Seapoint Fish and Grill: What's in a name

Name changes can be tricky but the Seapoint Fish and Grill has pulled it off and the food is great, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

SOMEONE DIDN’T GET the memo. “Hello, Seapoint Restaurant,” they answer when I ring to book a table, even though it’s now called something different. Name changes are tricky, especially when your restaurant is in the same building run by the same people. It’s the Dún Laoghaire as Kingstown, Snickers as Marathon, June, July and August as summer syndrome. But Seapoint Restaurant is now Seapoint Fish and Grill. A simple tweak. Even they don’t seem to be making a big thing of it.

Growing up in the beach county that is Wicklow, I was always a little snooty about Dublin beaches, feeling that they were just not beachy enough – until I discovered Seapoint. There, you have the joys of a sand-free swim, bobbing in Dublin Bay with a view of the Aviva Stadium from the water. You need to get over the mortification of inching in as icy fingers of water creep under your wetsuit while a daily swimmer twice your age wades into the waves in togs and a flower-dotted swim hat. But that’s Seapoint, a place where bronzed locals lounge like lizards on the warm honey-coloured stones and swim come rain, hail or shine.

Seapoint Fish and Grill doesn’t have a view of the bay, although it is decorated with evocative paintings of bathers in the nearby choppy waves. The restaurant is on Monkstown Crescent, in one of a line of stone mews running opposite the church.

I’ve only been able to get a late table on a busy Friday night and the place is thronged and noisy, so loud in fact that it’s not until the place empties out that we can hear the piped music they’ve been playing all evening. You walk in past a large, comfortable outdoor eating courtyard under a huge black canopy. Inside, the look is modern – wooden floor, tobacco brown panelling and orange banquette seating.

The new name may sound like a casual surf-and-turf place but the food holds on to the “restaurant” feeling just as doggedly as the staff do to the name. And that turns out to be no bad thing. I’m going all-fish with a mackerel smokies starter (€7.50). It’s a small pot of robustly flavoured chunks of fish, punchy as mackerel can be, with finely chopped bites of fennel and tomato to cut the creaminess of the sauce. It’s topped with a toasty “Coolattin crust”, which is a great use of this Wicklow cheddar and comes with a good salad and thin, toasted sourdough bread so the concoction can be spread like paté. It’s always a treat to find mackerel on an Irish menu and here, this cheap, plentiful and tasty staple fish is used excellently.

The “blackboard specials” are shown on a retro pinboard set into a large mirror in the centre of the restaurant. Carol’s bruschetta of crab claws is a wonderful, finger-licking plate of fresh crab claws with more fennel and tomato and served with micro-cress (€12.50).

Mains are definitely from the restaurant rather than the grill canon. I get a fresh-as-can-be slab of hake, butter-fried on a slick of spinach, all of it on top of a great artichoke risotto. There is cream, tang and crunch in the risotto, the crunch coming from a crumble of crisp, crouton-style breadcrumbs which seem to have been fried in a red pepper oil. Carol’s lamb fillet is fantastic, slow cooked to a velvet softness and pink inside, with a tarragon mash and a splodge of baba ghanoush, all covered in a brilliant red wine sauce.

A dark chocolate mousse is a little more anaemic than I would have expected but still good and comes with some luscious, syrup-soaked black cherries. Carol gets a textbook perfect creme brulée with a panna cotta and raspberry ice cream. We’re both driving so make do with cranberry and sodas and plenty of chilled tap water from a carafe throughout the meal. The wine list looks as if it may make taking the Dart there well worth it.

They may have taken the word “restaurant” out of the name, but Seapoint Fish and Grill is still a restaurant, an excellent restaurant. Even the bill at the end says so, at the top, in black and white letters.

Dinner for two with drinks and a peppermint tea came to €89.75.

[ Twitter.com/catherineeats ]

Biting the hand . . .

A full catch of restaurant critics and a chorus of approval met Ronan Ryan's great new Bite restaurant when it opened a short while ago on Dublin's South Frederick Street.

I had a great night and a lovely simple plate of sea bass there for €10.95.

But what's with the steep price increases? Bite's menu now lists grilled sea bass at €16.95, by my reckoning 55 per cent more than in those opening days. Mmmm.

The ever-professional Ryan says more expensive ingredients are behind the price rises. And yes, you can understand how line-caught yellowfin tuna (€17.95) and chef Malcolm Starmer's lobster burger (which comes with the works for €24.95) have extended the price range from the more basic plates.

The side orders, which are some of the best reasons to go here, remain priced at €3.95. According to Ryan, the cost of dinner for two, with wine, is averaging out at €66.

Judging by the numbers of customers reeled in on an average night, diners are hooked on the posh fish and chips idea, even if the prices are a little more on the posh side than they used to be.

Bite Dublin, 29 South Frederick Street, Dublin 2, tel: 01-679 7000