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GASTRO WORDS Conor Stevens PHOTOS Dublin Cocktail
Lab SCENE, HERD Bovinity I’m not one to bury the lede, so I’ll get it out of the way up front – I feel quite positively disposed toward this place. The only real beef I have is with the name. It is, hooves down, one of the most abysmally misjudged and cack-handed attempts at brand namegeneration that I’ve witnessed for some time. That said, I didn’t see the brief so maybe ‘the team’ totally nailed it like. I get it, tone is tricky yo. It’s also possible that the client was one of those have-a-go-merchants who imagine that copy writing is like, a piece of piss. Sister restaurant ‘All Bar Chicken’ would seem to support the theory. Just down the street it is, to all intents and purposes a chicken place, while the name strongly implies that it is anything such. Maybe a comma disappeared during the creative process. ‘All Bar, Chicken’ could almost feasibly nod to a focus on cocktails with a passing commitment to poultry. Whatever. Who cares. Perhaps the Bovinity name will itself act as a kind of spur, engendering a steely-eyed ambition to succeed in spite of it, like all of those unfortunate French men who were christened Kevin in the ‘90s and now endure mockery and persecution. I’ve given the phenomenon too much thought, of course, and arrived at an unfounded conclusion that this was born perhaps of a lazy Gallic alternative to ‘tiger parenting’ - just give them a shit, un-French name and let society do the hard yards for you. Merci beaucoup Maman. Bovinity opened at some point in June and positioned itself right out of the gate as some kind of Gen-Z, internet-addled, ADHD alternative to what used to be called steak houses. The monocle didn’t quite pop from my eye at the news, but it did occur to me that the depiction of this cohort as joyless, pallid, vegan abstentionists might be wide of the mark. Three out of four ain’t bad, I guess. The general vibe is one of fair fucks, Dublin ya ride, spicebag memefied basicness. Accessible alternatives to the leather, Cohibas and Cognac model are not new, of course, Le Relais de Venise has been doing its entrecôte and all-you-can-eat frites thing all over (but not here) for decades. Our own Butcher Grill (more later) also manages to serve top-drawer cuts while side-stepping the hoary old tropes. Nevertheless, putting the words ‘steak’ and ‘house’ together inevitably 36