Tom Doorley

What’s hot and what’s not for 2018 – and, sorry, it won’t include me on the TV

IT’S not very often that I’m the very first to review a new restaurant, not because I tend to be slow out of the traps but on account of a reluctance to turn up too soon, with an appetite and a notebook. Restaurants, like any other business, need a little time to settle down (even if, unlike theatres, they charge full price while on the nursery slopes).

However, I was the first to review Miyazaki in Cork, largely thanks to it (a) being in the Rebel Capital and therefore off the metropolitan radar and (b) because it’s a takeaway on one of Leeside’s shabbier streets, with a dramatic view of the horror that is the North Main Street car park.

The real reason is that the novelist (not the comedian) David Mitchell told the Observer newspaper that this unlikely establishment was doing the ‘best street food outside of Japan’ that he had ever tasted.

And so, I trotted along and was amazed at the delicacy and intricacy of what Takashi Miyazaki was doing. I perched on one of the six stools in this blessed takeaway and was, well, taken away.

The best restaurant news for 2018, as far as I’m concerned, therefore, is that Takashi will be opening a full-blown restaurant in what was, until recently, Fenn’s Quay in the centre of the city. I expect I am going to be spending a lot of time there.

In Dublin, where restaurants seem to spring up, like mushrooms, overnight one never really knows what’s going to happen next. But Dylan McGrath, who does remarkable things (some of them Japanese) at Taste at Rustic, Rustic Stone, Fade Street Social and latterly the Bonsai Bar will be opening in what is being called One Ballsbridge, along with a new Avoca store and restaurant.

However the really big news is that Andy McFadden, formerly head chef of London’s Pied á Terre (and, before that, at L’Autre Pied), appears to be Brexiting (at least up to a point). He started his career at Patrick Guilbaud’s and now seems determined to be doing his own thing, including a Dublin restaurant. Having eaten his food in London, I suspect that this is just the jolt that Dublin eating out requires.

In broader terms, I think there will be no stop, as yet, to the proliferation of chain coffee shops even though we might appear to be reaching saturation point. The same, bizarrely, seems to go for doughnut (or ‘donut’) joints.

Every year various publications around the world try to predict restaurant trends and it’s instructive to read back over the archive and count the ones that don’t appear to have happened, at least as of now.

One of which we can expect to see more, however, is fermented foods (think kimchi and sauerkraut and way beyond those forms of pickled cabbage). Another, related, item that we can expect to see more frequently is house-cured charcuterie (Chapter One being ahead of the game on this one). The drive towards ultra-local food, spearheaded very impressively by Sage in Midleton, Co Cork, is only going to become more emphatic and widespread.

Now that serious restaurants have fully embraced the Coravin technology that allows them to serve expensive wines by the glass (preserving the remains of the bottle perfectly under inert gas), I can see this trend spreading. It may be a little fiddly but it’s not an expensive facility and it opens up the wine list, especially for those who want to drink less but better.

The move away from three courses – starter, main, dessert – towards ‘plates for sharing’ or menus with blurred lines between the categories is going to continue, reflecting, as it does, the way that we eat at home and giving the customer more opportunities to experience what a restaurant kitchen can do.

I can’t see the average hotel taking food more seriously any time soon – despite the great exceptions such as the Coburg in the Conrad Dublin and the Garden Room at The Merrion Hotel.

A big change for me in 2018 concerns ‘The Restaurant’ with which I’ve been associated for 14 television series. I have stepped down from The Restaurant, the show which Paolo Tullio and I helped to create, because I feel that it has become, as I feared, the Marco Pierre White Show. But I wish my wonderful former colleagues on The Restaurant the very best of luck with the forthcoming fifteenth series.