Refuel: Dax Café Bar ****
23 Pembroke Street, D2. tel: 01 6629381
TYPICAL DISH: Rillettes
RECOMMENDED: Tuna tartar
THE DAMAGE: €132.80 for eight tapas, two desserts, one coffee, one bottle and four glasses of wine
ON THE STEREO: Diana Ross
AT THE TABLE: Birthday parties
Don't ever arrange to meet somebody at a restaurant on Pembroke Street. Nobody knows where it is. Matters are further complicated when there are two restaurants bearing the same name on the very same street.
There's Dax and then there's Dax Café Bar. The potential for confusion and misunderstanding is ramped up even further when the person you arrange to meet is, how shall we say, not from around here. As is the case with the flaxen-haired Sasanach -- or the Posh Blonde -- as she's known to regular readers of this column.
Another observation: ladies of a certain age should not wear vinyl jeggings and a leopard-print coat if there's a chance they will wind up sitting alone at a bar drinking wine. It does not look good. It attracts unwanted attention from onlookers with a predilection for cliché and smut.
These were some of the thoughts that entered my mind as I twirled a glass of Château des Eyssards Bergerac between my increasingly twitchy fingers and punched redial on my iPhone. No answer. Straight to voicemail.
Eventually after three texts and half a dozen redials, the phone is answered. I hear the Posh Blonde's husband -- Mange Tout -- on the other end. I tell him she's half an hour late. He says she left the house an hour ago -- without her phone. I tell him I'm on my own drinking wine. Getting madder by the minute. "Try being married to her," he says. It occurs to me that something might have happened to her. But Mange Tout knows better: she's cycling around looking for the place.
I try to get him to stay on the phone. But Bin Laden: Shoot To Kill is about to begin on Channel Four and the delivery guy from Konkan is banging on his door with a curry. "Gotta go," he says, and suddenly I am on my own again. So I reread the menu until in the mirror, I see a dash of blondeness sweeping through the door, all floral, windswept and breathless. "Wow!" she says. "You look like a hooker! I thought we were meeting next door and I forgot my phone." Would Mange Tout forgive me if I grabbed a steak knife and ran her through? He'd probably thank me.
By now I was so ravenous I could have licked the print off the menu. It was tapas, but not really tapas -- more a roll call of classic French appetisers: chicken liver parfait, charcuterie, sauteed duck and mushrooms, smoked salmon. Roughly priced at between €6.50 and €9.50 a piece. We ordered fast and we ordered big, with a couple of glasses of Picpoul de Pinet and a bowl of queen olives stuffed with almonds to get us on our merry way.
Pretty soon we were elbow deep in a Gallic feast. Unusually runny Duck rillettes (€8) seemed to me an Armagnac, prune and garlic-laden delight. It came with spears of crunchy sourdough toast, and had I been presented with nothing else to eat that night, I wouldn't have complained. "No, no," the Blonde cried, "you have to try the tuna tartar" (€8.50) -- four dense little cylinders of minced tuna, lemon juice, shallot and sesame seeds. A harmony of flavours that tickled and teased and because we had just two apiece, left us hankering for more. Stylishly presented too, with a perfectly dressed rocket salad that was more tousled than tossed.
The seduction continued with a spoon of crab meat dropped into a spicy bath of tomato coulis (€7), with avocado for a creamy finish -- posh gazpacho, you could have called it. I was, by now, having problems with the tapas tag that Dax Café Bar has adopted. It's a fashionable theme, but doesn't work on several counts: the food is unequivocally French, it's refined and beautifully presented. It's not casual, it demands your full attention. And you really won't feel inclined to share it.
The only exception to this was the bowl of calamari rings (€8.50), which were fresh and springy, if slightly clumped together and wanting a squeeze of lemon. Perfectly good in your typical tapas place, but it failed to reach the high notes set by the rest of the cast at Dax Café Bar. In fact, they looked downright dreary beside a plate of golden baked fillets of lemon sole (€9.50), speckled with fava beans and sweet, juicy diced tomato; nor could they hold a candle to the dense meaty flavour of the pork pastilla (€9) with its gorgeously sticky fig coulis.
Eating at Dax Café Bar was like going on a date that neither of you wants to end. Half-way through it you start looking for excuses to do it all again. To prolong the pleasure, you order more wine, and a couple of desserts (€6.50) you know you shouldn't really have -- creamy peach melba and a decadent chocolate tart that almost stops your heart. Everything about the place is perfectly pitched: the room, the lighting, the service. You wonder how you could have walked by and missed it, or mistaken it for the place next door. How? Because it was pretending to be something it's not. Tapas, my eye.
- Aingeala Flannery
Originally published in
