Dead Guy Ale is the recommended drink if you order the Scotch egg in L Mulligan Grocer. Good call. One taste of this sensational dish will bring any dead guy right back to life, reborn into a funky gastropub in Dublin 7, eating one of the defining dishes of the city.
The LMG Scotch egg is a Lazarus piece of cooking: smart sourcing and meticulous cooking re-birth one of the clichés of bistro cooking. Colin Hession and his team obviously looked at the Scotch egg and said: Ye must be born again. And it was so. And it was good. Amazingly good.
Mind you, LMG has said: Ye must be born again to everything it does - the Irish pub, the Dublin pub, pub food, pub service, pub drinks and drink service, menu writing and food sourcing. Everything in LMG is reborn, recast, in one of the great acts of re-imagining. What is so remarkable, however, is that it only required a sidestep for LMG to find itself in the new dimension. There is, theoretically, nothing new in LMG - leek and tarragon soup, potted crab, Scotch egg, rib eye and chips with spinach and portobello mushrooms, bangers and mash, pear and chocolate tart. Nothing may be new, but everything is simply better, everything is made new. Like that Scotch egg, or the lamb burger, or black pudding sausage with heaven and earth mash, or a perfectly chosen cheese board with Glebe Brethan, Mossfield and Cashel Blue, the LMG team take everything into a new sphere.
They are helped, also, by one critical factor: as you eat through the menu, you should drink through the menu, having tastes of the great Irish craft beers with each course. Drinking these guys is the equivalent of having a different glass of premier grand cru classé with every dish: you are drinking at the top end, at the zenith of culinary creativity, and it carries the food into the stratosphere. Welcome to the new Irish pub, a place of superb service, superb food, superb drinks. L Mulligan: grocer, and revolutionary.
18 Stoneybatter, Dublin 7 Tel: (01) 670 9889 www.lmulligangrocer.com
Photo PJ McKenna
