A few of our readers may be surprised to see that Aniar has been bottom of our Irish ratings since we started The Greedy Couple site. Our last and only visit to Aniar was a couple of years ago and the food was quite poor. But the head chef Enda McEvoy had just moved on, so maybe it was in a bit of a transition at the time. We returned to Aniar recently hoping that meal was just an off night and it must have been, because this time the meal was really quite excellent.

Chef Patron JP McMahon was on the pass for this meal, watching over our ten course tasting menu which started with a lovely dish of plump mussels, apple and scous grass - a light and cleansing opener. Mackerel, lightly cooked with charred leek which added a delicious meatiness to it continued the good start.
 
Some of the dishes were not heavily sauced, and on first appearance seemed like they might be dry, but on the palate did not lack moisture. An example of this was our last cold starter of a fantastic serving of butternut squash with some meltingly tender and very flavoursome goat ragu.
 
McMahon does not put too many components on one plate, instead falling on just a few to create excellent combinations with clear flavours. One of the best dishes was a perfectly cooked, pink and tender, woodcock, with al dente and moreish barley and an intense jus with elderberries lifting it with a slight tarteness. It had perfect execution with pure flavours. Adding a bit of bitterness to a dish again worked wonderfully with quince and kolrabhi marrying well with moist rabbit. The tastes and the intense red colours of autumn were beautifully captured on a great dish of pigeon, again cooked to absolute perfection, with blackberry and beetroot.
 
A dish of brill, although cooked just right, was the only slight let down. Served with sea bucktorn and mushroom, but with nothing to bring the dish together and lardo on the seasoned fish made the dish a bit too salty. Goats cheese with pear and hazelnut was a light, fragrant and well balanced cheese course.
 
A dessert of caramel, malt with artichoke crisps kept up the same high standard as the savoury courses. It had sweetness, saltiness and great textures to make up a very interesting sweet course.

The food of Aniar is accomplished , executed with skill and care, but still has has a slight rusticity to it. Maybe not the prettiest in presentation, but with a natural look, the dishes capture the local landscape well. Flavours are uncluttered, clear and on the whole the tastes on the plate worked extremely well together. Aniar is doing a lot to support and promote local farmers and you get a sense that they want to showcase their great produce as best they can.
 
The small dining room has a noise and energy that gives the feel of a sort of a local Irish bistro. The service is friendly, hospitable and enthusiastic and servers had a good knowledge of the food they were serving. Diners can opt to order a menu of between 6 and 14 courses. We opted for 10 courses at €100, which felt like good value.
 
The food in Aniar captures the region and the season and it manages to this with clear, uncluttered bold flavours. This meal was certainly up there with the best we have had in Ireland this year.

See Aniar on our list of restaurant ratings

​A year is not a long time for a new restaurant. It can take time to develop ideas, hone the food, recruit the right staff and essentially just polish the whole offering - this is why we try to give restaurants time before visiting. So for Loam in Galway, which is run by Enda McEvoy who gained acclaim for this work in Aniar, to be turning out meals of such a high standard after only opening just over a year ago is good to see.
 
The food in Loam is based around the region and season and does well to capture the current climate. Our tasting menu opened with a course of tender beef tartare, with a rich semi set egg yolk which was lightened and lifted with salted gooseberries. The next dish showed what Loam do best, an uncluttered clarity with big, but well defined, flavours. Salt cod, perfectly cooked, with kale, earthy salsify and a fantastic shitake mushroom broth – a really well thought out dish. This was followed by a pleasing offering of delicious pumpkin served in its own juices. A dish of mallard, perfectly pink, with earthy beetroot and rose, which gave it interesting fragrance, also captured the flavours and colours of autumn and was another delightful highlight on our six course dinner.

Too often chefs are putting herbage on a dish for aesthetics, but they do not add anything. In Loam they were used well and each one added something relevant. This was evident in a lovely dessert of carrot caramel and sea buckthorn which was elevated with the use of tarragon which it gave an aniseed note – quite clever. The last second dessert was even better though. An intense, and quite grown-up, whiskey ice-cream which on the palate gave way to a taste of burnt hay and worked fantastically with a barley and rosehip sauce.
 
Enda McEvoy’s food is accomplished, very well thought out with some clever touches that captured the landscape and climate. The flavours are big, but each ingredient stands out and everything on the plate is needed. 
 
A lot of restaurants these days claim to have a Nordic or a Scandinavian design, but in truth very few do and most are just trying to cash in on a trend. However, Loam is one dining room that actually does have this sleek, spacious and minimalist look. It felt a bit derivative, but it is a nice, comfortable space to spend a few hours.
 
€60 for this six course tasting menu felt like excellent value and €90 with well-matched wine pairings was definitely worth the extra. The service was decent, with knowledgeable servers, but lacked a bit of warmth at times.
 
