Flaneur at Four Weeks

"Thank heaven we live in Rathmines..."

Flaneur, 223 Rathmines Road,Dublin 6, flaneur.ie

Flaneur, the latest restaurant from Thom Lawson, has had a bit of a media bashing since it opened just over a month ago. The critics have not been unanimous, admittedly, but overall they seem a bit underwhelmed, some throwing up their hands in horror. My policy, as a rule, is to let a new restaurant settle down and so I left Flaneur until it had been open exactly four weeks. A lot seems to have changed in that time. I absolutely loved the place and I’m very glad that I did because this is my last restaurant review for the Irish Daily Mail. I would like to go out on a high.

The mission statement of Flaneur, if you like, is ambitious: “French bistrot cooking. Irish produce”. And just to make the challenge even tougher, it’s clear that Lawson and team want to keep prices well down. It’s about doing good food in the French idiom at prices that, frankly, make me nostalgic.

It's a simple place. Don’t expect table cloths (table linen costs a fortune to maintain) or heel-clicking, formal service. Heaven forbid. This is a busy, inexpensive, fun place in which to eat simply and well. It’s ideal for the heart of Rathmines.

It also has the kind of menu from which it’s genuinely hard to order, the very opposite of the kind where I find myself trying to establish what dish I least not want to eat. And so we ordered rather a lot.

There was a dish of rich, smooth duck rilletes served with Irish rapeseed oil infused with orange zest to cut the richness. With toasted sourdough from Tartine Bakery, this was a lovely way to kick off lunch and only €6.95.

And we had two big beef marrow bones, roasted, and served with more toasted sourdough for €7.95. When we had added some sea salt (it’s not on the table so we had to ask), this became a delightfully rich, carnivorous experience.

The kitchen sent out a taster of monkfish with a beurre blanc sauce which was being considered as a special and it was superb – cooked to absolute perfection – but completely under-seasoned. A little sea salt transformed it. Salt on the table is the way to go.

Handmade gnocchi Parisien – produced by a very early riser who makes them for both Flaneur and neighbouring Sprezzatura – were light and buttery with much Parmesan and a little actual truffle and herb butter (€9.95)

Jane Russell Toulouse sausage (€6.95) – in a coil, simply grilled and topped with a generous dollop of Dijon mustard – may have been just a touch overdone but it was packed with flavour and looked great while an escalope of pork from Andarl Farm in Mayo (€8.95) was actually too generous. If it had been cut in two and hammered out thinly it would have been better but it was perfectly encased in breadcrumbs and tasted of proper, happy pork.

We tried a few sauces with these dishes (€2.95 each), a creamy pepper one, a fabulous bone marrow gravy one and a perfectly executed Béarnaise, all presented in little sauce boats. All were employed for dipping good skinny fries, sorry, frites.

What the menu describes as Wicklow Greens, Toasted Walnut, Mustard Vinaigrette (€3.95) has to be the best value menu salad in Dublin, substantial and a miscellany of much more than the usual suspects, perfectly dressed.

Thom Lawson and his team have made a great success of Sprezzatura, doing great fresh pasta with inventive sauces and putting the emphasis, where possible, on Irish ingredients. When the first of the two outlets opened on Camden Market there were naysayers who maintained that it would never work. Doubtless there are those who claim the same about Flaneur.

Sure, it’s still a work in progress. I wonder if the menu is perhaps a little too extensive? Some dishes need tweaking and the seasoning needs to be become more consistent. But I love this place for the honest cooking, the complete lack of pretension and the charm of the young staff. And even the coffee’s good.

I have learned a lot in my almost thirty years of reviewing restaurants and one of the most important lessons has been this: to try to figure out what a restaurant is trying to do, and then to assess how close to the mark it has managed to get. Applying this approach to Flaneur, I’m somewhat in awe at what they are trying to do and I’m very impressed that, a month into the operation, there’s so little left to tweak.

I just hope that the gloriously accessible prices can be maintained.

Another thing that I have learned over the years is that restaurant reviews, good, bad and indifferent, may cause a bit of noise, but it’s people who decide if a restaurant lives or dies.

And Flaneur is a very democratic restaurant.

WINE CHOICE:

Most of the small wine selection is on tap and comes from Winelab, with prices starting at a pretty well unheard of €6.95 a glass. There’s a delicious Beaujolais (€8.95) which is served chilled, a Falanghina with a real volcanic streak of minerality (€7.95) and a chunky Rioja (€8.95) along with plenty of other choices. Beauregard-Mirouze Corbières is €48 a bottle, Athletes du Vin from the Loire is also €48 and the doubtless delicious Domaine Arlaud Charmes-Chambertin 2014 is a whopping, but not entirely unreasonable €250. I’d stick with the taps.