So why do we keep going back to... Library Street
Kevin Burke's post-modern dishes call everyone back.
If there is an art to writing a menu that has the dishes that push everyone’s buttons, then Kevin Burke is the Nostradamus of the medium, crafting menus that always hit the spot. Long before you know what you would like to eat, Burke knows already.
Having that dope about what trips your dopamine is the magic sauce of Burke’s hugely successful Dublin city centre restaurant. And that is why everyone – and not just us – keeps going back to Library Street.
Kevin Burke opened Library Street late in 2021, having returned from London and after some time in the kitchen in Allta, which preceded Library Street in its South Frederick Street premises.
Five years on, and Library Street is a mighty machine, open six days a week (!) and drawing the sort of eclectic crowd – wealthy Asian visitors; SoCoDos en masse; devout food pilgrims – that any restaurant would die for.
LS punters are the curious, the interested, the up-for-it, the sort of folk who come across as being familiar with the inside of the good restaurants throughout Europe and the wider world.
Even funkier than the punters are the staff, who carry out their job superbly, doubtless aided by their impressive exhibition of arty tattoos and GenZ socks. These guys are the bomb, right on top of their brief, which is to serve food that is both weird and comforting, and to make it seem as natural as breathing.
Burke made Library Street into a fan fave quickly, with the help of a brace of dishes that backed two winners in the same race: they were delicious, and they were instagrammable. You saw them before you ate them, and you wanted to eat them because you saw them. Win. Win.
Let’s hear it one more time, then, for the crispy chicken wing with chanterelles and tarragon mayonnaise; applause, please, for the Dooncastle oysters with Bourgoin verjus and pickled chilli; be upstanding for the Paris-Brest with stout and yuzu.
Kevin Burke could pull these strange yet comforting pairings from the ether seemingly at will, and make them seem entirely logical: stout and yuzu, yeah, that’s a cinch, eh? Pickled chilli and verjus? Sure, weren’t we reared on it.
This strange comfort entranced everyone. “Just great food in a lovely room,” wrote Stanley Tucci. “Incomparable” said The Sunday Times. “Sensational” said the ’Indo. “Superb,” was food writer Caroline Hennessy’s judgement, whilst Examiner restaurant critic Leslie Williams summed it up with a pithy epithet: “A joy, simple as.”
In March 2023 Library Street became the second restaurant to occupy top spot in The Sunday Times 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland, succeeding Chapter One. “The most clamorous room in Dublin” we wrote, and getting a table in either the restaurant or the downstairs private dining room became Mission: Impossible.
It was a great time to be eating in Dublin, from the rigour of Chapter One and Uno Mas to the funk of Variety Jones and Woodruff. Yet Library Street was the people’s choice, even with the fish heads.
Yes, the fish heads. Beginning with turbot heads, Library Street has had a thing about fish heads for the last few years.
“Not only is it a wonderfully fresh and fragrant piece of fish that we grill over charcoal in miso, preserved lemon and green chilli, but it’s a dish that enables us to use the nose to tail ethos.” Burke wrote on social media.
Makes sense. If you are going to serve an entire turbot, or a tranche of turbot, as Library Street does, then cooking and serving the head is smart and logical. Except Irish people don’t eat fish heads.
Even with the restaurant’s wise operating principle that “Everything is meant for sharing” fish head is a stark menu choice. Sharing a plate of gnocchi? No probs. Some oxtail ravioli? Easy.
But sharing fish heads sounds like someone’s disastrous date night.
And yet, imagine locking eyes with someone across the table in Library Street and finding the answer to your question – “Would you like to share a fish head?” – is a resolute: “Yes!”
True love, baby, for ever and ever. Get the rings in the morning.
2026 will be the year of which we remember warm summer evenings, and it’s a warm Monday evening when we take our seats in Library Street.
Objectively speaking, we have been allotted the second-worst table in the house, shoehorned between the tall middle table with its stools, and the work/drinks zone where the staff do their thing. The dishes come out of the kitchen down this pass, and a bevy of regulars steadily make their way past us to head downstairs to the private room, so we are in the thick of it.
It’s a rubbish table, and it’s somewhat apt, because Library Street is all about being in the thick of it, relishing the bustle, being in the room where it all happens, IRL.
The menu reads like it’s the work of someone who likes work. There are half-a-dozen snacks, a quintet of starters, four mains, three veggies and a trio of puddings. The marinated turbot head is there, sitting proudly at the top of the main courses, fitted out tonight with preserved lemon and miso.
Principal artisan suppliers like McNally’s Farm get clocked on the menu with a dish of North Dublin leaves with pear, walnut, sheep’s yogurt and Mount Leinster cheese from Tom Burgess in County Wicklow, a quixotic melange.
Given the right budget and the right appetite, you would contentedly eat the lot, because the menu is a statement of How We Eat Today. Like this: venison agnolotti with morel consommé; turbot with sorrel and béarnaise; hamachi with plum, tomato and calamansi consommé; chargrilled January king cabbage with dukkah and kimchi.
Burke refracts his ideas and his ingredients through a very visual sensibility. LS dishes look real fancy – the riding hood red of the Blaufrankisch and cherry dressing on the Connemara oyster; the plate of hamachi, plum and black radish shouting out a Helen Frankenthaler palette of colours; the dukkah-encrusted King cabbage which looks like it has been excavated from the ocean floor; the charred flesh of the turbot heads looking viscerally prehistoric.
You eat first with the eyes, then dive in and find treats galore for the appetite. LS food is happy food, and the striking visuals are matched by striking flavours at every point. The cabbage dish, which is maxxed to the max in every way, shows the supersavoury cooking that Kevin Burke has made his own, dialling certain dishes up to 11, then holding back on solid senders like the chargrilled pork chop with Uncle John’s’s kale, a dish of sweet, tender meat with sparklingly fresh kale and an undercurrent of morel velouté.
It’s a wild eclecticism, which would not make any sense at all to most of the world’s population. Which means it’s a defining example of post-modern restaurant eating, where the world is your oyster in terms of influence, education, experience and store cupboard.
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