We couldn't fail to be impressed with Loam; a restaurant serving seasonal, regional and delicious food, prepared with skill, care and by a talented kitchen. 

On Oxford Street near the waterfront in Belfast you will find the charming and laid back restaurant, OX. Opened in 2013 by chef Stephen Toman and manager Alain Kerloc'h, who met while working in Alain Passard’s fantastic L’Arpege in Paris, OX is serving up some really nice, clever, food, but just not enough of it.
 
Our 5 course tasting menu opened with a refreshing and light bouche of beautiful cured sea trout with avocado and beetroot with some verbena giving a lovely floral note. A moreish serving of hay baked celeriac topped with truffle, lardo and burnt onion followed – earthy, deep, autumnal and excellent. The next dish was the slight let down of the meal. Perfectly cooked monkfish, slightly soggy romanesco, served with gnocchi that felt out of place and squid ink that did not bring the dish together.
 
Thankfully the meal picked up again and the last two dishes were the best of the night. A big, bold and heartening combination of a tender piece of chateaubriand, with parsley root and foie gras – heavenly and indulgent. Dessert was a clever offering of polenta cake, served in a delicate sugar cylinder with mascarpone, and pecan nuts. It was light, refreshing, perfectly balanced and enhanced by slightly tarte apricot – a superb dessert.
 
But despite some great cookery and quite pleasing dishes, we left OX a little bit disappointed. Not with the food really, but the whole experience just didn't feel generous. Sold as 5 courses, but the first being a bouche, the second being not much bigger, it was really more like 3 courses and these were just not sizeable enough to leave us feeling fed. The bread course was a few small and rather bad slices and petit fours were a token gesture of two average macaroons. It all just seemed a bit meagre. £45, around €63, is a good price for this kind of restaurant and they are clearly trying to keep the price of their menu affordable and accessible whilst still having luxury ingredients like chateaubriand on the menu, but price point is relative to feeling fed and this is where OX fell a bit short of the mark.
 
Luckily the waiter suggested that we might go next door to their wine bar, OX Cave, for a cheese course. Which we did and after some excellent and well selected cheeses, served by very knowledgeable staff, we were a bit closer to satisfying our hunger.
The food that we did have was based around a seasonal and regional core, with some clever touches of innovation, but without feeling showy and we could tell that OX has the ability to serve up some great food, even if on this occasion it did not feel enough which made it a bit difficult to get a full grasp of what OX has to offer.
 
The dining room has a good atmosphere, with service that is welcoming and hospitable. OX is a nice restaurant, serving some great food, but maybe they just have the balance between portioning and price slightly off.

​See OX on our world restaurant ratings.

Belfast is a city with a food scene that has been developing steadily over the last few years. Our first stop on our recent visit was to Michael Deane’s fine dining restaurant Eipic. Deane is a sort of founding-father of fine dining in Northern Ireland and now runs an empire of eateries on Howard Street, with Eipic being the jewel in the crown. The head chef at Eipic is Danni Barry, who previously worked with Deane before going out to gain experience around the world, including Simon Rogan’s acclaimed L’Enclume. She was with Rogan when Deane asked her to come back to Belfast to head up his latest venture, Eipic.
 
You can see a small bit of Rogan’s influence in her food, but she definitely has found her own style. Her cooking is elegant, refined, with excellent seasoning which is right on that level to enhance the natural flavour of the ingredient without adding any saltiness. This was evident in the opening dish of our six course tasting menu; a moreish, but light Jeresulum artichoke purée, adorned with an artichoke crisp. 
 
Barry does not clutter her dishes, instead they are restrained and allow just a couple of ingredients to shine through - a perfect example was an extremely good dish with a perfectly cooked langoustine, simply served with kohlrabi. Perhaps the best dish of the meal, although it would be hard to pick one, was a flakingly soft and superbly prepared cod, served with an intense and delicious bone reduction. The food in Eipic was seasonal, but also captured the region and the autumnal weather perfectly. This was typified with a serving of partridge, lightly glazed with cider and accompanied by cabbage and some excellent black padding.
 
Whilst her food is elegant and refined it has a homeliness and a nourishing wholesomeness to it. Glazed beef with boulangere potatoes and rainbow chard was a comforting and well executed end to the savoury part of our tasting menu, a dish not easily forgotten. The dessert on first appearance looked like a tart appearing in front of us to round off an excellent meal, but was a bit of a let down when we delved into it to find the pastry was just a thin ribbon circling some spiced pear and fruit. It was tasty dish, with excellent pasty work, but it was one of those that got a bit boring the more we ate.
 
The dining room is spacious, smart and comfortable and service is professional, friendly, but lacking a little bit of engagement at times. £60 (around €85), felt like good value for the standard of food and there are some nice snacks to start and the bread was some of the best we have had in Ireland this year.
 
Deane and Barry have combined to create a very nice restaurant in Eipic, serving well executed seasonal food using the best regional produce. If in Belfast, which hopefully we will be again soon, it is certainly worth a stop. 

