Tom Doorley
Life is just a meal of chilli sauce on Japanese dumplings with bacon
÷ GERTRUDE 130 Pearse Street Grand Canal Dock Dublin 2 Phone: 01 515 7563
ISUPPOSE there are still people who sit down at home, every day, and eat a starter, a main course (meat and three veg), followed by something sweet. But I’m willing to bet that they are, literally, a dying breed. What puzzles me is how long it has been taking for restaurants to take on board how times and behaviours have been changing.
Sure, we have ‘small plates’ and ‘plates for sharing’ and, on some menus, a deliberately blurred demarcation between starters and mains. But if you look at the general run of restaurants – and most of them are never going to be reviewed in a newspaper – the menus are still stuck in the three distinct courses model.
Gertrude, from Colin Harmon who revolutionised coffee with his 3fe venture, is a café that takes the concept by the scruff of the neck and gives it a good shake. Ultimately, it will be an all-day kind of place but until they can get the staff – easier said than done in contemporary Dublin – this applies currently only on Fridays and Saturdays. Other than that, the shutters come down at 4pm.
How to describe the place? It’s big, bright, airy, with an open kitchen; there are no airs or graces. The focus is on the food and the menu itself is eclectic. Eclectic with Asian, more specifically Japanese influences. Oh, and the first thing I really noticed was that they serve manzanilla, the bone dry sherry, by the glass. I was like an old war horse getting a whiff of cordite. Dry sherry, served by the glass, is almost invariably an indication that you are in a place that cares about wine and food. It’s also the ultimate aperitif.
My solo lunch started with dumplings, largely because I very rarely pass up the opportunity. Now, I should stress that we are not talking Irish dumplings, those balls of dough, sometimes enriched with bacon, that are sometimes found on top of a traditional casserole. Actually, they are not found nearly enough these days, and that’s another reflection on how our eating habits have changed.
No, these are Japanese dumplings fashioned from thin dough, neatly pleated. I mentioned dumplings in another place last week and complained that they were too heavy, too doughy. At Gertrude, they get them absolutely right: the skin just substantial enough to contain the filling, in this instance shredded cabbage. These exemplary dumplings were served with a fermented chilli sauce (think dark, savoury, a little hot, pleasantly tart and salty) and topped with bacon that had been crisped to the point where it could be blitzed into something approaching a powder.
As dumplings, they were first rate. As a riff on bacon and cabbage they were inspired. Writing about it here at my desk, I want to head off to Pearse Street right now.
The Japanese theme continued with my tonkatsu sandwich. Tonkatsu is pork encased in breadcrumbs and fried, then sliced and served, usually, with a salty, sharp, fruity sauce. Here the pork is no ordinary stuff; it’s free range from Whole Hoggs near Slane in Co Meath. The pork was inside a crisp and surprisingly dark coating but the meat was only just cooked, moist, rather lovely. As a sandwich, in effect, it came in three geometrically perfect slices. The richness was cut by salty, sharp saucing and finely shredded cabbage (the traditional accompaniment).
By this stage, I had fallen into conversation with the people at the next table. Gertrude is a friendly kind of place. They had ordered what the menu describes as apple fritters with custard and they asked me to share because, well, because this a generous dish.
I have to carp here that they weren’t fritters. What arrived were three deepfried spheres, doughnuts essentially, with chopped up apple distributed through the dough. As such, they were fine but misleadingly flagged. The custard provided enjoyable lubrication.
With sherry, wine, water and excellent coffee, my solitary lunch weighed in under €50. And I want to go back.