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W GASTRO ORDS Conor Stevens Worthy Note If I’m no
t mistaken I first heard of Note (Bar, Bistro, Bureau) about a year ago. I recall thinking that Fenian Street was a pioneering location for a wine bar. It’s an area I associate with Trinity’s back gate, the so-called science-end where many of college’s dorkiest and least Dublin types would be voided from the corpus of the campus at day’s end. The same types who have subsequently inherited the earth. I then ‘found myself there’ a few days before the Christmas after one of those festive lunches that unchecked, strain towards New Year’s. I saluted young chef Essa Fakhry (or someone) on my way out and made a mental note to come back when he’d established himself in the kitchen. He’d been one of those ‘ones to watch’ for a while and I liked the cut of his jib during a stint at Amy Austin. By which I mean I liked the food he sent out. Full kitchen service appears to have begun in early Summer and with it a torrent of overwhelmingly positive reviews. Noted Englishman Jay Rayner himself even filed copy. The person charged with keeping me from social media told of myriad ‘events’ and cross-pollinations with other kitchens. Shit was blowing up. This is where it’s at – at the bleeding edge young cooks are endlessly collaborating, popping up like modish whack-a-moles in the food ventures of fellow travellers. It’s all happening. Painted black from the ground to the eaves, the three-storey building doesn’t so much sit on Fenian Street as loom forbiddingly across it. It looks like a chess piece threatening to advance upon the Ginger Man across the way or maybe the result of a teenage nihilist’s tantrum. I wear black on the outside, cause black is how I feed on the inside. I like it. The room feels as if it could have been dismantled in Clerkenwell and reassembled, tasteful trope by trope. The 36