There are two arts to the restaurant business. There is the art of cooking: making something delicious that people want to eat, enjoy and pay for. And, secondly, there is the art of running the room: orchestrating and controlling a space where people feel comfortable and looked after, and where the food is seen at its best.
If you want to see both in action, then book a table in Solas, which has charmed visitors to Dingle for a happy nine years now. In Solas you will see how Nicky practices the art of cooking, whilst Anne practices the art of running the room. Poetry on the plate, and poetry in the motion.
The precision is needed for a couple of very good reasons. Firstly, the Solas menu is expansive: four dishes to share; eight pinchos offerings; six tapas-style dishes; and a Solas special of wagyu rib-eye just in case it’s your birthday. This portmanteau offering is then completed by a trio of puddings, and a selection of artisan cheeses. More than twenty individual offerings makes for a hard-working kitchen, one where the food is delivered to the table as soon as Nicky has finished garnishing, embellishing and polishing each plate.
This self-imposed pressure means that Anne has to control the flow of punters into the room, but remember that in Dingle the flow of punters is actually a continuous torrent of customers, abetted by hopeful walk-ins who step in the door repeatedly during the evening to ask – pleadingly – if there is any chance of a table? There never is.
The artful tango created by the couple makes for special eating, and a charming room. Nicky’s dishes major in the shellfish which is the especial prize of Dingle’s piscine bounty: Kerry rock oysters; scallop ceviche; Blasket Island crab; octopus carpaccio.
The oysters will have a yuzu ponzo and smoked trout caviar; the crab is a zinging tartlet of the most superlative crab meat, the dish topped with avocado and lime and finished with garden greens.
The scallop ceviche is a holy moly! stunner of a dish, the microscopic dice of shellfish served on the shell with apple and ginger and a mustard seed and lemon grass pickle, and Nicky also offers the scallops Spanish-style, with morcilla black pudding, ajo blanco and pickled grapes. The octopus is served as a dice of carpaccio with a kimchi aioli.
No one else is cooking fresh Irish shellfish with such determined artistry and flair. When the day arrives that every coastal town in Ireland has a room serving Irish shellfish with such verve and imagination, well that will be the day when we can take our place amongst the League of Nations with Insanely Good Cooking, and do so with pride.
The one problem, however, is that Solas cooking is difficult. If we were Olympic judges, we would be awarding Solas maximum points for the difficulty of their routine. Take the simple matter of the Solas chorizo and Manchego croquette, served with smoked paprika aioli and Dingle sea salt.
We are, of course, having a Peak Croquette Moment in Ireland, one which has been going on for some time now. There are plenty of good ones, but none is like the Solas croquette.
Rather than using egg in the mix which wraps the filling, Nicky mixes three flours to create a coating which shatters into your mouth when you take a bite. It is insanely good, adding a moment of tactile surprise to the bright, fulsome flavours of the cheese and chorizo. The perfect crunch, and then the perfect ooze of ingredients: boom!
Whilst the croquette stops you in your tracks because of this surprising brittleness, every other dish offers a masterclass in technique, from the ocean fresh salinity and texture of the crab tartlet to the baked chocolate sponge which oozingly melts into a stream of chocolate the way you dreamingly hope good chocolate will.
Whilst Nicky is squeezing out sparks in the kitchen, Anne is welcoming a steady procession of guests who arrive every ten to fifteen minutes, taking their seats and ordering their food and wine until the room is rockin’.
Everything is optimised to ensure the very best guest experience, from grilled coco bread with Solas’ confit tomatoes to baked Alaska with burnt meringue and oat tartlet.
The menu focus isn’t entirely a fishy one, so you could order Kerry lamb kofta, or Annascaul belly of pork, or that Summerville Farm wagyu. But the Solas shellfish creations are one-of-a-kind, virtuosic renderings of our sublime marine bounty, and you really need to enjoy them as a culinary duetto, a sublime addition to Dingle’s Other Voices Festival, which will shortly close the season in what is the most artful food town in Ireland.
~JMcK with photographs by Samuel McKenna
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