There is a charming tension between the oblique style of Mongoose’s visual messaging, and the dead-ahead deliciousness of Shane Stanley’s cooking in the zazzy Dublin 8 restaurant.
The fanzine-style menus in lurid pink and green, the post-modern art style with its Radiohead-like irony, the IYKYN anonymity of the narrow entrance and the pared-back room itself with its broom-cupboard charm, all signal a too-cool-for-school jape, the sort of thing that the Higgs brothers, Keelan and Aaron, who created Mongoose along with its neighbour, Variety Jones, have patented over the last decade.
But the cooking is as direct and on-point as anything coming out of a kitchen in Dublin city right now. Mongoose food is visceral, crafted and utterly on-the-money. In Radiohead terms, Stanley is cooking the noisy big bangers from The Bends. Kid A can wait ‘til later.
The hand-scribbled menu is a 4 x 4 x 4 offering, with nicely oblique touches in the snacks, such as green beans with cockles, and ox tongue with tomato and caper salad. Choosing between the four pasta dishes is the definition of a culinary dilemma, whilst the mains have solid senders like porchetta with gravy and whole roast chicken, alongside Goatsbridge trout with hollandaise and duck leg kofta with Parmesan polenta.
And do you know what it all tastes like? It tastes like the food coming out of a kitchen that is having a real blast cooking these very dishes. Happy food. Vivid food. “It is just an absolute joy to eat this food!” Sam McKenna said more than once. Shane Stanley and his deputy, Sean Cunningham, are packing the room to the rafters – we could only get a booking at 5.15 pm on a Tuesday! – and it’s no surprise that punters have embraced these yumola dishes for their contented bellies.
Open with a bang is sound restaurant advice, and grilled langoustines with rouille, and bbq organic mushrooms with pangrattato and comté custard are Big Bang starters, the mushrooms fleshed out with fresh tarragon, the langoustines a happy mess of sweet, tangible, saline vivacity.
The quartet of pasta dishes drive the sweet whisperings up an octave. Pork sausage and fennel ragout with fettuccine sounds like something you might cook at home if you had a nifty pork and fennel sausage to hand. But what was remarkable about the Mongoose version was its utter simplicity: a ragout of sausage, fresh pasta, boom bang a bang!
The dish felt unmediated, as if someone’s Italian nonna had just broken up some sausage in the pan, added a ton of cracked black pepper and grated cheese with some herbs, and doused the dish in a sprinkle of magic before tumbling it together and sending it on its way. We suspect the pasta cooking water in Mongoose might be nothing less than the elixir of life, because the dish of linguine with confit tomatoes, chilli, garlic and mussels was almost – almost – as good.
Two home runs in, and the kitchen again stepped up. Grilled Goastsbridge trout is a fish that should be cooked over fire, and this was a triumphant example of live-fire mastery, the skin crisped to a vellum-like wafer, the flesh teasingly rare at the centre.
But the duck leg kofta was something else. Sitting sandwiched between a rubble of green beans and fried greens with Parmesan polenta haloing the sliced kofta, this was a marquee production: tender, sweet, the duck showing itself to be the ideal meat for making kofta, so long as someone in the kitchen doesn’t mind doing a great deal of work.
Bread, salad and spuds are offered as side dishes, and the fried potatoes with a jumble of greens were excellent.
We shared a fine sticky toffee pudding with Jersey milk ice cream, one of the two sweet things, the other being a lemon drizzle cake, whilst cheese and crackers are also offered. The fact that Mongoose has a decent number of its eclectic wine list offered by the glass means you can sip your way from Assyrtiko to Nero d’Avola and discover that the wines are a sure fit for the food.
Service was brilliant, the room was rockin’, the playlist meanders from Marc Bolan to Andrew Watt-produced Rolling Stones, and Mongoose is some outfit: assured; idiosyncratic; unpretentious; and charming. It’s time to rebrand Dublin 8 as Dublin Ate.
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