I suppose that this one should be filed in my long-running, intermittent and un-commissioned who would choose to eat here? series. The feeding of curiosity should be central to this criticism racket, right? They can’t all be white-hot openings from thrusting young Turks. Sole 1.0 opened in 2018 with an entrance on South William Street and began its long slow descent into the abyssal depths of my consciousness.
Never once in the intervening years did I hear of anybody I knew eating there. I never even overheard a stranger allude to it. I may have eaten once in sister restaurant Fire (at the Mansion House) but I wouldn’t swear to it. I could have questioned its very existence were it not for the gargantuan (€4.5 million) expansion unveiled last year that has seen the restaurant force its way through the very fabric of the city to burst (literally) onto the Drury St scene.
The new maxxxed-out incarnation now boasts some 200 covers including two private dining suites ‘perfectly suited for VIPs, celebrities, and discerning guests who value both luxury and privacy.’ I’m beginning to wonder if everybody who eats here (rubes and celebs alike) prefers to keep the fact private. As we approach the grand new entrance I note that the Drury St gatherings no longer resemble the spontaneous expressions of youthful joy that they once did – it increasingly feels like the young folks drawn here are enacting enjoyment. Everybody seems to be photographing somebody else holding a sandwich. It’s a scene held together with kayfabe.
More make-believe awaits as you enter the restaurant to be greeted by a phalanx of stiffly uniformed staff. You are received at the hostess station into a space that is intended to be impressive. There’s a sweeping, illuminated staircase and prominent light fixtures. Heaven or Las Vegas, depending on your taste. We then wade through a sea of greige to our seats at the bar and the room opens up. The sensation is of entering the ossified cavity of an ancient leviathan or the husk of a decommissioned submarine. Whitewashed ironwork spokes radiate out from a central column behind the bar, bracing the ceiling to some kind of steam-boat/steam-punk affect. It really is something.
The interior is ribbed for your pleasure and many appear to be enjoying it – the room is full and roiling. The majority appear to be tourists. I’d wager that a good number of them will soon be clanking goblets of mead in Bunratty Castle. There are clear plexiglass partitions punctuating every two seats at the bar that somehow make the stranger at your elbow feel closer than they are. It’s an odd feature but a cold stiff martini should take your mind off it. You could have a glass of champagne or even a (much-touted) Laurent Perrier Tasting Flight. It’s a fizz-forward kind of place. Bubbles for your troubles etc. You could also get yourself into Stubbs Gazette if you chose to venture too far down into the Burgundy and Bordeaux lists.
The theme of conspicuous consumption (and up-sell) continues into the food menu where a lot of real estate is given over to Seafood Towers and what passes for Caviar these days. You could have a flight of that too – The Ars Italica Caviar Experience – for €178. This place has more flights than Cork Airport. Casting about the room you really could be anywhere – a casino in Macau, an Abu-Dhabi hotel maybe. The lobster tank is flanked by two meat-aging cabinets filled with some of Peter Hannan’s finest gently putrefying steaks. Tonight you dine in Mammon.
‘Guinness’ Smoked Salmon makes a cursory nod to site-specificity but should sound an alarm bell, regardless of where you originated. We need to stop using this brand as a lazy semiotic shorthand for Irishness. Just stop. Guinness does not need to play any part in the smoking of anything except cigarettes. The ‘Signature’ Sole Connemara oysters are clean and brisk with ozone but unfortunately arrive around the same time that we notice a pervasive bang of sewage that will ebb and flow throughout dinner. It’s not a good thing to experience in a dining room. We push on.
From the more restrained side of the Appetisers sweet little queen scallops eat well upon a dense and bright sweetcorn ‘chowder’. The attendant shavings of chorizo feel as if they might have snuck across the border from a different restaurant. A murky Watercress & Wexford Potato Soup tastes more of commercial stock and delivers none of the peppery verdancy that you might expect.
I can’t count the amount of times I’ve eaten Sole Meunière, it’s not that the instances are innumerable, I just don’t make notches on the bedstead. Even so – I’m never not thrilled at the ceremony of table-side filleting. The economy of those dextrous strokes that speak of relentless reps. The one that I had here was as good as it gets – I guess you need to nail your namesake dish.
It’s a good-sized fish timed perfectly and very deftly de-boned. It could feed two and represents a high water mark for dinner. A side of mashed potato however is over-worked and gluey. It raises spectral shades of Cadbury’s Smash™. Also – ditch those cheap plastic lemon presses – charge an extra euro and give me a halved fruit tied in muslin.
A serving of risotto should have the motility to ease into its containment. You may have seen a cook in Milan or Rome tap your soup-plate on the pass before it’s picked up — this is an act of encouragement to settle the rice into its surrounds. The Seafood Risotto here, a special on the night, is either scared stiff or playing dead. You could plant a flag in it and claim the territory. Requested cheese-free it arrives with generous shavings of grano and is also chronically over-seasoned.
To our left a young woman is on a solo journey – working her way joylessly through the top end of the menu. It appears that she’s in training for a feat of competitive eating or is some kind of influencer. She dispatches the caviar ‘experience’ with the assistance of the champagne flight before calling for serious claret and putting away a fillet steak with French fries. A small part of me wanted to hang on to see if she’d order the Ferrero Rocher Baked Alaska for two. I can but hope.
There’s doubtless some competent seafood cooking to be found here, Hannan’s steaks are difficult to screw up, the fish and shellfish is well-sourced and service is well-drilled but this doesn’t amount to a defence. There are simply too many independent restaurants in Dublin now cooking with real passion and invention to do so. The overall product is too corporately slick to hold onto, too anonymous to connect with. It is frictionless in a way that makes dinner seem to happen to you – as if you’ve been passed through a vaguely luxe food-chute where you emerge considerably poorer.
Sole is less a destination restaurant than a transition between the conditions of hunger and repletion. I’ll file this one under ‘best enjoyed on somebody else’s dime’.
Words: Conor Stevens
Images: Killian Broderick
47 Drury St
Dublin 2
