In the restaurant business, if you're the savvy type, it's not that difficult to talk the talk. You list your suppliers on your menu and your sentences include phrases like 'local' and 'artisan'. The better people actually walk the walk, they care about where their ingredients come from and they have a passion for what they do. But best of all are the people who are living the life they preach - they don't just know where their pork comes from, they have their own pigs. They have hens and they probably grow all their own salad leaves. They know the feel of soil on their fingers.
So it is with Bryan and Mandy Maher who have opened a beautiful restaurant in their garden centre, The Garden House, on the Back Road in Malahide. There are strong signs of a Daylesford Organic influence in the design of the room with painted timber walls and herbs growing in boxes. There are some super photographs around the walls, of hens, pigs and cattle and all, it turns out, belong to the family and the photographs were all taken by Bryan. There are hens on site and plans for pigs to join them. There are polytunnels for salad leaves, herbs and vegetables and a glass greenhouse will be planted with tomatoes.
The lunch menu is pleasingly short with small plates priced between €6.00 and €8.50 and larger dishes between €11.00 and €13.00. A team of friendly staff talk us through the dishes and the room is run very efficiently. A brocolli and almond soup was served with excellent sourdough and brown breads and was really faultless - wonderfully smooth with a very pleasing flavour and topped with toasted almonds. A bruschetta with creamy mushrooms and a fresh parsley pesto was one of the most 'moreish' lunch dishes I've eaten and very well balanced between the creaminess of the mushrooms, the crunch of toasted sourdough and the light sharpness of the pesto. Clogherhead crab cake with a tomato and tarragon salsa and some herb aoili was almost all crab and very little potato, a reverse of the norm, and continued the high standard of the cooking. Slow cooked Moroccan spiced lamb is served on flatbread with hummus and harissa and some cucumber yoghurt. It's a substantial dish with great flavour, with perhaps a little too much torn mint leaf on top but delicious nonetheless.
Some fresh cod is given some O' Hara's pale ale batter and is served with some minted peas, homeade tartar sauce and skinny fries. The batter is as crunchy as a crisp, the fish ( not always cod, sometimes whiting ) is fresh from Howth each morning and the value is very strong at €12.50. At this stage there was barely room for dessert but the Ottolenghi-ish display of cakes was too much to resist. A slice of pistachio and lime cake served with some organic yoghurt was utterly delicious, wonderfully moist and satisfying. Great coffee finished off a really impressive lunch in a venue that the couple have only taken over in the past four months. This kind of accomplished cooking doesn't happen with passion alone so it was no surprise to learn that there's an experienced chef running the kitchen - Paul Kavanagh, ex Guilbauld's and Itsa4 in Sandymount is the man bringing the Maher's philosophy on food to life and the operation here is going to set a whole new benchmark for food in garden centres.
The Garden House, Back Road, Malahide, Co. Dublin
www.thegardenhouse.ie
Photographs by Eamon Barrett
