marco pierre whites courtyard bar and grill pg2

Marco Pierre White Courtyard Bar and Grill: The price is White

Marco Pierre White’s new D4 eatery transports you back to a time of ordinary, overpriced food

Catherine Cleary

Restaurant Title: Marco Pierre Whites Courtyard Bar and Grill

Proprietor:

Address: 1 Belmont Avenue , Donnybrook

Phone: (01) 5510555

Website:

Cuisine: French

Sat, Nov 23, 2013, 01:00

First published:Sat, Nov 23, 2013, 01:00

Her herbed chicken is probably the best dish of the night. The meat is juicy and chalk-pale as if it’s been brined and then finished with a herby crust, with yet more sauce on the side and some decent fondant potato.

My rack of Wicklow lamb (which is five cent short of €30) is disappointing. The meat is sinewy, fatty and a touch watery. The fiery mustard dressing, with more micro-chives, is way too punchy for the lamb. The lowest point is a €4.95 side of five onion rings, so drenched in oil that they drip when you bite down. There’s another €4.95 “beef tomato basil salad” side and it’s just that: a single beef tomato, sliced with yet more micro-herbs and some finely diced shallots.

Desserts are decent but small. My plum crumble has salty nuts in the crumble topping, which is a great touch. Carol’s bread-and-butter pud is an excellent rendition, but thinking about the mark-up that turns such a small portion of bread, eggs, cream, sugar and raisins into an €8.95 dessert hurts my brain.

The only wow of the night is the bill. We’ve had just a glass of wine each, and a lot of tap water. One of us had the early bird and it’s come to almost €60 a head. Good food is worth the spend and I’ll happily put up with catering quantities of guff from chefs if they put something gorgeous on my plate. But that’s not what’s happening here. It’s 2005 again, folks. This place is jumping on a weeknight. Forget green shoots. Ordinary, overpriced food is back.

Dinner for two came to €117.05.

THE VERDICT: For these prices there are better places

Marco Pierre White Courtyard Bar and Grill,

1 Belmont Avenue, Donnybrook

tel:01-5510555

Facilities: Mercifully Marco-free

Music: Background pop

Food provenance: Lots of place names for the fish 

Wheelchair access: Yes

marco pierre whites courtyard bar and grill pg1

Marco Pierre White Courtyard Bar and Grill: The price is White

Marco Pierre White’s new D4 eatery transports you back to a time of ordinary, overpriced food

Catherine Cleary

Restaurant Title: Marco Pierre Whites Courtyard Bar and Grill

Proprietor:

Address: 1 Belmont Avenue , Donnybrook

Phone: (01) 5510555

Website:

Cuisine: French

Sat, Nov 23, 2013, 01:00

First published:Sat, Nov 23, 2013, 01:00

Let’s try to ignore the elephantine ego in the room. Forget the ceiling lights angled to light the caricatures on the wall. Ignore the lifesize face with fag dangling from his lips on the placemat in front of you. Feel the relief that they haven’t put his picture in the loos. I can’t vouch for the gents. There’s a giant M on the door of the gents so maybe it’s a tribute cave where a cardboard cutout hands out the facecloths you can use to dry your hands.

Let’s take Marco Pierre White out of the picture. We know the London chef is not in the kitchen here in his second Dublin restaurant, in partnership with the Fitzer restaurant family. But everywhere are signs of a man in love with his own legend: once rock star, now older, stockier (pun fully intended) god. So lionised is the image you feel he might write menu suggestions in squid ink on the bodies of flunkeys, or carve them into Parmesan wheels and pitch them down steep mountainsides to roll up at the gates here at Marco Pierre White Courtyard Bar and Grill. It’s a mouthful of a name, seven words where one (Fitzers) would probably do.

Anyway, baggage stowed in the overhead locker, what’s it like? Well, it’s a lot like 2005. Inside this Donnybrook redbrick is a smart Londony-New Yorky fitout in 50 shades of brown. Outside is a courtyard with fires burning in glass boxes and a garden-centre label still attached to at least one of the trees.

Expensive as it looks inside, with its Jules Verne diving-bell lamps, the mock-mahogany tables have a slidey finish. This means the cutlery skitters like a compass needle on a stormy ship rarely fastening on true north. The service, like the place, is more solid, handsome and smart.

The a la carte menu is strikingly pricey, even for Donnybrook. So we’re taking the Jack Sprat approach, one early bird, one splurge.

It’s a meat- (steak six ways) and fish-fest kind of menu. He-who-shall- not-be-named takes pride in not offering a vegetarian main course. So if you’re not inclined to order anything with a face, you can eat six spears of indifferent asparagus with a tablespoon of hollandaise over them for €8.95.

