We like a chef who is not just talented, but is doing something different, adding something new and interesting to the food scene and cooking food that shows a passion and care. Chef Conor Dempsey in Dublin's Amuse restaurant is a very skilled chef who is doing this.

The food in Amuse is using Asian flavours and ingredients, some dishes with a taste of Japanese, others with a touch of South-East Asia, but all with Dempsey's own interpretation. The cookery is ambitious, combining many, sometimes powerful, components on the plate. On most dishes, on the 8 course tasting menu, this is done with aplomb with the resulting dish delivering a complex, yet clean flavour. Hamachi with the fragrance and slight bitterness of bergamot, worked well with the slight heat from a horseradish yoghurt. Cod with a Kamebishi (3 year old fermented soy) sauce was another highlight - the richness of the sauce was cleverly contrasted with a sushi rice cream. The Kamebishi was more complex then a normal soy; deep umami, rich and slightly sweet, but it didn't overpower the fish. A serving of perfectly cooked Anjou pigeon with aubergine and kombucha (a fermented tea) was also another noteworthy dish. 

A very clever dessert of passion fruit 'Tom Kha Gai' was another beautiful offering; sweet, but not overly, well textured and light. Tom Kha Gai is a coconut soup, a savoury dish we have had many times in Thailand, a strange name for a dessert then, but the flavours are reminiscent of the original. The menu also starts with many quirky amuse bouches, a pre-dessert and some good petit-fours. All of these are extras and not included in the 8 courses.

A couple of courses were a let down however. Guinea fowl with courgette and coconut did not work. Another was the final course, a door-stoppingly dense dark chocolate ganache, too heavy to end an 8 course meal, served with unpleasant soapy violet.

The food in Amuse is respectful to cuisine of Asia that inspire it and the produce that it uses. Some dishes have that deep, but delicate umami synonymous with Japan, while others blend the sweet, salty and bitter balance that is the trademark of food from South East Asia. 

The 8 course tasting menu is €90, which may appear on the high side for Dublin, but when you consider the number of extras, the work involved in the menu and the quality of food, then it is actually very good value and feels generous. The service is friendly, informative with waiting staff taking an interest in the enjoyment of the diner. 

In an industry where many restaurants are following trend, copying others, or looking for something that will sell to the masses, Conor Dempsey is, maybe bravely, choosing gastronomy and high end dining and you get the sense here that he is passionate about both. Since our last visit nearly a year ago the food has progressed and the dining room feels more comfortable, so it very encouraging to see a restaurant investing in the right things and it will be interesting to see if Amuse can continue to improve. 

Amuse is a great addition to the Dublin food scene, serving fun, and clever food with some interesting Asian produce, delivered with skill and care by a talented chef. We certainly won't be leaving it a year to our next visit and, the fact we are eager to return, says a lot.

We have added our favourite casual dining restaurants in Dublin to our restaurant ratings list. When we find ourselves out shopping, meeting friends or family, looking for a good brunch or in town without a plan or a reservation these are the spots we look to in Dublin to fulfil our casual dining needs. For us, casual dining is subject to the same three criteria as any fine dining restaurant: food, service and value. 

Pichet is a bistro-style restaurant, cooking consistently good and tasty food. A talented kitchen, led by Stephen Gibson, produces well executed, flavoursome, interesting and modern bistro food. The dining room gets busy, but is still quite spacious and comfortable and the service is friendly and engaging. The lunch and pre-theatre menus are particularly good value.

Another good value lunch and pre theatre menu is in Etto. Cooking rustic, wholesome, satisfying and well executed food with a focus on seasonal and local produce. The dining room is small, buzzy but intimate. A real care and a love of food and produce is evident in Etto and there is a lot to like about this place.

Soder + KO  still feels like eating in a large old nightclub, despite claiming to be "Inspired by Scandinavian creativity" and the service is pretty poor. But behind all that the food is quite good and still has an authentic feel. In the wrong hands this food could so easily be a let down, but Chef Kwangi Chan has taken his fine dining experience and applied it to cooking food inspired by his native Hong Kong. The dim sum are good value and really delicious.

We are generally not fans of Sunday brunch as it is usually pretty poor, generic food and a way for average restaurants to get rid of stock left over from Saturday night. That was until Forest Avenue came along and started to do it the right way. A top Dublin restaurant by evening, it also serves a tasting brunch on Sunday which is definitely worth a visit. Reservation a few weeks in advance needed for this one.

Restaurant FortyOne, Dublin
We have always had a good meal in Restaurant FortyOne, in Dublin's Residence club. The cookery was good, the food was light, fresh and seasonal and it slowly but surely improved over the years. But our last meal, a 4 course tasting lunch, wasn't up to this standard. The first course of scallop, apple and tomato was boring, but still better than a second course of a courgette flower stuffed with prawns, which was so over seasoned all we could taste was salt - actually there was large pieces of salt to bite on. The other two courses were an improvement, the best being a perfectly nice serving of duck, cherries and foie gras. The meal did not feel generous, instead feeling just a little bit meagre. Restaurant FortyOne has a lot going for it; an elegant dining room in an old Georgian building overlooking Stephens Green and a talented chef in Graham Neville. But on this occasion the service did not live up to the dining room and the food was well below what Neville is capable of and we left disappointed and a just a little bit hungry.

