Il Vignardo

Italian football, of which I’m a fan, can be beautiful or brutal. For every Gianfranco Zola there’s a Mario Materazzi. I’m coming to the conclusion that Italian food, at least as practised by restaurants, is much the same.

Il Vignardo is located in the basement of Isaac’s Hotel in Store Street, gateway to a district that, fifteen years ago, was Dublin’s Beirut. A waitress who worked for me was mugged twice in the same week while walking home. Since then the once cruel streets have been gentrified somewhat, thanks largely to the rise-and-rise of the adjacent Financial Services Centre, Fianna Fail’s patented version of the Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City.

It’s a curious room in which to dine; columned vine-clad arches rise in profusion, stone, plastic or papier maché, I couldn’t tell. The hotel’s website said it evoked “thoughts of Italian vineyards and sunshine.” An abandoned set for a B-pic ‘Adam and Eve’ was what I had in mind, though the mingled scents of what everyone was eating didn’t make for an Edenesque experience. The open-plan kitchen didn’t help. “They really should sort out the air-conditioning” was Sibella’s initial comment as we walked in.

The menu, involving pizza, pasta and many specialities had us spoiled for choice so we ordered a bottle of Soave from the normally reliable house of Masi to sip while we made up our minds. I thought it severely overpriced at €29.95. The waitress uncorked it behind the bar at the back of the room, a practise I thought had died out years ago. The wine was dreadful, though certainly not ‘corked’, with unnatural bitter almond flavours. We complained and the waitress immediately offered to replace it with something different. We selected a Puglian Chardonnay which turned out to be out of stock. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll have another bottle of the Soave”. This shit-or-bust approach paid off, the wine was fine – although I have to say there are many more characterful versions of Soave around. The waitress ventured the opinion that the problem may have been caused by badly-rinsed glasses and I think, in retrospect, she was right.

Like the eejit I sometimes am, I was tempted by the ‘grilled local lobster’ and so ordered a half as a starter, at €15.95 a fair price. It wasn’t exactly grilled. It had clearly been boiled much earlier in (hopefully) the same day, refrigerated, then daubed with garlic butter and flashed for a second or two under a grill. The butter was melted but the meat underneath was cold as a witch’s tit. My dismay, however, was greatly exceeded by Sibella’s. Her minestrone came accompanied by garlic bread, seemingly crafted from a stale supermarket French stick. That was the best part. The minestrone itself was light on vegetables other than lumps of potato sticking up like rocks in a bleak sea. Worse, someone had poured oil on the troubled waters, a liberally-ladled dose of basil oil to be precise; oleaginous and robbing the minestrone of any taste of vegetables it otherwise might have had. I tried it; one mouthful made me feel like I’d jumped off a stricken supertanker and was drowning in the slick.

We awaited our mains with trepidation. In fairness, Sib’s vegetarian pizza was fairly decent. It was expensive, though at €13.50. The equivalent at Ciao Bella Roma or Pizza Stop where they do such things pretty well wouldn’t have cost much over a tenner. I chose the fresh crab and spinach linguine, most expensive pasta dish on the menu at €17.95. It seemed a nice idea and should look pretty appetizing, the white pasta providing a neutral background for the green spinach and the pink-flecked crab. Dream on. The spinach or the pasta, both well overcooked, had not been properly drained. As a result the crab swam in a disgusting sepia swamp that smelt as bad as it looked and tasted worse. I found a few flakes clinging to the hill of pasta, above flood level, and have to say it wasn’t bad crab by any means. A good idea spoiled by lousy execution.

Against our better judgement, we took dessert. Not wanting all my illusions shattered on one night I insisted we didn’t risk the tiramisu. Instead we settled for a ‘New York Cheesecake’ to share. New York, yeah, right. A real New York cheesecake is a rich baked job so heavy it would break your toe if it fell off the table. This was the usual gelatinous stuff, more ‘Forksrork’ than New York.

We finished off with an ineffectual attempt at an Americano and a bitter, thin, over-run espresso. Was I really among Italians? In view of the dismal overall experience I should make a point of exonerating the waiting staff, who were charming and efficient throughout. Not their fault the kitchen let them down big-time.

To revert to the football analogy, the food at Il Vignardo on the night we dined there wouldn’t even rate as a clogging match between two relegation threatened Serie C teams. It belonged to an earlier era, brutal as a gladiatorial in a run-down coliseum on the fringes of the Roman Empire. In my role as arbiter, I have no hesitation in giving it the thumbs down.

Verdict: Apart from the excellent service everything sucked.  There was no sense of the place being ‘managed’. This restaurant really does need a generous dose of ‘hands-on’ .

The damage: £95 ex service for 2 starters, mains, coffees, 1 dessert, bottle of wine.

Rating: *1/2

Il Vignardo, Isaac’s Hotel, Store Street, Dublin 1, Tel: 01 855 3099