Tinakilly Country House
The Restaurant

Tinakilly Country House is twice blessed. The only thing better than discovering a wonderful country retreat by the sea just 30 miles south of Dublin is to discover it has great food as well.

The restaurant is in a meticulously designed new addition which detracts nothing from this Victorian Italianate Manor. On two levels, the spacious dining room allows single diner’s like myself the option of either gazing out at the garden undisturbed or to pretend to gaze out while eavesdropping discreetly. The main topics this evening are golf, the Irish rush hour and Chef Christopher Daly’s rendition of wild Irish salmon.

My table is in an alcove of chintz-clad bay windows overlooking a courtyard where a spring garden surrounds the fountain pool. County Wicklow’s aqueous evening light accentuates the bristled buds of the poppies about to burst into bloom and their teeny pink geraniums friends.

The menu at the Tinakilly Restaurant is also twice blessed. First, there is a seven-course tasting menu reflecting the best offerings of each Irish season. Then, a second four-course menu offers four à la carte selections for each course.

The seven course ‘Taste of Summertime’ won my devotion the minute I taste the first course of warm salad. Slivers of beef and garlic chives are stir-fried with morel, shitake and enoki mushrooms in a gingery oil and then layered between rounds of Chinese spring roll pastry. The earthy mushrooms and rich beef are notched up to a zesty start by their dose of ginger.

Cooling things down is a lime and ginger soup. Pale green, it’s topped with a frill of fennel a morsel of ice. This mild gingery chicken stock base is spiked with cool lime to make a nice counterpoint to the spicy beef salad.

The fish course—the talk of the tables—is a wild Irish salmon wrapped in thin strips of Bayonne ham and topped with an olive-pimento chop. The intensely-flavored salmon flaked apart with the first pressure of my fork. The earthy taste of smoky crisp bacon and the piquant green-red pimento chop combined both in flavor and color to create a sublime dish.

Picking up on the salmon’s color, a refreshing and beautiful watermelon and spearmint sorbet is set before me. The purple under leaf of the green mint shows off the salmon-pink sorbet. As I clear my palate, the clippers, schooners and barquentines which sail in their frames about the room remind me of Tinakilly’s original owner, a sea captain. I wonder if he ever had salmon this good?

Then the meat course, a roast breast of duck—pink and without a trace of fat—arrives sliced and stacked around a potato Stonehenge scattered with bright green asparagus, redhead carrots and a swish of dill. The duck’s game flavor is heightened by a juniper-scented jus. The tender, crisp vegetables aren’t far from the garden. It may just be blarney, but this Irish potato seems lighter and more flavorful than those from my own garden.

An imaginative cheese course follows. A savory-sweet cheesecake made with cashel blue cheese has a hazelnut-biscuit crust and is dribbled with honey sauce. The sharp cheese, the crunch of the crust and the sweet honey are naturally fine companions.

The finale of this opus is a Tinakilly peach melba which is not just any peach melba, of course. First, the peaches are stewed in white wine with cloves, then they are stuffed with raspberry puree and placed in a marzipan cup and topped by jaunty burnt sugar cap with creamy vanilla ice cream sitting by their side. Least I find myself still peckish, Tinakilly-made chocolate petit fours are served with the Illy espresso.

I leave Tinakilly’s restaurant seven times blessed and set of for a long walk in the gloaming.

                           By Kate Crawford  March 2002

LINKS WITH ATTITUDE

The Seven-Course Tasting  Menu.

Here's Tinakilly's web site.