So why am I this crabby? How about the decor, the sundries and the fries

THE Alex Findlater & Co Food and Wine Hall is certainly rather striking. counter.On the Saturday of our

visit, the main part was packed: much coffee was being drunk, serious looking sandwiches consumed, meaty dishes being assembled at the carvery

In addition, there’s the evenings-only Grill Room and the Oyster and Seafood Bar which is where we ventured by way of a rather grubby, scuffed door off what you might call the main drag.

It’s a bar in the sense that there is some seafood on display in refrigerated splendour but not one at which it’s possible to sit.

A small open kitchen was busy deepfrying things for most of the time we spent here, the burbling of hot oil reminiscent of being in a busy chipper.

Most of the time we spent in the Oyster and Seafood Bar, we were the only customers and yet there was a stream of staff through the room.

At times, it felt more like the Oyster and Seafood Corridor to be honest.

Our shared ‘Findlater Prawn Cocktail’ was decent enough.

The prawns were plump, the ‘bloody mary sauce’ a perfectly adequate marie rose affair, the iceberg lettuce as you would expect it to be and the ‘house bread’ a rather sweet brown sort.

Unheralded on the menu were strands of marinated fennel which were fine.

Part of the menu is headed ‘sundries’ and here I came across something described as ‘crab & salmon Scotch egg, masala dressing, apple and fennel salad, fries’. Well, it sounded interesting. The crab and the salmon had been blended with somewhat glutinous mashed potato, then wrapped around a soft-cooked egg and deep-fried. In itself it was rather bland and oily but the killer blow came in the form of the ‘masala dressing’.

I won’t presume to know how they make this but if I wanted to recreate it – and I certainly don’t – I’d mix a lot of curry powder (the sort that is very heavy on fenugreek) with catering mayonnaise.

It was the kind of dressing you might use for coronation chicken if you didn’t like chicken.

Anyway, we found it oddly unpleasant and rather haunting.

The apple and fennel salad was covered in a great deal of olive oil but was perfectly edible.

And then there was the platter with truly excellent battered monkfish, softshell crab that appeared to have been cooked in rather tired oil, plump and sweet prawns in garlic butter (which also contained the tamest chilli imaginable) and a couple of cod croquettes which were something of a reprise of the glutinous mashed spud encountered earlier.

There was a good dill-enriched tartare sauce, a peppery salsa and some marie rose. Good bread was provided.

‘Fries’ as places like this insist on calling what the rest of us think of as ‘chips’ were anaemic looking and deficient in that essential quality of crunch.

For a kitchen that spends so much time deep-frying, and entertaining customers to the unmistakeable sound of the process, one would hope for, at least, a decent chip.

We shared a single enormous slice of Cashel Blue for ‘dessert’ and concluded with decent coffees. With a large bottle of sparkling water and two glasses of wine, the bill came to €81.70, including the most charming and efficient service from our outstanding waitress.

According to a newspaper report from last year, the owners are ‘actively seeking sites in other Irish cities and in the UK with a view to rolling out the concept to a wider audience.’

I’m not quite sure what the ‘concept’ is. And before attempting to “roll” anything out, I’d tidy up that grubby door and think long and hard about the menu.