It’s as if a parfumeuse had a hand (or a nose) in constructing the assemblage.įermoyle plates, Riedel glasses, a hand-cranked grill and a stunning menu – what’s happening in Naas? It’s degrees of separation. Neighbourhood: sweetbreads with charred corn and onionĪnd then it’s on to dessert, a confection that is part baked Alaska enveloping a parfait of Velvet Cloud yogurt (€11), and a load of other bits – yuzu apple sorbet, sorrel ice, and an apple ice wine jelly with Scoby energy. A bottle of Vina Albergada Tempranillo (€38), from a well-chosen wine list that quickly heads north of €50, does an honourable job of working through our meal. Neighbourhood: squid noodles with pickled kohlrabi and toasted kelp in a smoked-bacon dashiĭuck breast (€34), from the larger-plate section, is cooked with precision, the fat rendered, the skin crisp, and the flesh rare without feral minerality. There is no spoon – a mistake, perhaps? I lift the bowl and slug it right down. Squid noodles (€14), with strips of pickled kohlrabi and shards of toasted kelp, are bathed in a smoked-bacon dashi that is so good I want to finish every drop. Oh dear, there’s probably no topping that, yet all the dishes that follow are delicious. Neighbourhood: Dublin Bay prawns wrapped in lardo, on rosemary skewers with aioli Savoury head juices are spun into an ephemeral emulsion with a touch of chicken fat, vanishing from the tongue with a carnal memory of sweetness, pleasure and a longing for more. Few people relish the prospect of sucking a prawn’s head – and I’m not going to suggest you do, at least not today – but this aioli does all the visceral hard work. They are local, landed fresh on our shores, and when they’re delicately grilled, topped with a yielding slice of opaque lardo, and placed in a square, around a pool of aioli that is worthy of an Only Fans page, you need to pay attention. They are not farmed in the southern hemisphere, frozen, shipped a zillion miles and slapped in batter. These are quite different from tiger or king prawns. Neighbourhood: Bone marrow with sourdough flatbreadĭublin Bay prawns (€12) – sometimes called langoustines – are threaded on to four sprigs of rosemary. Yes, the produce is top tier and seasonal, but what you get on this one-pager menu of snacks, small plates and larger dishes is a blast of sheer joy.Ĭomté croquettes (€8) are dabbed with dill emulsion and jalapeno, yielding a warm stream of loveliness beef tartare is mixed with smoked eel on beef-dripping potatoes (€10) and tender sweetbreads, deep-fried in golden breadcrumbs (€15) are, I am surprised to discover, quite happy to be paired with charred corn and onion in a rich sauce punctuated with black garlic. It is sublime.īut worthiness, backstories and tasting menus are not what this food is about. Sourdough starter, which otherwise would have been discarded, brings a distinctive nip to each quarter of the crisp circle of flatbread, waiting to be loaded with the hot, trembling marrow, which is mixed through with a light touch of roast onion, thyme and Coolatin cheese. But cook it for a few seconds too long and the marrow starts to pool and stream away.Īt Neighbourhood, a rather beautiful new restaurant in Naas that opened in December, the bone marrow with sourdough flatbread (€14) is a Flintstones-size chunk, hewn vertically with a cleaver, introduced to a polite level of heat and placed on a folded white napkin in an aesthetic high-low collision. Canons of roasted bone, day-old sourdough toast, and a parsley salad. It’s a much-copied dish, a nose-to-tail icon that has been on the menu at St John since Henderson opened his renowned London restaurant, in 1994. Roast bone marrow drives a resolute Fergus Henderson stake into the ground. Sometimes you look at a menu and there it is: the money shot.
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