Restaurant Review - The Greenery
Monday 23 September 2013
Tucked away in the corner of a little strip of shops in Donnybrook Village is The Greenery. With a candy stripe awning over a couple of outside café tables, the ambiance is light bright and relaxed with pretty young girls flitting around. Open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and brunch on Sundays, it’s the sort of place where you can get Eggs Benedict or French Toast in the morning, Quesadillas with spicy chicken, crab salad, or crispy Buffalo wings at lunch, and a ribeye steak and Champagne cocktail in the evening. It offers popular middle of the road bistro style food, which, like Michael Palin’s travels, includes nods to the Mediterranean, the Far East and South America.
My friend Mary and I whirled up one evening for supper on our way out of town having visited an art exhibition. Perhaps this is why our eyes were drawn instantly to two long feature abstract paintings on the wall; we were told by our delightful waitperson that she, a design student, had painted them. They are very effective in adding verve to the room. We were seated initially on an imposing cream banquette at the back the room. Attractive as it was, I was cocked up like Judge Judy looking down on Mary’s chair, so we moved to a more comfortable one at the side. Do designers never sit on their new creations to road test them?
We were brought a lovely tray of breads and dips – a nice touch - as we looked at the menu. Starters €7.50 - €12.50 included those Buffalo wings, fig and goats cheese tart with honey dressing, and crab salad with crunchy fennel and tomato vinaigrette. Mary’s Prawn Tempura (€9.50) sported five ‘torpedoes’ complete with tail shell sitting on shredded lettuce and which, whilst tasty enough with blobs of chilli mayo, had a fairly robust uniform brown shiny smooth ‘battledress’, which was more reminiscent of the frozen Asian supermarket variety than the ethereal lightness of ‘Japanese Tempura’. Pan fried scallops (€12.50), on the other hand, had a threesome of perfectly seared molluscs which sat on a good spicy stew of chorizo and chickpeas. It was a really nice dish which would be quite good also as a ‘light mains’ if you wanted a couple of starter sizes.
Mains €14 - €28.50 ran the gamut from risotto to an 8oz Black Angus Fillet steak through posh Fish ‘n Chips, and chicken stuffed with ricotta, sun blushed tomato, Parma ham, fondant potato and Mediterranean vegetables. A 10oz rib eye steak with all the trimmings seemed decent enough value at €22.50, whilst a word I hadn’t seen for a long time cropped up in a ‘Melody of mini burgers’ with homemade fries. Mary ‘s Butternut squash risotto with herb rocket and Parmesan shavings (€14) had really good flavour and colour and was well presented topped with frisee, Parmesan and two batons of bruschetta. She loved that it was also a perfectly moist risotto and not of the sticky wallpaper paste variety. My smoked haddock (€19.50) was a lovely combination of silky mash potato, topped with spinach, black pudding, poached egg and Hollandaise sauce - tasty and comforting.
Puds €5/€6 included summer berries with white chocolate sauce; chocolate brownie with toasted almonds and vanilla ice cream, and Eton Mess – which looked suitably sinful at a nearby table. We shared instead an ‘Irish Cheese Board’ at €9 which was a quartet of cheeses including St. Killian, Hegarty’s cheddar, Smoked Gubbeen and Cashel Blue, modulated with little pairings of green grapes, walnuts and quince jelly, and two types of excellent crackers.
With a delicious bottle of fresh aromatic Jean Remy Haeffelin Riesling 2011 (€26.90) and an Americano for Mary (€2.20) our bill with service came to €103.60. It’s a very pleasant spot and my only comment would be that they could do with a wider selection of reasonably priced wines.
The Greenery,
3 Eirpage House,
Donnybrook Road,
Dublin. 4.
Tel: (01) 219-5966
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT.