RESTAURANT REVIEW – Rustic Stone revisited

The year 1947 became a culinary landmark when the first Betty Crocker cake mix hit America’s shelves. This novelty empowered the housewife to create a fresh, ‘home-made’ (as in ‘made at home’) cake with the absolute minimum of time and effort. The concept initially backfired because home cooks felt compelled to return to the way things were pre-war – “No more tins or  powders, let’s give the boys coming home food like mom used to cook”.  Despite this early knockback, the brand’s marketing people didn’t give up. Still, the market for all-in-one cake mixes remained, to use the jargon of the time, “slow to mature”. Undeterred, the parent company undertook research, enlisting the services of leading business psychologist Dr.Ernest Dichter in an attempt to find the missing link between product and customer. The problem, he concluded, was guilt. Baking a cake was an act of love on the woman’s part; a cake mix that only needed stirring up with water cheapened that love.  Dichter’s solution was to recommend leaving out the powdered egg in the mix so women could incorporate fresh eggs into the batter. This would give the cook a sense of making a creative contribution and restore the love act. Over to Madison Avenue where a precursor of Dan Draper came up with the catchy slogan “Just add an egg” and sales of Betty Crocker’s cake mixes soared.

I’m revisiting this snippet of marketing history in an attempt to understand the success of Dylan McGrath’s Rustic Stone. Frankly, I’m puzzled. I don’t understand the appeal of forking out €100 for dinner for two in which participation is required to par-cook the main course. Wouldn’t it be so much better to have your steak arrive at table cooked to perfection by a skilled chef, especially as the chef/patron is a sometime Michelin man? Yet appeal there must be. The place was jammers, mostly with females of mature years. The menu appears set in Stone, still bearing the ‘sirlion’ typo and the bad chick lit descriptions of the food I recalled from my previous visit. There are some good things about Rustic Stone, first and foremost, service. Readers may recall I savaged the restaurant a few weeks after it opened, castigating the front-of-house operation as “shambolic” and calling for a forced deportation of the staff to a McDonalds on Rockall. They have solved the problem; not by recruiting more but by recruiting better. The standers-and-waiters have gone, these days it’s a lean, mean machine. The girl who looked after us performed miracles by dint of sheer cop-on. Some of the culinary ideas are smart, too. We took three of the ‘small bites’. The chilli peppers stuffed with tuna, avocado and aromatic herbs would have been great if they hadn’t been chilled to death. The cured beef and lovely citrus-scented duck breast ‘sandwiches’ came with a cracking home-made mango chutney. The tempura (it wasn’t) of salmon was fatty and overcooked. I believe ‘Crackbird’, Dublin’s first ‘pop-up’ has popped-up again. Can I suggest to Jo Macken that, before he anoints another chicken, he pop over to Rustic Stone and taste the treatment that Dylan has accorded the spatchcocked quail. Now this was delicious. The successs or failure of our evening hung on the main course. The History Woman and I opted for the t-bone for two, at €62 considerable more expensive than the equivalent at The Butcher’s Grill. How would we like it? Medium rare, although why the waiter asked us was puzzling. Weren’t we supposed to cook it?  The slab of beef arrived slightly browned, you couldn’t call it ‘seared’. Now it was down to us. We were advised to cut slices and toast them on the rapidly cooling stone platter. Dubious of this advice, we simply let the whole piece sit there, turning it from time to time and thumb-prodding it until we achieved the desired result. We heard a stifled cry from the next table.  A fellow diner had burnt her hand while overcooking a tranche of halibut. What a palaver. You risk injury and indignity in equal measure. We gave Dylan’s take on the “add an egg” philosophy the thumbs down.  It was a good piece of meat, though and we liked the polenta chips. We hated the hay-textured verdure on the side. Desserts, a panna cotta spoiled by unsightly presentation and a selection of frozen yoghurts and sorbets, were acceptable. And there you have it. We spent €131, ex service. The food is inconsistent, the room uncomfortable and badly ventilated. By the end of the evening your hair, skin and clothes smell of cooking while the glasses on the table have acquired a patina of grease. I really don’t ‘get’ Rustic Stone, most likely I never will. But can sixty southside matrons on a Tuesday night be wrong? Rustic Stone, 17 South Great Georges Street, Dublin 2 Tel: 01 707 9596

Ratings: Food *** Wine ** Service *** Ambience ** Overall ***