I’m sorry to be crabby, but if I shell out the guts of €200 I expect better fare than this

÷ SOLE SEAFOOD AND GRILL 18-19 South William Street Dublin 2 Phone: 01 544 2300 sole.ie

JUST as Bertie Ahern demonstrated his creativity with language when he spoke of upsetting the apple tart, I quite like it when people refer to an unimpressive experience as a damp squid. After all, these days we’re more familiar with the seafood than the little firework.

The squid at Sole was not damp, I must stress, but we’ll come to that later. For the present, let’s just say that Sole was both expensive and underwhelming. The bill, however, made an impression, and not in a good way.

We had two pre-dinner drinks and four small native oysters; one of the cheapest bottles of wine, two starters, two mains, one side and two espressos.

This weighed in at €180.50 to which I added a tenner because the service was the one aspect of our visit that was excellent. With desserts, we would have had to shell out on the wrong side of €200.

I should add that Sole had been open just shy of a week when we ate there; but these are not preview prices.

There’s a fine bar in this large restaurant, featuring a chilled display of seafood, and dispensing, for us, a negroni and a virgin mary (which is the same as a bloody mary but without the alcohol). They were fine.

And so to table. Intrigued as I was by a watercress soup at €10.50, we had two starters featuring imported main ingredients, which, in this island nation, seems slightly odd: Norwegian king crab and Portuguese octopus.

The crab is a variety from Asia that was introduced to the Barents Sea back in the 1960s and these big beasts of the deep are regarded by some as an environmental threat. So, eating them seems like a responsible thing to do.

What they have in bulk they tend to lack in flavour, certainly by comparison to our own native crabs. We have a strange reluctance to eat the best part of Irish crabs, the brown meat, but that’s another story.

My little salad of ‘micro leaves’ seemed quite grown-up in terms of growth but that didn’t bother me. The small pieces of crab were sweet but had been cooked in salt water which seemed to overwhelm their delicate flavour.

Flecks of pink grapefruit and some mustardy mayonnaise did little to cheer up this €16.50 starter.

Portuguese octopus was billed as ‘tempura-coated, flash fried.’ Now, tempura is a much misused term.

Normally, it’s a very light, dry, crisp coating. What encased the octopus was a batter, yes, but it was as to tempura as my singing in the bath is to Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Had the menu said ‘battered’, this would have been a rather dull, pedestrian dish. The expectation of tempura made it a disappointment.

Onwards and, hopefully, upwards. But, sadly, no. Main courses continued the theme of disappointment but, to be fair, in differing ways.

Coquilles St Jacques. Scallops cooked in the rich, grand tradition of haute cuisine, promising exquisite decadence. That’s what those simple but seductive words seem to promise.

You get your scallops in the half shell, enveloped in a creamy sauce with cheese, surrounded by a piped purée of potato. The whole thing is then browned under a scorching grill.

Here the menu mentioned ‘Mornay cream’ which, traditionally, should be béchamel enriched with cheese.

What came with our chopped scallop had the consistency of milk.

As to why anyone would use seemingly under-seasoned, under-buttered mashed spud to pipe around the edge of this, I have no idea but that’s what Sole managed.

At €35, it comprised two shellfuls with a little samphire as an adornment.

‘Panfried Irish halibut’ appeared to have spent too much time in a pan. It tasted overcooked and looked more steamed than fried. ‘Heritage’ potatoes and ‘seashore’ salad (mainly samphire) could do little to revive it.

Lacklustre food at any cost is always disappointing; at prices as ambitious as these it feels worse.

Of course, the great thing is that Dublin has lots of affordable good food.

As far as seafood is concerned regular readers will have a good idea of my favourites.