Tenors

‘Ryanair doesn’t do cruise ships but if it did they’d be exactly like this’ was the thought that struck me as I plucked my fifth moule out of the great salt lake that represented the mariniere element of my starter. I glanced across the table to see how Sibella was faring with her toothpaste textured liver pate. Much the same, judging by the grimace.

That Tenors Grill Room in Donnybrook has a nautical aura is probably accidental but the vibe is certainly accentuated by the red triangles stretched across the rafters, giving an impression of dinghy sails hung out to dry after a regatta. It’s a cavern of a place, a bigger version of the steerage lounge on a ferry complete with king-size bar that would sustain you for the length of time it takes to cruise the Mediterranean.

On the left hand side is a vast space, largely bereft of furniture, featuring another megabar, from which the bartender seemed to have gone awol. It was into this space – you couldn’t really call it ‘a room’ – that we were ushered as the table we’d booked for half seven wasn’t quite ready. We sat down, as bidden. And waited. And waited. Eventually the girl who had greeted us brought a wine list from which we selected a bottle of Charles Back’s Goats do Roam (still love the pun) white. She returned immediately with the bottle in an ice bucket. No sommelier, she dribbled wine down the outside of my glass and, for the lack of a napkin, water from the melting ice flooded the table. She wasn’t going to mop up either, until I called her back. At this point I should state – for those of you who get infused with xenophobic apoplexy on reading of such incompetence – that the lass was not a ‘foreign national’.

I suspect the name Tenors is another pun. All but one of the mains, a duck dish, were €10, starters a fiver affording, in theory, cheap eating, say around €20 a head for three courses. Hence, I suppose, the surfeit of families; mum having a night off, dad looking pallid and anxious as his offspring balanced on the stair rails or jumped off the grand piano. All the while the restaurant front-of-house staff circulated aimlessly as if guided by malfunctioning compasses.

The menu represents a circumnavigation of the globe, with dishes culled at random from culinary traditions from Canton to Calais. I would previously have though it impossible to mess up pork belly and mash. Actually the mash was fine. The point of this dish is surely that long cooking transmutes fat into succulence and flavour with, ideally, a crispy topping to lend textural contrast. Here the whole thing was flabby, the gobs of fat sickly pale; an overwhelming taste of five spice was all the flavour you got unless you fell into the saline pool of thin gravy that enclosed the mash island. Still, I think I was luckier than Sibs, whose nasi goreng and anaemic satay chicken was about as Indonesian in character as a day trip to Holyhead. Oops, nearly forgot to mention the crispy onion rings, thick, crude, delaminating before they arrived at table.

And so it went on. The meringue Romanov wasn’t; it was a mousse. The ‘New Yorker’ baked cheesecake seemed oddly synthetic, texturally the sweet cousin of the liver pate. New York? Well, Woody Allen might have got a movie out of it, I suppose. I’ll call a halt there, except for mentioning that they charged us for two bottles of wine, a mistake easily corrected but maybe indicative that didn’t appear to be a captain at the helm of this vessel, unless it’s a reincarnated Captain Smith of Titanic fame.

Tenors is not a good restaurant. Granted, it’s low-priced and family friendly. That some people may like Tenors, that it’s ‘popular’, is not an argument that cuts any ice. If this is true then its a sad reflection on how minimal our culinary development has been since we left behind the era of cremated meat and overcooked cabbage.

If Tenors, with its shambolic service, pretentious pan-global menu and incompetent cooking represents value for money then we have to find a redefinition of the term ‘value’, simple as that. I’m sick of hearing that ‘cheap’ means ‘value’, it doesn’t. Anyhow, how cheap is it? We spent €70.50, €23 per head of it on food. Most of our better restaurants, from Dalkey to Howth, are offering recession busters. For example, Venu, where I dined the other week, have a summer menu, 3 courses for €22.50. House wine, at €21.50 is easily a match for the dearer Goats do Roam here. So, no contest. Although Charles Guilbaud’s professionally trained staff may forcibly restrain your little darlings from treating his gilded statuettes as Action Men and Barbie dolls it’s a small price to pay.

The damage: €70.50 ex-service for 2 mains/desserts/starters, bottle of wine, 1 coffee

Verdict: Seriously wonky cooking hampered by a pretentious menu. Pleasant, inefficient staff.

Rating: *

Tenors Grill Room, 1 Belmont Avenue, Donnybrook, Dublin 4 Tel: 01 283 0407