Allta's Starry Trek
Niall Davidson and his crew explore strange new worlds with their transcendent style of cooking. Here's why we voted them the No.1 Restaurant in Ireland.
Grand Canal Dock is a rigid promontory, extending out from the performative architectural zone of Misery Hill in Dublin’s Docklands. At the end of the promontory, the building which houses Allta is surrounded on three sides by water, but remains relatively close to Dublin’s centre.
On paper it’s a dream location, however the once-virgin quays in this zone, on both sides of the River Liffey, are today occupied by megabanks, commercial businesses and expensive apartments. In the planning stages the developers, as always, forgot to add any human activity to their computer simulations, so playgrounds, corner shops, bus stops, trees and walks are absent.
The handsome Three Locks Square does, however, have Allta, which now operates as two businesses. Adjacent to the restaurant, is Allta na Farraige, a cocktail and seafood bar, which restaurant writer Katy McGuinness recently described as having “the best food I’ve eaten in Dublin in a while”.
In our recent visit, both the bar and the restaurant were humming busy, though our walk back to town after dinner felt like walking through a post-apocalypse movie set: not a soul to be seen.
We chose to eat in the restaurant, where the spring menu was just launched. At €95 pp it offers quite a bargain for Dublin dining.
The kitchen in Allta puts us in mind of the bridge of a spaceship, which is pretty appropriate because the team here want to boldly go where few culinary teams have gone before. At the bridge is Niall Davidson, playing the roles of both Captain Kirk and Mister Spock: decision maker and chief scientist. Or maybe just mad scientist.
Davidson has always envisaged the restaurant experience as a total immersion event. His work is multi-sensory, and he uses the appetite as his conduit to expose us to things we haven’t experienced. His cooking works like an electrolyte, conducting a charge through the senses. This has exceptional impact with snack dishes such as the winter citrus ceviche with leche de tigre, and the in-your-face whumpf of barbecued oyster poached in pork fat XO with rhubarb juice. To use a climbing term, this is free soloing, with no ropes and no safety net.
From the cliff face, Davidson takes you to nature’s edge zones, the forest and the shoreline. Venison tartar is served in hollowed bones, set amidst an Ikebana of fern, bracken, pine and holly with smooth sea stones. The tartar has an umeboshi gel, dehydrated house miso and coffee. The plating is both exuberant and animist, the kitchen’s artfulness influenced deeply by Japanese ceremony.
The next course underlines that affinty, as the kitchen offers a bbq pea and wild garlic custard, a tribute to the savoury dish the Japanese call chawanamushi. This steamed custard has a winning jiggly texture when – as here – made correctly. Michael Finnegan’s Boyne Valley cheese is used to make the ethereal cracker.
The Allta shiitake miso butter has returned! Yes, the ultimate Allta statement dish, one of those 101 Things To Eat before You Die creations. As we were dunking the sourdough into the umami magnificence, the music of Lankum came roaring out of the Toby Hatchett speakers, completing the reverie.
The Allta journey takes a walk on the wild side, and the next journey takes them all the way down to the Lost Valley, where Mike and Darcy fashion Carrignamuc, the most cult cheese in Ireland. A turban of stuffed chicory is wrapped around the cheese, doubling down on a note of wild bitterness. Each dish is a foray into the possibilities of the ingredients, whilst also offering a juxtaposition of those ingredients, seen here also with barbecued deep sea squid with red shrimp, peanut miso, shiso and sea herbs.
The handles on the Allta knives, made by Sam Gleeson of This is What I Do and used for the meat course, are made from recycled sea plastic flotsam. The cutlery holders on the tables are made from polished bog oak. Every single item on the table is selected for the properties it brings to the whole experience.
Davidson creates new paradigms by reimagining old paradigms. Serving shellfish with lamb is a venerable tradition, and here some mussels are smoked, the lamb from Willie Drohan’s flock of Comeragh Mountain Lamb is aged to hogget maturity, and the seasonal aspect is represented by wild garlic.
Niall and Liza Davidson’s Allta enjoys a crack team which includes Lali Gonzalez, formerly pastry chef in Chapter One, and now Head Pastry Chef in Allta. Ms Gonzales’ work has a couture poise, and a finesse that means a masterpiece such as her filo pastry with rhubarb, pickled magnolia and magnolia ice cream is as much about the dish’s perfume and texture as it is about the electrifying tastes. Have a little glass of auslese with this, and you will dance all the way home.