Mulberry Garden, Dublin
We championed, over the last year or so, the food in Mulberry Garden and the progression it made under then head chef Tom Doyle. Doyle moved on near the start of this year and with him some of the momentum that the restaurant had gained over the previous year. Having a menu that changes weekly means the food will be very individual to the chef, so bringing in a new kitchen leader will mean a new take and a period of transition might be inevitable. Mulberry Garden is still cooking some good food and the occasional dish, such as poached Irish lobster, balanced well with an aromatic almond & garlic soup, still delivers a delightful treat. But others, such as hake with artichoke, fennel and potatoes, lack cohesion and feel more like individual components on a plate with nothing bringing them together. The food has lost its a bit of it's edge and its uniqueness and therefore it is not the great value it once was, especially now that the tasting menu has gone up to €70. The restaurant feels like it has taken a step back to where it was a couple of years ago, which in fairness, was probably to be expected, at least in the short term. Nevertheless, Mulberry Garden is still a very charming neighbourhood restaurant, cooking some very good dishes with seasonal Irish produce, supported by a warm and hospitable front of house team.

So, we have had two pieces of quite funny feedback recently criticizing us, among other things, for being anonymous. Now it turns out that this person (yes, they were probably from the same person) turned out to be more than a bit insulting, calling some restaurants that we have praised poisonous, accusing chefs of plagiarism, telling us our rating list was wrong, calling us idiots but worst of all questioning whether we actually ate in the restaurants we reviewed........you get the picture. An angry chap who took our site far more seriously than even we do, but it did provide us with a bit of amusement. 

But it was the anonymity that really bothered them, the accusation being that we did this out of cowardice or to try and have, as he put it, 'dominion' over restaurants. Now I know most of our readers, well the few that we have, aren't as perturbed by this, or would ever be this bothered by the reviews of a couple of amateurs like us, but we thought we would explain our reasons for the anonymity and talk just a little bit more about us, just in case other people may think this is why we are doing it.

We are a couple, who don't work nor have ever worked in the restaurant industry, although we constantly wish we did as we sit in our 9 to 5 jobs thinking about our next meal or gastronomic adventure. We love food, we love restaurants. We are passionate about it and we travel the world for it as often as our bank balance and our annual leave allows. 

We started The Greedy Couple to chronicle this, but also because we thought, in honesty, that our opinion would stand up to some other reviewers and that it could hold maybe hold a bit of relevance. We decided to be anonymous because we thought that this was missing in Ireland - it is done a lot in other countries. We think that it is helpful in writing unbiased reviews and we have no interest in getting any special attention in a restaurant. When known critics or food bloggers are in a restaurant they can sometimes get an extra bit of attention, which can impact reviews without even knowing it. So, we think being anonymous might be the best way to do reviews, but we may be wrong as there are a few who write good stuff and are known. The truth is our site could be more popular and maybe even have more readers if we weren't anonymous, so sometimes it can be a pain in the ass, but, for the moment at least, we think this is still the way want to do it.

Another decision we made is that we would try to not just review the meal, but try to review the whole restaurant and attempt to give an overall impression of it. We have tried to make our reviews, a reflection of our experience in each restaurant, a sort of account of what we felt while we were eating there - but at the end of the day they are just our opinions.

Also, we would actually welcome some real constructive feedback on what we are doing, right or wrong, good or bad.

TGC

Restaurants have come and gone over the years, others have risen and fallen, but Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud has, for over 30 years, consistently been at the top of Irish food scene. Monsieur Patrick Guilbaud did for Ireland what the Roux brothers, when opening Le Gavroche, did for London; it brought fine dining French cuisine to the city.  We recently returned for a lunch that showed that Guilbauds can still deliver a high quality experience.

The starters set the tone for the very good meal that followed. A light and refreshing salad of a tomato gel, gazpacho and mozzarella tasted like a field on summer's day, light, refreshing and aromatic, it was a truly excellent first course. A moreish dish of egg with peas, pea shoots and mushrooms was also delicious. The seasonality of the starters continued through the mains and the desserts.

The one thing that separates Guilbauds from most, nearly all in fact, other restaurants in Dublin is consistency. Sure they have a large brigade that helps them deliver and maintain this consistency, but that doesn't change the fact that when there are mistakes they are relatively small and never ruin a dish. On our main courses the pigeon would have benefited from being a bit pinker and the halibut may have been the very slightest bit over, but it did it only did a little to detract from the quality of the dishes. The pigeon served with cherries was a very elegant dish. The other main of halibut served with a sort of curried sauce was delicate and well balanced.

Desserts were visually impressive and technical, demonstrating great pasty work, but sadly perhaps a little style over substance. Strawberry tart with lovage ice cream looked like a ‘picnic on a plate’ with the ice-cream being the star, but the tart being a slight let down. "Cosmic apple", an array of apple in many forms was slightly muted on the palette, not delivering a refreshing tartness nor much sweetness, although the addition of pistachio added a nice different dimension to it.

The service was formal, but friendly and engaging, with the sommelier standing out for particular praise, passionately and knowledgeably recommending wines. For this standard of food and service the €55 3 course lunch is one of the best value meals in Dublin.

Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is serving classical, but not outdated, elegant French food with seasonal Irish produce. Whilst restaurants continue to open in the city, many of them following trend or fashion, or looking for a niche, some will be edgier, more interesting or more progressive, some may even delight, but Guilbauds remains a stalwart and every city needs a restaurant like this. We are often asked to recommend a restaurant in Dublin and Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is a restaurant we can suggest with confidence.