence in a convivial, warm place filled with laughter, cheer and delight.

JW's Steakhouse, Dubai

When it opened, something like 20 years ago, JW's Steakhouse was the place to go in Dubai. I kid you not. People flocked to the joint, they had to put tables outside under the staircase. You'd have to make reservations weeks in advance. Every weekend, it roared with the voices of diners, jangled with the clangour of crockery and clink of holloware. Harried staff plied the packed tables - and if you ate there often enough (or were just unbelievably important), your name was engraved on a brass plaque and glued to the top of a table.

I reviewed it for The Fat Expat seven (!) years ago:

Consistency is the true high point of this, Dubai's oldest and most established steakhouse. It's just consistently damn good, time after time after time. There are flashier joints, there are more expensive joints. But nowhere will you find a safer pair of hands.

Don't worry about the slightly naff 'brass' plaques on the tables with regulars' names on them: it's just part of the 'gentleman's club' atmosphere: dark woods, deeply studded green leather high back club chairs and beef bone napkin rings, along with the steer decorated underplates, are all part of the Texan Men's Club feel. This is not a place to take vegans, although they might serve you one if you agree to have it done rare.

I loved it then, and I love it now. We went there last night with friends. We sat at the bar and did drinks - they make a fine Martini, served in a conical, stemless glass placed into a wee glass bowl of crushed ice.

The studded leather chairs have gone, for some reason, to be replaced by a more staid green plastic upholstery, but they still nestle you like an astronaut's jumpseat. The napkins are still buttonholed and threaded through un-PC bone rings. The tablecloths are still runners. The Swan pub has gone, a terrible shame.

An amuse bouche of warm foie gras slides in front of me. Oh my word. Golly. Kapow.

The lobster bisque is still on the menu. Let's face it, there'd have been a major outbreak of senseless violence that would have made Grand Theft Auto seem like a LaLaLoopsy convention if it wasn't.

It's served to you with cream dropped in it: a dark, textured and rich soup marbled with cream and dotted with delicate little dots of lobster meat. Flambeed brandy is poured over it. And on the side are parmesan shavings, marie rose sauce and flat croutons to bear the combinations of stuff you choose to precede/antecede each spoon of rich soup. My Last Meal would include this soup.

Mind you, my Last Meal would make Mr Creosote blanch.

They have a wine that has long amused me - and which I order every time I go there without fail: Goats Do Roam. It's a South African Plsssp to the French (I looked the word up, you have to pronounce it properly) and it's a fine drink, too.

That went - as it always does - nicely with my 7 ounce fillet (medium rare), onion rings, gratinated potato (they used to do dauphinoise, sadly now lapsed), baby spinach in garlic, spring vegetables and asparagus in cheese sauce. Others had 16oz T-bones (glorious) and stuff.

They do a 32oz T-bone. One day. When I'm bigger.

All this richness and finery comes with bearnaise and pepper sauces. Order extra, you get piles of extra. This is a good thing.

The steak's perfect. It's just stopped mooing, it's tender and it tastes like a dead cow. The other stuff is bang on - hot, crispy, juicy, green, fluffy, crunchy, sweet, piquant, unctuous. Umami is in there too, but it better get to the back of the queue.

There's a lot of nomnomnom going on at this point. The place is 75% empty, the table next ours consists of three noisy Levantine ladies, all 'I swear to God you don't know me if you have seen what this guy did next' bluster. They don't even manage to cut through the food bliss going on.

At Dhs 2,300 for four, the bill's half what you'd pay - and we did not stint, I can assure you - at the priceless Traiteur (Park Hyatt), let alone cruddy places like Rhodes', Pierre-White's, the Rivington or The Ivy. The meal was utterly faultless, the service flawless. We were at home, fed like kings and totally comfortable throughout.

We didn't do dessert. There was no point. Chocolates arrived in a steaming dry-ice laden bowl. And in an instant we're upstairs in Hofbrauhaus.

And that, my dears, is an entirely different story...

Down Home On The Farm in Dubai

 

It reminded me of the scene in Terry Gilliam's brilliant 'Brazil' where our hapless hero and his heroine are driving into the sunset down a road lined with advertising hoardings. We had turned off the Emirates Road into the Al Barari development only to find ourselves surrounded by a wall of verdant greenery. The road all the way to The Farm café/restaurant is like a drive through a tropical paradise, albeit one only a few feet thick - on the other side lies desert strewn with rubbish and 'project on hold' construction sites. We continued down the paradise alley to the restaurant's car park and wandered in to the achingly chic white and wood of The Farm - itself surrounded by a veneer of lush gardens and water park, all fenced in from the outside - a sort of canvas backdrop you almost feel will tear if you put your hand out and push against it.

We were late to the party, for sure - everyone who's anyone has already 'discovered' The Farm, but we needed the Niece From Heaven and family coming out to give us the impetus to plan an eating out in Dubai, having previously forsworn the city's pricey dining pleasures. You need to book well ahead, the place is popular without a doubt - and for somewhere as out of the way as that to be popular says something, no?

We arrived on time for our booking - they had called the day before to confirm this and also SMSed confirmation. The table wasn't ready. There was a little confusion, we were a largish party of seven adults a baby and TNFH but soon sorted out. I handed back the stained napkin sitting under my cutlery to the waiter and we settled down to...

Oh horrors. It's only a bloody iPad menu. I won't repeat my previously stated views regarding this crime against commonsense. Actually, stuff it, I will. It's lunacy. In this case, it's made even worse by iPad stands that are too worn to stand up reliably. The application is better structured than the last one I came across, but still and all that. A bloody iPad. And yes, when the bill came, I did realise who was paying for the 'sledgehammer to crack a walnut' technology.

The menu is tempting, for all the iPaddery. There's a full-on Thai menu and a mixture of salad things and bigger offerings. I played with the idea of lamb shank and bailed at the last minute which turned out to be a mistake.

We had a baby. We had asked for a baby chair when we had booked. We asked again when we arrived. We asked when we got to the table. We asked twice more. Eventually an Ikea baby chair pitched up. We'd likely have been faster nipping out to buy it. Juggling a baby and an iPad menu that won't stand up is not, by the way, for the faint hearted.

Tomato tatin as a starter. Gorgeous, salty goaty cheesy tapenadey and tomatoey. It came before the drinks we'd ordered. Starter finished, the drinks turned up. My peach iced tea was precisely what it said on the box and much enjoyed. I'd have enjoyed it more, likely ordered a second, if it had come before the food. Others had the spiced jumbo prawns or had decided to share plates of bruschetta. All were making oo and aa sounds.

Yeah, clearly hated that one. Loathed it. Yuk. 

But we did have to look at the debris for an aching age...

Done, we looked at those plates for aeons. They were taken just as the main courses arrived - in fact, they waited for the table to be cleared before they could serve them. I had the beef papaya salad, very nice and appealing to the eye, if perhaps a little light on the protein. But that was my fault - I knew I was up for a solid chunk of lamb shank, so no salad was going to hit the spot. Others had the couscous halloumi salad, the corn-fed chicken, the salmon. Much pleasure was derived from this food. We had coffee, which was nice. We paid the stiffish bill (around Dhs140 per head, two couples having shared starters and most had salad mains), had a wander around the garden for obligatory tourist selfies and went for a drive to discover the other side of the green Reality Wall before heading for home.

I'd go back, for sure. The Farm has lovely food, a nice 'feel' to the place and a beautiful, if metaphorically loaded, setting - but the service was pretty shambolic. I broke my rule about never taking photos of my food for Instagram again. Which could be said to be a compliment.