It’s my civic duty
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FX Buckley’s
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Was there before and made an absolute pig of myself😀 Savage all right in fairness!
Our critic dines — rather unhappily — at Peggy’s On The Green in Dublin
Was I on the set of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, I wondered on my visit to the new Peggy’s On The Green in Dublin? Five minutes in, and before we’d taken a sip of our cocktails, in a room full of empty tables we were asked had we chosen our food yet, adding that they needed our table back by 7.15pm.
Rolling up in a taxi to meet my friend Trish for a 5pm dinner, the exterior of the former Three Storey had been festooned with great big green and gold balls heralding the rebrand. A Guinness umbrella was up, and a girl stood, somewhat incongruously, on the street in the rain handing out free drinks vouchers for “Dublin’s Newest Restaurant and Parlour Bar”, immediately reminding me of tacky tourist resorts abroad. It was only short of having the starspangled banner and the tricolour waving outside.
“We’re not here for the night,” I said to our server, “but it didn’t say anything about a time limit on my booking reservation.” “How did you book?” she replied.
“Most restaurants in the city have an early bird menu to attract customers at this time.” I said, “but we’re facing into and having an expensive dinner menu, and almost as soon as we’ve sat down, we’re already being hurried out the door.”
Meanwhile, the other girl was still touting for customers outside. Having consulted with the barman, our server said that she “could put other people upstairs, and the cocktails were complimentary”. Maybe she was following orders, but if I hadn’t been “on the job” I’d have hightailed it.
We could only hope the food might retrieve the situation.
But it didn’t. The menu, which was riddled with spelling errors, offered bar bites (€6.95€13.50); dinner (€22.95-€48) and desserts (€6.95). The bar bites included French onion soup, beef “crouquettes” and crock mussels. Trish had popcorn chicken with a curry mayo (€11.50). “They taste like something I’d get from a cheap supermarket package,” she said. Pil pil prawns (€13.50) were an aberration: six small prawns scrunched up beside two squares of bowl-filling bread in a green herb-laden oil bearing no sense, taste or fiery colour, of the Iberian tapas stalwart.
Dinner included lamb shank and panko-crumbed cod — both with colcannon. Trish’s 10oz sirloin steak (€32) had a sprinkling of crushed “Tabacco” onions, long-stem broccoli and a commercial-style pepper sauce. No fries were included, and we realised there were no sides as such listed on the menu so six chunky truffle fries (€6.95) from the bar bites section were hastily rustled up.
Laughing out loud when my “panfried sea bass” (€26.95) arrived, I said “it looks as if it’s in flight”. Stiff as a board, overcooked to a state of rigor mortis, this sad sea bass fillet sat on a three-storey plinth of tasteless, skin-on “baby boiled” (potatoes) which, in an attempt to be stylishly “crushed”, looked as if they’d been stood on with a size 12 boot. Sitting atop this inedible abstract work of art was a clump of rocket that reminded me of the hair on the Luke Kelly statue. It brought me back to the good old days in Ireland when the food was just abysmal. Eton Mess (€6.95) in a glass beer mug was a relief, while Trish’s vegan “Belgium choclate” cheesecake (€6.95) sported a sad little drooping yellow flower. By this stage, we too were wilting with the stress of it all. The only positive thing I could really find was the comfortable decor and we did notice that the barman seemed very nice to his three customers at the bar.
“A proper, uncompromising & authentic Irish restaurant, parlour bar & lounge on the green,” they say. I say this is the kind of fare that gave Ireland a bad name 30 years ago.
Ireland’s food is now worldclass and we can hold our heads high, but unfortunately tourists won’t find it here in this outdated “Oirish” takeoff.
With a bottle of Atlantik 2022 Albarino (€40), a luke-warm espresso (€3.50), a small water (€3.50) and service, the damage came to €167. Oh, yes, and by 7.15pm there were two other people sitting at another table. It’s not often I resent paying a bill in a restaurant. ●
Life contacted Peggy’s On The Green for comment.
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That’s a clamping
Ouch
They obviously refused to buy one of her wall plaques.
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I was thinking this is going to be a slating now just because they asked for the table back, but once we got to the spelling mistakes I was on board. If you can’t be arsed proof reading the menu what kind of standards are going to be in the place
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As bad a review as I’ve read in an Irish paper for a while.
You a love a bad review of a restaurant.
I do. I miss AA Gill terribly.
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Head up to Capel Street
A pre dinner pint or two in McNeills
Dinner in Bovinity
A post dinner drink or two in Pantibar
You’ll put down a great night
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Meh Lucinda always comes off as vindictive. Paolo tullio would always try to find some positives in a review as he knows how hard the restaurant business is
If you want a proper gutting, do it for all the right reasons, like jay Rayner does
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That was white asparagus, duck and cheese
You’re some man
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Gerald Keane’s canteen
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You’ll have gout and stinky piss by bedtime
He hardly darkened it’s doors again after that mugging off
That’s the first restaurant review that has actually made me feel queasy.