Restaurant Review - Farm - Leeson Street
Tuesday 04 September 2012
It’s funny how some niche areas seem to mushroom organically creating a cult zone for dining with a vibe. Generally it revolves around a good pub where ‘the crowd’ likes to hang before moving on to eat. Ranelagh and Cabinteely villages spring to mind, along with Monkstown Crescent, and what I recently described as the hottest set of culinary traffic lights in Dublin, the 5 branch junction at Haddington Road, and Bath Avenue. Another evolving ‘restaurant junction’ is around O’Brien’s Pub and the Burlington Hotel, at Sussex Road and Upper Leeson Street. The restaurant quota has been changing and being added to. The long standing Canal Bank Café, and sister restaurant The Sussex over O’Brien’s, have been joined by Quatro 4 Italian, around the corner. Rigby’s opened late last year, in what was the former Soup Café, on the run of shops on Upper Leeson Street. A couple of doors down Keshk Café, which moved to Mespil Road, is replaced by Aladdin’s Restaurant. The biggest change, however, has to be the addition of Farm, just opened in the premises occupied previously by Da Vincenzo, which had been in situ for 23 years.
Farm is the sprog of Farm Restaurant in Dawson Street which, as the menu says humorously “is owned and operated by a locally sourced Irish family” with “organic staff from all over the world, some locally sourced……” Okay, we get it, the theme of Farm restaurant has been organic or freerange food where possible. They have done a really nice job on the decor, soft comfortable and welcoming, nothing to frighten the horses, with pale green tongue and groove walls mixing with brick, splashes of aubergine ostrich skin upholstery, and various farm animal pictures.
The lunch menu had starters €5.25/€9.50 including home made hummus with organic pitta bread, olive tapenade and vegetable crudités, and spicy chicken wings with blue cheese dip and celery sticks. Rena loved her bitter sweet Asian Green Salad (€6.95) overflowing with mixed leaves, bean sprouts, spring onions, ribbons of bamboo shoots, pickled ginger, peppers, cucumber, roasted chilli, and red onion. Likewise my Five Mile Town Irish goats’ cheese tart (€7.95), which arrived as an enormous tranch was ace. It looked almost daunting but was light and moussy as a feather, and quite delicious.
A dozen or so mains €12.50/€15.95 included O’Doherty’s organic black pudding salad with caramelized apples, Cashel blue cheese and mixed leaves, as well as an organic steak sandwich with all the trimmings. An organic Irish beef burger has O’Neill’s dry cured smoked bacon and mature smoked Gubeen cheese, and comes with sliced cornichons, home made relish and fries. Rena had a very good wild mushroom risotto (€13.50) incorporating St. Tola’s goats’ cheese, baby spinach, candied walnuts and Parmesan shavings. I opted for a Fish Pie (€13.50), again very large, in a big flat gratin dish, incorporating salmon, cod and haddock. Real comfort food but it almost had me dozing over the keyboard for the afternoon
I was quite taken with the idea of trying the French classic, Floating Island, soft baked meringue with lemon crème Anglaise and cherry compote, but it wasn’t available, so we shared the Farm Surprise (€6.50) of organic icecream, crushed meringue, fresh fruit, hazelnuts, cream and raspberry coulis, piled high in an old fashioned sundae glass. Scrumptious.
There was also a Specials of the Day Lunch Menu with soup at €5.25, a main course at €9.95 of free range stuffed breast of chicken wrapped in organic bacon, on mash potato with fresh vegetables and gravy, and dessert €4.95.
A 2/3 course Early Bird menu at €21.95/€24.95 runs from 3pm – 7 pm and, along with the a la carte, there is a very good 3-course Dinner Menu also with coffee at €29.95.
Our bill with two glasses of Pinot Grigio (€5.95ea) and optional service was €66.30.
Good casual style food, and charming staff.
Farm
133 Upper Leeson Street,
Dublin. 4.
Tel: (01) 212-0743