This is all predictably macho so I’m surprised by the matronly touches dotted throughout the meal. There are dolls’ house copper pots of sauces on the side, as if a D4 dieters’ club had a hand in the mission statement. My Castletownbere crab comes with “sauce mayonnaise” in a piped splodge on the side. The crabmeat is fine but the muslin-wrapped lemon it’s served with isn’t particularly juicy, which seems like a waste of effort. There are surgically scissored micro-chives and a tangle of micro-basil and parsley. This is not the last we’ll see of these garnishes. Carol draws the short spear with the asparagus starter. It’s a Ronseal dish: asparagus, hollandaise. The end.

A BIT OF FUN !

Homebaking

“After a long day at college and listening to the wife moan about Christmas I came across this article. I decided to give it a go !!! Think I might have got carried away !!!”

Independent 27^th October 2013,

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/

Feeling depressed? Maybe you need to knead: New research reveals how baking is helping to lift thousands of people out of depression

What with all the cupcakes-at-dawn hype over BBC2's Great British Bake Off final last week, which concluded in dramatic fashion with a surprise winner amid accusations of misogyny, it can be hard to forget that baking isn't all about the frivolous.

But new research into the industry has revealed baking's more serious side: as a crucial therapy that is helping to lift thousands of people out of depression.

John Whaite, the GBBO 2012 winner who has described suffering from crippling depression, believes baking is emerging "as a form of pill-less Prozac". In a report today for the Real Bread Campaign, he calls for more people "suffering from mental health issues, or who are simply going through a tough time to get the chance to try their hand at baking real bread to see how it could help them". Mr Whaite, ambassador for the campaign group Baking a Smile, said he is inundated with people contacting him to discuss "how baking helps with their various mental health issues".

Bakeries are being set up all over the country to help people facing a range of different challenges, from acclimatising to life on civvy street to struggling with learning disabilities. They include the Better Health Bakery in Haggerston, east London, which provides training placements for adults living with mental health issues; Aberdeen's the bread maker, a social enterprise that runs an apprenticeship scheme offering work experience to 24 adults with learning disabilities; and Dough Devils, a co-operative bakery in Manchester run by a group of ex-offenders.

Paul Youd, in Taunton, Somerset, runs bread-making sessions for parents and children in homeless shelters, and sufferers of domestic abuse. He writes about his experience at his No Bread Is an Island blog. In Yeatman Hospital, in Sherborne, Dorset, the community mental health team runs a therapeutic baking group for its elderly patients with dementia and is working on a recipe book called Baking Memories.

The Real Bread Campaign, which received a four-year grant in 2009 from the Big Lottery's Local Food programme to bring real bread back into local communities, said the potential number of people who could benefit from a spot of kneading "runs into the hundreds of thousands or even millions". About one-quarter of the population has mental health issues in any one year, the report said.

A gift from the kids !!!!

i dunno what there trying to tell me lol !

italian cuisine

Here's a few pictures taken of italian food effort in class it was a great effort from all , this is our effort we worked in pairs for this class and i think for a first effort we turned out a couple of nice plates and i feel that my presentation is coming along and  gradually improving !                                                                                                                                                                                         pictured here is our take on tagliatelle,roast peppers&goats cheese,mushroom.                            

the homemade burger !

The homemade burger !!! 

 heres my take on the homemade burger , simple but certainly different to any sort of burger i had  made before  this was a fresh look at a classic , the thinly sliced onion rings made all the difference. 

pork!

Gruesome i know but as i was to find out ,there were many things that i didn't know . Chef quinn boiled the head in brine and herbs for about 4 /5 hours and then deconstructed the head showing the class the different aspects to this popular animal, the brain the cheeks , how to use and cook with the majority of the head even the ears !! having seen this i have a lot more respect for the rasher ! i mean the piggy, joking aside i found this class very interesting cooking trotters(crew beans) hocks(knees) all parts of the animal that i wouldnt have considered before .                                                                                                                             below i have a  picture of the pork belly dish with pigs cheek deep fried pigs ear garnish .(pork scratching)
i think it turned out very well considering most techniques we used were new to me.  i had made roast pork belly before but as the course progresses i feel i am taking on board other elements that are helping my end results .(hopefully)                  

fish populette!

  fish populette , the class effort was good and it laid the foundations for my effort at home which i thought turned out very well having learned how to go about  making this dish not a bad effort .                                                                                                 

The home effort served with crushed potato and thyme went down a treat . This dish was fairly easy to do considering i had only ever done it once . Served with my own touch at home delicious! a dish i will do and tweek again and again  tip .(the folding of the paper is important to make sure that the fish steams )

fish demonstration !

well here we are coming in to the festive period already! the time has passed very quickly so i have had to take stock of what we have learned as  a class and  as an individual . some things i found great and others a bit more tricky but hey we aint perfect ha ha ! .    

                                                                                                            here i have a picture from a demonstration our class watched by chef eric from restaurant la boheme ! in waterford very interesting explaining a few aspects of sea food that i never would have thought of, sourcing , quality,a lovely seafood bisque pictured here was on the menu that day and was duly devoured by the class. cheers eric !!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

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