Don’t be in any doubt: what Rory Carvill and Oliver Dunne are doing in Cleaver East is important.
Together, they have created a hybrid of cooking and eating that is thrillingly original. Sure, they have borrowed ideas from everywhere, but it’s the fusion of those ideas into something that is brilliantly new and successful that knocks your socks off in CE.
Our jotted-down notes give some idea of how novel their work is. We scribbled this:
“A cuisine of opposites: slick yet wholesome; studied yet improvised; vivid yet restrained; pure yet wanton; cool yet clamorous; triumphal yet modest. The work of two of the great talents of the contemporary kitchen in Ireland”.
Now, that is the standard nonsense people scribble when they are in the middle of a wonderful meal. But amidst the nonsense is the idea that we were working towards: Cleaver East seems to reconcile all the tensions that its format might present, and it resolves those tensions because Mr Carvill and Mr Dunne are so talented.
In the hands of almost any other chefs, CE would be a disaster. It’s one thing to innovate, and it is quite another to get everything so ship-shape after only three weeks of business. We suspect that Mr Dunne, in particular, has learnt many lessons from his time creating and shaping the Bovine menu at his Malahide restaurant, Bon Appetit.
Cleaver East’s playful creations are right on the money: they steal the Italian idea of deep-fried arancini to kick-start a terrific paella. The smoked chicken ball with chicken and vegetable spaghetti is like a dim sum dumpling. The scotch egg is superbly re-worked with a brandade-like cloak round a quail’s egg. A black olive crumb sets a dish of heirloom tomatoes on fire. And their Black Forest gateau? is right to wear that question mark: it’s Black Forest gateau, Jim, but not as we know it. The strawberry and cream panna cotta is going to be the most-talked-about dish of the city in 2013.
The tensions are reconciled, and the focus is so precise that you might call Cleaver East’s cooking “microscopic”: every tiny detail of taste and texture is magnified into magnificence. Along with the cooking at NEDE, Cleaver East brings something novel and brilliant to Dublin.
John McKenna
