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GASTRO WORDS Conor Stevens Reel Talk The Seafood
Café For some years now Niall Sabongi has existed as a kind of piscine pimpernel on the Dublin dining scene, appearing here and there like a razor-clam’s siphon poking from the tide-retreating sand. Various seafood ventures have risen to the surface only to sink without trace, but all have been bound together with an apparent passion for and desire to champion the bounty of our waters. Sometimes an idea lands, sometimes you land nothing. I believe that The Salty Buoy food truck is still afloat in some capacity - those Hake Kievs! To my near-eternal regret I never made it to The Saltwater Grocery in Terenure, that sounded really quite interesting. The work with SSI – Sustainable Seafood Ireland - is to be commended. I suppose he first came to my attention with Klaw, his ‘crab-shack’ concept on Crown Alley. It was an awkward space but one of the few spots in town where you could slurp oysters without someone solicitously placing a napkin into your lap and inquiring of your credit rating. The enterprise that has proven most enduring is The Seafood Café, just around the corner on Spranger’s Yard. The corner is a very familiar one to me. I’m relaying this from my place of ‘business’ a couple of doors down the street and my current wife lived in a former life above the restaurant itself. Alan across the street in John J Cooke & Co mends my old watch every now and then when it runs out of time. It’s a true microcosm of Temple Bar. It has also latterly become popular with the young balaclavasporting set which is lamentable. That piece that somebody forwarded me on WhatsApp about a team of Garda scientists using a DNA sample from the late Lugs Branigan to create a squad of super-cops designed to clean up our cobbled streets has proven to be errant nonsense. I’m beginning to mistrust the internet. If only there was some way to fact-check these stories. Whatever. Re-fund the police. Nevertheless – The Seafood Café remains a great place to eat oysters and that’s reason enough to belly up to the bar. The new Sunday lunch programme might be an even better one. With menus (as with early-in-the-relationship sexual manoeuvres) if you’re explaining you’re losing. The satisfaction it’s attempting to deliver should be readily understood. It’s easy to get down with this concept - you choose how you’d like to do it by selecting a shared main course (and a couple of sides) and the restaurant basically does the rest, sending out rounds of snacks to get everyone in the mood 28