Stefano Crescenzi admits something quite extraordinary in his opening thoughts to ‘Dunne & Crescenzi: The Menu’: “In this respect we feel we have lost ownership of the restaurant. It has become a place of the people, made by the people who so joyously inhabit it”.
Mr Crescenzi is right: D&C is run by Stefano and Eileen, but the beneficial ownership is, in truth, owned by the people of Dublin. Some other city restaurants come close to this – people are very proprietorial about Chapter One, for example – but yet nowhere is like D&C. You can tell this from the demeanour of the customers, who behave as if they are in their own sitting rooms. During the summer, we marvelled at the dolce vita manner of the middle-aged folk in South Frederick Street, sitting at different tables with their coffees and pastries at 11 in the morning, talking across the room, comfortable as all get out in their skins: it was extraordinary, so much so that you had to pinch yourself to remember that you were in Dublin.
Achieving this in their restaurants has been the most singular achievement of Eileen and Stefano, but it is only one of many achievements. They are extremely successful business people, with a considerable restaurant empire. They gave Dublin real Italian food, and not red sauce food. They serve that food in the most unpretentious and authentic manner possible, which is why you crave it so much: when Sam and Connie McKenna got back from the Leeds Festival, mud-spattered and wrecked, broke and tired, it was dinner at D&C in Sandymount that brought them back to life.
How have the Crescenzis done it? We have been writing about them ever since they opened their little deli in Sutton back in 1995, and the main ingredient of their working lives since then is that they have not changed: what they do today is simply done on a bigger scale than the little shop back in 1995, but otherwise they do what they do, which is to say to you: here is something delicious, enjoy it.
They share two advantages. They are both vividly intellectual, and they have a shared aesthetic. In The D&C aesthetic, you do things the very best way. “To change traditional recipes to suit a particular taste or to sell more dishes... is what we consider the end of cooking”.
The end of cooking! What utterly dramatic language to use, and yet it is, of course, utterly correct, for to be inauthentic is to be a fraud.
“Why did we choose uncertainty over certainty?”, wonders Eileen in her afterword, looking back on 15 years of D&C. She tries to answer the question – we wanted a nice place for the kids, we knew Italian food and wine so it seemed natural – but she fails to get the correct answer. And what might that be?
Simply this: the girl who went to Rome as an art student in 1975 was, with the opening of D&C, once again choosing the path of art as the path for herself and her partner. The path of art was always going to be her life path. ‘Dunne & Crescenzi: The Menu” is the latest element of that life as art.
Mercier Press €19.99
