Tom Doorley

reviews Jamie Oliver’s Dundrum restaurant

JAMIE’S ITALIAN

1 Pembroke District, Dundrum Town Centre, Dublin 16 Phone: 01 298 0600

SNOBBERY takes many forms and the most insidious kind objects to success. Take J K Rowling, who committed the cardinal sin of making a vast fortune through encouraging children to read, and then turned her hand to adult fiction.

The chattering classes, the kind of people who actually read the books shortlisted for the Booker Prize, sneered. And then Melvyn Bragg, the adenoidal intellectual, goes and writes a highly positive review of the work in question, The Casual Vacancy, and, in a stroke, causes many red faces and confirms his own independence of mind.

There’s a certain kind of food enthusiast (they would describe themselves as – horrible word – ‘foodies’) who will never darken the doors of a Jamie’s Italian. Why? Simple. It’s just too popular, too well known even to those who – heaven forbid – have never visited a farmers’ market.

So, I’ll be honest here. One part of me wanted to like Jamie’s Italian in Dundrum, the first Irish venture in the cheerful Essex boy’s empire. And the marginally larger part of me wanted to be, and succeeded in being, completely objective about it.

Getting a table on a Thursday night was not going to be easy. It was booked out but I discovered that they take walk-ins. What they do is give the hopeful customer a kind of paging device. And they buzz it when a table becomes free. I sent the anonymous dining companion ahead and he got a table for two in something under an hour. Full marks for that. This is a vast, cavernous restaurant which has been described on Twitter as ‘a bit like a canteen’. A canteen? It’s not noisy but it has a distinct buzz. And the food is far superior. I liked the prosciutto joints hanging up and the displays of fresh fruit and veg. This may be all a bit self-conscious but I don’t care.

Our Italian waiter had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the menu. We ordered tagliatelle Bolognese and were told that it is made with beef and minced free-range pork. It was ace, deeply flavoured, more brown than red, intense, almost an Italian exercise in what the Japanese would call umami, that indefinable savouriness that goes with soya sauce, Parmesan, bonito and all kinds of good things. Crisp breadcrumbs added some good texture – a nice twist.

This was a starter portion. We tried two others, a risotto of winter truffle which tasted potently truffley, possibly thanks to a generous slick of truffle oil. The rice was just a little too ‘al dente’ (or, hard, as we would say in Ireland) but doing risotto in a restau- rant is never easy unless it’s cooked from scratch, and that takes 40 minutes (23 spent stirring the damn thing).

OUR third starter was panzerotti of wild mushrooms. These are crescent-shaped ravioli, in effect, filled with porcini (what the French call cepes) and brown caps and they came with some sage leaves fried in butter. Let’s just say that I would travel further than Dundrum for this rich, earthy, woodland dish.

A main course ‘seaside risotto’ was poor, the rice too tough, the saffron overwhelming the seafood which, to be fair, was, unlike the rice, perfectly cooked. But it was a bit of a mess, quite out of place with the rest of the meal.

Veal saltimbocca, the mainstay of the trattoria, the ‘red sauce joint’ of Italian-Ameri- can cuisine, is usually a bit dull. Not here. The veal was from Wexford (Jamie has insisted on plenty of local produce) and it had been marinated in olive oil and lemon and other good things, then topped with sage leaves and a slice of prosciutto and gently chargrilled until just cooked, still moist and nicely smoky. It came with a generous top-dressing of chopped baby tomatoes which, amazing as it may seem, actually tasted like tomatoes. It was probably the best version of this dish that I’ve had. Anywhere. And it didn’t have a sickly sauce of Marsala as it so often does.

A slice of passable lemon curd cake was shared and we finished with perfect macchiato (espresso with milk froth) and a glass of grappa, the Italian poitín.

With a carafe of red and white and also a bottle of mineral water, the bill just breached the €100 mark but we had done ourselves very well. Jamie’s Italian is not just very good, it’s also (wine aside) pretty sound on value for money.