A taste of the Seventies and my childhood days of good, wholesome, comfort food

FOOD, like so many other aspects of life, is subject to the vagaries of fashion. There’s a Twitter account called 70s Dinner Party (@70s_party) which features pictures of dishes so shockingly outlandish that it’s even more unsettling, for me, than stumbling upon old pictures of myself wearing elephant flares and shirts that were not so much loud as blaring.

Restaurant food at the moment features a number of fashionable tropes such as ‘plates for sharing’, fermentation and the Scandi schtick which seems to involve a lot of foraging of unlikely items. When these manifestations of fashion are done well, they deliver pleasure, even if some can be fiddly.

But when fashion is done badly, it’s bloody awful. For example, there’s a belief amongst some of our worst chefs that industrial sweet chilli sauce brings with it not just pleasure but a whiff of exotic sophistication. There are restaurateurs who think that serving dishes on anything but an actual plate or bowl is boring. There are some who believe the word ‘Cajun’ can take the harm out of food that has the taste and texture of cardboard. And there are those who think that acetic acid sweetened and coloured with caramel is actually, you know, balsamic vinegar. I could also mention scallops fashionably raw in the centre and grains of risotto rice chalkily similar, but enough. Let’s draw a line.

Instead, I want to celebrate a place where the food stands well outside the vagaries of fashion, where what I ate transported me back to my own experience of growing up in the 1970s with the huge advantage of having a mother who was a skilled, confident and generous cook. My lunch at Hatch & Sons at the Municipal Gallery on Parnell Square amounted to glorious nostalgia.

I reviewed the original Hatch & Sons on St Stephen’s Green for lunch when it was quite new and was irritated by how few dishes promised on the menu were still available at half-past-one, and more so by the Attitude with a capital A. The experience of the northside version could not have been more different, although I should admit that I turned up early – not for fear of missing out, just because I was starving.

I know that hunger is the best sauce but I still maintain that the simple, homely, wholesome and comforting cooking at Hatch & Sons doesn’t demand a ravenous appetite for its appreciation.

I started with a bowl of the kind of soup that so often greeted me when I got in from school: a chunky concoction of red lentils (why red, I often wonder, as they are really orange when raw and yellowish when cooked?) and carrot. My mother’s version would have been passed through a sieve and given a payload of pepper that made me glow as I did my homework.

This one was more rustic, less spicy, but no less delicious and warming even if it would never attract the attention of Michelin. And regular readers know what I make of those rubbery stars.

It came with dark, dense brown bread and plenty of butter, as soup should.

Then came a beef and Guinness stew, an all-in-one dish in that it featured not just tender pieces of meat but also chunks of carrot and potato all liberally bathed in an excellent gravy, all of this amounting to another childhood memory.

This is – and was – winter food: comforting, warming, deeply savoury and, best of all in some respects, eminently simple.

I finished with a square of coconut and raspberry cake, a tray bake to employ a phrase that we have imported since my young days, which was good if not quite in the same league as the other two courses.

But again, it had the virtue of tasting homemade, of the domestic kitchen rather than an industrial process.

With mineral water, a glass of red wine and a startlingly but attractively strong macchiato, the bill for this simple solo feast came to €31.25.