Avoca's Fern House Café in Kilmacanogue, County Wicklow, is now opening for dinner on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. Matt Murphy and Giorgio Ramano are heading up the kitchen, so you can expect the cooking to have solid Avoca senders with washes of Italian accents. What intrigues us about the menus is that the lovely Arctic Char from Sligo produced by Bill Carty appears not just as a main course – with salsa verde, dauphinoise potatoes and sesame green beans – but also as an intriguing starter where it is served as tempura, with coconut, Asian chilli and lime dipping sauce, and a herbed salad. Bill also picked up a Eurotoques award last week, so Cloonacool Arctic char is not just going places, it is going to all the right places.
The rest of the Avoca menu reads beautifully, but not so beautifully, one suspects, as it will eat.
Reservations on 01 274 6990.
Meantime, we await the restaurant where the kitchen decides that Arctic char should be char-grilled: charred char, anyone?