See Eipic on our list of world restaurant ratings.

Below are some short reviews of restaurants we visited over the last few months.

Relae, Copenhagen
Christian Puglisi’s restaurant in Copenhagen is serving top quality food in a laid back bistro style, informal and unpretentious atmosphere that has a neighbourhood feel. Drawing on a core of seasonal and regional produce, but allowing a small bit of global influence, Puglisi's food is interesting and innovative. A stunning and very clever dish of cauliflower, bergamot and mackerel demonstrated a style that can have bold flavours, each holding its own ground but marrying together beautifully to create a clean finish. The same can be said for a fantastic and interesting dessert of apple and mushroom. A course of frozen blue cheese with herbs was a light and different take on a cheese course and worked brilliantly. The only let down on our 7 course tasting menu was a rather awful serving of chewy lamb with fava beans that tasted like falling into a mucky swamp. At around €100 for a 7 course tasting menu Relae represents excellent value, especially by Copenhagen standards. The service is engaging, knowledgeable and fun. Relae is an excellent restaurant and highly recommended if visiting Copenhagen.

See Relae on our list of world restaurant ratings
 
formel B, Copenhagen
There are many great restaurants in Copenhagen now and more opening each year. In our 3 visits we have been lucky enough to have eaten some amazing meals, but formel B was not one such meal. The food was dull, clumsy and very quickly forgettable. In fact, a decent turbot dish and some perfectly cooked sweetbreads were the only positives that we took away from this meal. The rest was an array of poorly executed, seen many times before, dishes. There were leaves and greens where there shouldn’t have been, badly chopped and sliced components and portioning that wasn’t quite right. Anyway, suffice to say that we will not be returning on future visits to Copenhagen and there are much better restaurants in this price range.

See formel B on our list of world restaurant ratings
 
Amuse, Dublin
We have already reviewed Amuse this year, see here, but just a quick note about a rather good lunch we have had there since. There are too many restaurants that have very good dinner and tasting menus, but offer up dull lunch or pre-theatre servings. So it is great to see Conor Dempsey, Amuse’s chef patron, doing it the right way. The lunch menu was as well executed and showed the same care and attention as on the tasting menu we had previously. Dempsey is still developing Amuse, but he is investing his resources in the right things and the restaurant continues to improve. This is a very good to see and the lunch menu, at €29 for 3 courses or €40 for 4 courses, offers great value and a great lunch option in Dublin.
  
Indaco, Ischia
In the Regina Isabella hotel in Laco Ameno on the island of Ishcia young local chef Pasquale Palamaro is serving some creative and local inspired food. His food shows a lightness of touch and an excellent palate. An opening dish of scallop carpaccio was a delicate and cleansing start to our tasting menu. A moreish, but surprisingly light serving of spaghetti with mullet roe, grilled pine nuts, lemon zest had a beautiful freshness to it. This best dish, in fact it was one of those rare perfect 10 out of 10 dishes, was pumpkin consomme, with a pumpkin gel, provolone tortellini and tiny balls of truffle. The gel bursts to thicken the consumme and all married together harmoniously with the tiny bits of truffle giving an earthiness. Desserts were a slight let down however. Porcini mushrooms with a seawater foam felt like there could be a great dish there somewhere, but wasn’t quite finished. Lemon with liquorice was missing any flavour of liquorice. The order of the courses felt a little bit wrong too with the savoury servings finishing with the smallest lightest dish. Service was quite formal, but very attentive and €90 for our 5 course dessert felt like good value. In all Indaco is a very nice restaurant, with a beautiful view overlooking the gulf of Naples, serving light flavoursome and innovative dishes and if you find yourself on the Island of Ischia then Indaco is definitely worth a visit.

See Indaco on our list of world restaurant ratings
 
Pipero al Rex, Rome
Just off the Via Nationale in the Hotel Rex in Rome, you will find the charming restaurant of Pipero al Rex. On the main the food is clever, balanced, well thought out and delivered with aplomb. An elegant serving of duck tartare was an excellent start to our tasting menu and worked beautifully with a mustard puree. A rich and warming dish of egg poached in tea with potato puree was moreish, with chopped hazelnuts adding the much needed texture that made this dish work. Another highlight was that a dish of rigatoni with broccoli, sausage and pecorino foam, but felt just slightly over seasoned. Desserts were decent, if not up to the standard of the proceeding courses and the only let down was an overly salty and quite average carbonara which was too big and rich for a 6 course tasting menu. Service was a little bit rushed and slightly conceited at times and €100 for the six course menu was decent enough value. Pipero al Rex provides some beautiful and tasty dishes that manage to both comforting and interesting, prepared by a clearly talented kitchen team in a cosy and intimate dining room in the centre of Rome.

See Pipero al Rex on our list of world restaurant ratings