John McKenna waits patiently for a table at Bakestone
It's just before one o'clock at Bakestone, it's a Wednesday in late wintertime, and there are no tables to be had in the restaurant.
“Sorry, tables are all full” explain the busy girls behind the counter. You might expect people to start leaving the queue, but no one does. Instead, we wait, trays in hand, and use the time to finally decide what it is we want to eat for lunch. Roasted cauliflower tart? Sausage-meat pie? Chicken sandwich on Arbutus bread?
You wait, thinking of all those old clichés your mother used – “Hunger is the best sauce” – and then, suddenly, the hard-working girls on the floor have freed up and cleared a couple of tables and we place our order and load up the tray, and grab our table.
Was it worth the wait? More than. The cooking in Bakestone is good – clean flavours, precise presentation, imaginative combinations, and there is some stonking sweet baking to wrap up your lunch: we had a slice of apple and almond tart that was simply excellent, and a slice of lemon madeira cake that was benchmark good.
But before that we demolished the cauliflower tart and the sausage meat pie and the chicken salad sandwich on Declan Ryan's excellent Arbutus bread. It's the use of top-class ingredients like the Cork bread that mark Bakestone out: they could save money by buying pappy rubbish from the big bakers, but they don't. There is ambition here and, if we might surmise what the ambition of chef and co-owner Ali Honour and her crew is, it would be this: “We want to be better than Avoca.”
That's a healthy ambition, and Bakestone gets there by offering creative cooking, as opposed to the commonplace catering that so many pick-up-a-tray places subside into. As with Avoca, Ms Honour and her staff show a real verve for food, and demonstrate real energy and discrimination in their work. Those characteristics explain why, on a Wednesday in October, in the surreal setting of the Ballyseedy Home and Garden Centre, everyone is happy to wait for a table at Bakestone.
