To me, my birthday means pretending that my life is more profound and fancy than the current reality. This year it meant French and a la carte. This time I travelled literally two buildings away from my first review, Peploe's, to La mère Zou, 22, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland.
This is a tiny and cosy restaurant, where you forget the outside world for a couple hours, therefore perfect for my idea of celebrating another year in the bank. Even though the tables were close together, it did not bother me at all this time.
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After being swiftly seated, we were given bread, butter, and olives, which were tiny and fairly awkward to eat, yet very delicious.
Their dinner menu can be accessed here
My food:
Salade de Tomates Heirloom - Heirloom tomato salad, St Maure goat cheese crumbs, basil puree and chargrilled focaccia
The only vegetarian starter (fancy restaurants really just do not care, do they??), yet I was pleased. Less choice usually does mean better quality after all.
As someone who thinks vinegar is completely ridiculous and inedible, I loved the tomatoes, marinated in balsamic, and together with the greens and goat cheese it was just a lively and inspiring start.
If you looked through the menu, you will have noticed that the only other vegetarian option on the whole menu is... yes, another salad. Veggies are cool and all, but I went for the Filet de Saumon et Langoustine - Salmon and Dublin bay prawns, ravioli of crab, prawn consomme, broad beans, sorel. Whereas it was fancy and you need a masters degree to eat the langoustines (I was confused since I did not get a water bowl, which suggested that I needed to eat them with my cutlery????), at the end it just felt like a warm, homely meal. It was delicious, yet the least memorable meal taste-wise.
At this point I would like to point out how very friendly our waitress was, she just made the night more fun, which is rare. Props to you.
I chose my dessert from the specials board which was a Belgian waffle with ice cream and chocolate sauce. There is no complicated theory to this one, just a damn good waffle with rich ice cream and a mini jug of chocolate sauce, and who doesn't love that?
Nice wine (Chablis, 2011) throughout and a good espresso at the end completed it all very nicely and I left the restaurant ready to enter my third decade (as long as I could eat meals like that)
We paid ~€150 for two people.
Yet again, no place for vegans unless you are happy with chips and salad. Vegetarians can enjoy some salads, which is prefect, if that's your thing.
A.