Cafe Paradiso, no meat necessary
Posted on March 29, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Cork, Restaurants, Reviews.
Cafe Paradiso
Food style/ethnicity: Vegetarian
Price: 40 - 50 (Euro)
Location:
16 Lancaster Quay
Cork
Ireland
As a traditional meat and two meat kind of guy (see my recent Meatapalooza tour of Austin, Tx), I’ve always been in two minds about going to Cafe Paradiso. On the one hand, everyone raves about the food, on the other, I need my dead animal products. It is one of those places about which I kept saying “I must, I must” but I never did, despite sending plenty of other people there to eat!
Last night there was a slow food event involving a movie in the Kino followed by supper in Cafe Paradiso. I signed up last week but as the day approached we realised the night was going to be far too long for Catherine who suffers very badly from tiredness in the initial phases of pregnancy. On top of that, I was wrecked from filling a skip with garden rubbish. So we decided to give the movie a miss and just re-book the restaurant for 7pm.
It’s a fairly small place with cafe style decor rather than a formal fine-dining (to use an American phrase) setup. The staff had been very friendly in my dealings with them when originally booking and re-booking and that continued for the night. Only two other tables were occupied but that may have been due to the imminent slow food supper.
The menu looked great even if I had to change the way I usually read one from “which meat am I in the mood for?” to “which combo of flavours really does it for me?”. Whilst we were figuring it out, we got a small basket of breads which were bursting with taste.
As I mentioned in the comments on my posting about pregnancy and cheese, there were a lot of dishes with cheese in them and we had to get the young waiter lad to find out which ones were pasteurised and which weren’t. The Knockalara sheeps cheese was ok so Catherine had a fantastic “tartlet of caramelised red onion, pinenuts & Knockalara sheeps milk cheese with watercress pesto and olive-crushed potato”. She demolished it and thought it was fantastic. I had “vegetable sushi with pickled ginger, wasabi and a dipping sauce, and tempura of aubergine & cauliflower”. Utterly brilliant. I do love my wasabi and the sushi with the pickled ginger was just awesome. Tempura can often be dodgy but this was light as a feather. A perfect perfect plate of food.
In white wine I am very boring. I am a longterm member of the ABC club (except for really good Chablis) and a lifetime member of the NBSB club (nothing but Sauvignon Blanc). The very odd time I’ll have Riesling or Pinot Grigio or even Gewurztraminer. Throwing safety to the wind, I went with half a bottle of Loosen Riesling. Wow. On the first mouthful I thought there was something seriously wrong with it, there was so much happening in my mouth. What sort of devillish mixture have they created to get so much taste into an itty-bitty bottle of wine? I’ll be searching that out again very soon.
And then we had the mains. Catherine went with “eggroll pancake of leeks & spinach with oyster mushrooms in cider cream, and a crushed potato, parsnip & wild rice cake” which looked fantastic, had a great sauce which I tried and she loved the whole thing.
I went with “watercress, red onion & pinenut risotto with Desmond cheese, tomato-basil broth and panfried fresh artichokes”. This was superb, the mix of flavours was really stunning with each ingredient identifiable but working together and I loved the artichoke on the side. However, I do take issue with calling it a risotto. It was made with risotto rice but was totally non-creamy. My guess is that it was cooked like normal rice and then the ingredients added after afterwards. As I said, it tasted fab but didn’t have the expected texture.
Most of the desserts sounded awesome and Catherine went for a dark chocolate dessert with coffee ice-cream and ginger sauce (exact description missing off their web-site). She thought it would be too heavy and initially found the flavours a bit too strong but the trooper that she is, she persevered and funnily enough she cleaned the plate.
After dithering for ages I went for “ginger-poached rhubarb with a set vanilla custard
and orange shortbread “. It tickled every bud on my tongue. Coffees were spot on too.
This is a chef at the top of his game. We were blown away by how he managed to pack so much flavour into every dish. Whilst we were eating, a diner was settling up and I heard her pass comment about the potential for them to be called “best vegetarian restaurant in Europe”. It sounded like this was more than her just passing her opinion. I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if they do get such an award.
The total for an almost perfect meal? €108. An incredible bargain. Do yourself a favour and have a meal there.
[tags]Cafe Paradiso, Denis Cotter, Vegetarian, Slow Food[/tags]
27 Replies to "Cafe Paradiso, no meat necessary"
conor on March 29, 2006
My big sis got me his first book way back and I have to admit I’ve only cooked one thing from it which was a beetroot mousse. I’m a big beetroot fan.
Everyone was dubious when I put it in front of them and the consensus was that that it was neither good nor bad just odd.
So I did have a giggle when I saw the same thing on the menu last night. I should have got it, I’m guessing it would be a “tad” better than the thing I cooked.
I should get the Seasons book because I loved his verbal description of some of his winter recipes on Winter Food recently. Speaking of which, I must have a listen to your episode!
