Looking back on it, 2016 will go down as the year when the last crumbs of recession were consigned to the public pedal bin. Existing restaurateurs began to feel confident enough to up their act (and their prices, it has to be said) while hardly a week went by without the media hailing the birth of somebody’s new culinary baby.
One of the most pleasing aspects of the year just gone has been what I detect as a revival of interest in comfort food, largely spearheaded by Italians and Italophiles. Italian cooking is steeped in local, seasonal products with heady aromas and savagely rich flavours. It was in search of such that Miss X and I found ourselves, a few days before Christmas, in a new trattoria/wine bar on Dublin’s Harcourt Street, called Di Luca, in honour of the chef-patron’s nephew.
Miss X was, in a previous life, also a restaurant critic; in her day a purveyor of astringent, nothing-held-back writing. I know her from our mutual presence on the naughty step of innumerable restaurant award juries. We also have a shared heritage. Her father and my mother hailed from the same town in south Lancashire, mired in those days in the murk of mines and mills, possessing a strange dialect a few words away from being a language in its own right, distinct from that of the town three miles further up the East Lancs Road. Miss X knows, for example, that “a croft” is a patch of waste ground and a “flash” is a large pond. She was delighted to be asked to accompany me on a review and rewarded me after the event with what amounted to a short essay on our lunchtime caper down memory lane.
We began, as seemed appropriate, with a glass of prosecco frizzante. While drinking it, we studied the menu, the text of which I found impossible to decipher. I was well into Woody Allen mode, fearing terminal blindness was about to be visited upon me, when I copped on that grey print on a grey background is an unsound choice for a menu in an atmospherically lit restaurant, as is Di Luca.
The menu, once we’d held it near the window, proved commendably brief. We shared three starters. Both of us were utterly charmed by one of the simplest and most endearing dishes I’ve had in recent memory. A generous assortment of wild mushrooms — enoki, gallinacci, portobello and funghi porcini as far as we could detect, maybe others — slathered but not smothered with prime gorgonzola. The pungency and saltiness of the cheese was perfectly balanced by the meaty texture and woodland-scented aromas of the mushrooms. It would have been even better, my guest pronounced, had the dish in which it was served been heated, allowing the flavours to expand yet further. The crab cocktail also pleased, the shyest of vinaigrettes doing more to enhance the sea-tang than a dollop of the habitual Marie Rose. I will pass on my guest’s verdict because it is interesting to see how other people view food — “lovely, but I’m all about hearty food in winter and would never order this unless the sun was splitting the stones outside. Imagine that dish with a glass of Pecorino and a mild sunburn in the late afternoon.”
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My own take was to treat the crab cocktail as an intriguing diversion, an ethereal entr’acte between the plangent notes of the mushroom and gorgonzola and the oozy decadence of our “final starter” (a contradiction in terms?), the risotto. I am picky about risotto. I cook it a lot, having gleaned the basics from a momma from Milano and, years later, boning up with a course from the chef of one of Italy’s most prestigious hotels. Prior to this day, the best risotto I have eaten in Ireland was a squid ink version in Dame Street’s glorious but ill-fated Fiorentina. I remember praising it to the skies in a review. Di Luca’s “special”, a risotto in which plump, pillowy, sparsely cooked oysters jostled with firm arborio cooked to the perfect density nudged it off the podium. “A masterpiece in timing” was my guest’s verdict. At some point I realised that both risotti were the inspiration of one and the same person — Kristan Burness, formerly of Fiorentina but now chef/proprietor at Di Luca.
Miss X was initially dismayed because earlier diners had consumed, in toto, the short rib ragu, but she settled for the rigatoni with homemade salsiccia. Dismay turned to joy because the sausage was firm and meaty, with hints of smoke and undertones of aromatic herbs and spice. The tomato sauce had a streak of cream through it and was spiked with hidden nuggets of pancetta.
My chicken cacciatora was notable for the firmness of the accompanying potatoes, the presence of fresh herbs in abundance and the restraint — all too often the restaurant version of this Tuscan commonplace turns up with the chicken immersed in a rich tomato sauce. The fowl in this instance was a fair-sized leg and the thigh was firm and tasty — the dish all the better for it.
Wine choice was limited. We accompanied our mains with a robust but velvety primitivo, on the recommendation of the proprietor. It was good, but fell just short of justifying the €40 price tag, I thought.
The excellence of the food thus far encouraged me to choose tiramisu for dessert, something I hadn’t done for years. It was made, we were told, by the cheerfully efficient French waitress. If the French can make tiramisu as good as this, I decided, after the second mouthful, the Italians should cede the task. The other dessert, poached pears, struck a low note with my guest: “Given the season, totally under-spiced, not a detectable trace of clove, cinnamon or star anise. Pears cast adrift in a ‘flash’ (ha-ha) of drip-tray brown”.
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Coffee was merchantable but unexciting, the embodiment of Nespresso. Wait a minute, it was Nespresso. A big, gleaming pod-fed machine stared provocatively from the countertop. I was appalled until I realised that the venue was formerly an O’Brien’s sandwich bar — presumably the monstrosity, so un-Italianate, was inherited.
If so, that was not all that was bequeathed. Kristan afterwards gave me a 10-second tour of the diminutive kitchen where I glimpsed that he had turned out his satisfying creations on a couple of small induction hobs. I was staggered and, at once, sympathetic.
The bill came to just under €100 — good value for a delightful dining experience in a cosy, friendly trattoria blessed with comfortable seating, caring staff and a high standard of cooking. I went back a few days later, specifically to reprise the oyster risotto. It was as good as I’d remembered.
DI LUCA
10 HARCOURT STREET, DUBLIN 2
01 478 9049
FOOD: Four stars
WINE: Two and a half stars
SERVICE: Four stars
AMBIENCE: Three and a half stars
VALUE: Four stars
OVERALL: Three and a half stars