For some years now Niall Sabongi has existed as a kind of piscine pimpernel on the Dublin dining scene, appearing here and there like a razor-clam’s siphon poking from the tide-retreating sand. Various seafood ventures have risen to the surface only to sink without trace, but all have been bound together with an apparent passion for and desire to champion the bounty of our waters. Sometimes an idea lands, sometimes you land nothing. I believe that The Salty Buoy food truck is still afloat in some capacity – those Hake Kievs! To my near-eternal regret I never made it to The Saltwater Grocery in Terenure, that sounded really quite interesting. The work with SSI – Sustainable Seafood Ireland – is to be commended. I suppose he first came to my attention with Klaw, his ‘crab-shack’ concept on Crown Alley. It was an awkward space but one of the few spots in town where you could slurp oysters without someone solicitously placing a napkin into your lap and inquiring of your credit rating. The enterprise that has proven most enduring is The Seafood Café, just around the corner on Spranger’s Yard.
The corner is a very familiar one to me. I’m relaying this from my place of ‘business’ a couple of doors down the street and my current wife lived in a former life above the restaurant itself. Alan across the street in John J Cooke & Co mends my old watch every now and then when it runs out of time. It’s a true microcosm of Temple Bar. It has also latterly become popular with the young balaclava-sporting set which is lamentable. That piece that somebody forwarded me on WhatsApp about a team of Garda scientists using a DNA sample from the late Lugs Branigan to create a squad of super-cops designed to clean up our cobbled streets has proven to be errant nonsense. I’m beginning to mistrust the internet. If only there was some way to fact-check these stories. Whatever. Re-fund the police. Nevertheless – The Seafood Café remains a great place to eat oysters and that’s reason enough to belly up to the bar. The new Sunday lunch programme might be an even better one.
With menus (as with early-in-the-relationship sexual manoeuvres) if you’re explaining you’re losing. The satisfaction it’s attempting to deliver should be readily understood. It’s easy to get down with this concept – you choose how you’d like to do it by selecting a shared main course (and a couple of sides) and the restaurant basically does the rest, sending out rounds of snacks to get everyone in the mood and drinks to loosen things up. LFG. Your choice of main determines the price point and begins at €45 per person (on this occasion) with a quite marvellous-sounding dish of Roast Hake with Lemon Potatoes, Olives and Feta. You could almost be in Greece (were it not for the howling wind and relentless rain outside). If you feel like pushing the boat out €75 pp buys you the Lobster Thermidor. I’m here for a particular Halibut presentation that I’ve heard a lot about, costing €65. Pimpin’ but not splashing it about.
Your choice of loosener is a Bloody Mary, a ‘Pint of Plain’ or a Black Velvet, so no choice at all. The bloodies don’t skimp on the Mary and come topped with an oyster so there is indeed eating and drinking on it. You might want to hit yours up with a couple of jolts of Tabasco. It’s a good way to start anything on a Sunday afternoon and works a treat with our first snack of sweet little queenie scallops grilled on skewers with jalapeños and cherry tomatoes. There’s a dollop of smokey, silky baba ghanoush dusted with tart sumac to underscore the Levantine lean. Thick slices of firm cured Clare Island salmon arrive next with blood orange and capers, the plate brought together with a quickening chardonnay vinegar dressing.
I’m very partial to halibut, of the prime fish landed by our trawlers (a list that includes turbot, black sole and dory) it’s possibly my favourite. There’s a particular clean delicacy to its napery-white flesh that appeals to me over the others. I’ve seen specimens broader than manhole-covers and thicker than the Yellow Pages. (For younger readers – the Yellow Pages was an analogue method of accessing basic information that did not re-orient your neural pathways toward an appreciation of the tenets of national socialism.) The fish that was broken down to give us this this ‘Rack of Halibut’ was of a good size. It displays deft fish-butchery too – centre cutting through the spine to leave two meaty tranches from the top and bottom of the animal with those ‘ribs’ giving the appearance of French trimming. It has been weighted and cooked on a charcoal grill until the succulent flesh slips from the bone with a suggestion of motion.
It slips into an outrageously good chicken butter sauce that has intruded upon my thoughts for weeks. Eli, the impossibly young looking chef who serves it to us, explains that it is made by reducing chicken stock ‘almost down to caramel’ before whipping butter in with lemon juice and zest for brightness. It is an outstanding dish, simplicity made possible with the very highest level of execution. For sides we enjoy a textbook Caesar Salad and some superb ‘Hash Browns’ topped with crème fraiche and trout roe. It is quite apparent that a number of processes have been employed to produce those shattering then yielding blocks of burnished potato. This is by many degrees better than I had been expecting. ‘Tableside Pudding’ (which sounds oddly rude) manifests as gently collapsing quenelles of Chocolate Cremeux paired with a cherry compote. Quite a perfect finish really to a lunch that surprised and impressed at every turn.
That young cook has a background in fine dining and it shows in the saucing – in addition to that ridiculous chicken butter there’s a Sauce Américaine to go with the Salmon En Croûte option (€55 pp). If you can make that classic of the French repertoire than it surely wouldn’t kill you to knock up a pot of soup de poisson from time to time. This entreaty goes out to everybody involved. For context – when I last reviewed the place (in 2019) I noted (in pretty florid terms) that it was one of the best I’ve had outside France – the colour of a boat’s rusted gunnel and announcing itself with a breath of the harbour. It now only exists in my memory and on a website menu that nobody sees fit to update.
Service, led by long-time manager and first-mate Philip O’Neill is always warm and knowledgeable, there are lots of things to drink that work with the food. It turns out that Sunday lunch needn’t be brown and bovine or even mammalian. Consider giving yourself over to the many and various pleasures of the deep next Sunday and be sure to ask about that fish soup.
Words: Conor Stevens
11 Spranger’s Yard,
Temple Bar
Dublin 2
