Tom Doorley, Philip Nolan and Monty Don

All this and more in brilliant

THE EAST ROOM RESTAURANT Plassey House, University of Limerick Phone: 061-202186, eastroom.ie

THE food at high table in various Oxford and Cambridge colleges is supposed to be very good and their cellars are said to be the stuff of dreams. However, by and large, feeding people in educational establishments is a pretty perfunctory business.

At school, I lived mainly on industrial grade oxtail soup and mincemeat tarts; at university I recall two medical students dissecting the blood vessels in a particularly badly trimmed piece of lunchtime corned beef; and the food at the school where I taught for a few years was so terrible that I used to buy Mars bars from the tuck shop to keep me going.

I can’t tell you what the catering is like in the canteens and coffee shops at the University of Limerick but I can report that it has a lovely, green, sylvan campus and that the food in the East Room is both good value and impressive in parts. Members of the public are welcome to eat in this elegant, bright, highceilinged room, part of the solid Victoriana of Plassey House in the heart of UL.

Our lunch was excellent in parts; the impression we took away is that there’s a skilled and ambitious kitchen here. When it’s firing on all cylinders it can produce memorable food.

Service, incidentally, was a delight, the linen was crisp and the glassware elegant. And so, to starters. Cured salmon, grapefruit jelly, cucumber, Doonbeg crab, fennel, smoked crème fraîche sounds complicated but it worked, accentuating the freshness of each element, with a lovely contrast between the greens and the orange shades of both salmon and the trout caviar which sat on a pillow of sweet, succulent crab.

Belly of suckling pig with a scallop made a classic combination, salty and sweet in a lovely balance of flavour, one that was further enhanced with a little carrot purée, That would have been a very sound dish but for the addition of a very fine dice of pineapple and chorizo which threw things out of kilter. Often less is more, and more is... Well, you get the picture.

This lack of judgment followed on into one of our mains: a risotto of wild mushrooms and summer truffle with a ‘crisp hen egg’ and smoked Arbequina olive oil. Sounded great, ate rather disappointingly. The Italians may like their risotto somewhat ‘al dente’ but they don’t leave a hard, chalky centre to each grain of rice.

The summer truffle, fabulous when it’s good, had negligible flavour and the soft-yolked egg, encased in breadcrumbs and placed in the centre of the dish was far from crisp after contact with the rice. Back to the drawing board, I’m afraid. However, a slow-cooked rib of beef was from a different planet. Tender, full of taste, served with perfectly cooked barley bathed in a savoury reduction with toasted hazelnuts and crisp slivers of

Jerusalem artichoke and a nugget of herb butter. Yes, a lot going on there, but all in autumnal harmony.

Desserts were ace. A white chocolate bavarois was sweet but not too sweet and came with just enough caramel ice cream that tasted of Crunchies. Finally crumbly, rich, faintly biscuity caramelised chocolate made this a knockout pud.

Passionfruit tart, with thin, crisp, buttery pastry and a clever raspberry and white chocolate sorbet with fermented raspberries was a delightful riot of flavours and definitely not something anyone in their right mind would try to make at home.

It’s unusual to encounter such a combination of careful, clever judgement in some dishes and a lack of it in others during the one meal. Dialling down the complexity a notch or two (and a working visit to the Veneto, perhaps) might help to avoid such lapses.

However, it’s clear that there’s some excellent cooking going on here. The short lunchtime menu — three starters, three mains, two desserts — is keenly priced, the dining room is elegant, the staff lovely.

Lucky old Limerick.

THE SMART MONEY:

There’s no arguing with three courses for €32.50. (One for €20.50, two for €27.50.)

AND ANOTHER THING:

Car parks at UL can be very busy but you can park right outside Plassey House if you’re eating there. Ask for directions when you book.