Mark Dowling on March 29, 2006
Allow me to present a dissenting view. My then gf (now wife) was visiting from Canada and had read all about CP. We went having been to Amicus the day before. Now while Amicus is not veggie the difference in price for equivalent quality food was extreme. Being a former veggie she was hoping for a much better experience.
On a general point, a single visit to Canada was enough to destroy Ireland as a place to enjoy eating out, since you become acutely conscious of the appalling value for money you get back home. It’s great to live here in Toronto for the last couple of years because when people visit and you take them to dinner you can really go for it and spend the same as a fairly ordinary meal in Cork.
conor on March 29, 2006
Interesting, I don’t know anything about Amicus. Anyone else?
As for value in Ireland, you are 100% right. Even a trip north to Derry reminded me of how crazy restaurant prices are down here. So when I say “great value”, it is relative to other places here rather than globally.
I would love for an Irish restauranteur to take a meal that they offer and break down the cost of it into raw materials, labour, building, taxes, margin etc so we could see why prices are so bad here.
I can’t believe everyone is gouging us, otherwise some smart cookie would open up a cheap but good place and fill it to the rafters every night.
Mark Dowling on March 29, 2006
14a French Church St
Good for lunch or dinner, I don’t think they take reservations. Last there in 2004 I think so hopefully things haven’t gone downhill since.
Kieran on March 29, 2006
Thanks for the Amicus tip!
Ireland is bound to be expensive given the over-heated economy, the high wages, and astronomical cost of real estate. For visitors, the strength of the euro isn’t helping either (although it’s a nice bonus for us when we go state-side).
I can’t speak for restaurants, but in our situation our rent in Killarney is higher than London and similar to New York. Our rent in Dingle went up 40% this year. Rates in Killarney increased by 5K. Energy went up 25%, etc., etc., etc. Given this state of affairs, our prices are only going to move in one direction.
I am well aware of the anger about high prices, but what’s the alternative? As in Conor’s comment, a smart cookie I know opened a restaurant after seeing the need for cheap dining options. His food was decent and very reasonable, and he was so busy that everyone thought he was doing well. He came to me looking for advice last year, at his wits end after losing 30K over three years, and what makes it worse is that he didn’t pay himself a salary during that period. His life savings are gone. What could I say except “Get a job or raise your prices?”
Apparently they exist, but I don’t personally know anyone who is creaming it in the restaurant or artisian food business here. Ireland is a very, very expensive place to do business.
We should be happy that high Irish wages allow people to afford those expensive meals out, but we should demand quality in exchange. That at least makes the price more palatable.
conor on March 29, 2006
You make total sense Kieran, particularly about quality. I don’t mind handing over money to anyone if I feel they have done a good job and are not trying to screw me.
The people who drive me crazy are the ones selling rubbish at inflated prices. And there does seem to be a large number of those in every type of business at the minute.
What they forget is that when the economy takes a dive, we’ll all remember who are the good uns and who are the bad uns and we’ll still be giving our money to the good uns.
Scale is a problem for Ireland. The big difference between here and the US is that people eat out far more over there which gives restaurants the required economy of scale. I ate out with an Irish couple based in Texas in January and they told me that they eat in restaurants 9 nights out of 10!
The population of Austin is only about 650,000 yet every street was jammed with restaurants of every style and level. I wouldn’t be surprised if the restaurant density was more than 10 times that of Dublin.
But I would love to know how Derry manages to be so cheap. I’m guessing both wages and rent/rates are far lower?
ovizii on February 14, 2007
hello,
I noticed your blog is one of the first to use this microformats, you are even listed on their site, and I was just curious if ther is a way to use “more”-tags inside a review?
I tried my first review here: http://yongfook.com/ and I would like to be able not to show the full review on the mainpage, maybe just right to where review starts below the ratings…
can you give me a clue how to do that or maybe its not possible?
ovizii on February 14, 2007
sorry somehow my urls got mixed up, the review is here: http://pacura.ru/2007/02/14/review-of-yongfooks-personal-blog/
conor on February 14, 2007
Hey Ovizii,
I’m not 100% sure what you are asking in the first question. Is it the same as this question on the Wordpress Codex? Does that not work in a Structured Blogging Post?
So you want to do some kind of “excerpts” of your posts on the main page and then the full contents when you click on an individual review? Nice!
If there is a problem with doing this in an SB post, it is unlikely to be fixed since the Structured Blogging initiative has pretty much come to a halt due to lack of developers and/or funding.
We’re actually building a business called LouderVoice at the moment where we are taking a pure microformats approach to the reviews (no plug-in necessary and no doubling of the markup like SB). Look at the review I did yesterday to see what the output looks like (still rough, but it’ll be better when we launch).
The key feature of LouderVoice is that we will aggregate reviews from registered bloggers and allow people to search for reviews and rate them, group them etc. But they will always read the reviews on the actual blogs not on our site. Sign up for the upcoming Beta2 test phase over at LouderVoice if you are interested.
ovizii on February 14, 2007
thx for the quick answer.
I found some serious limitations regarding this wp plugin, one of those are the ones I am talking here.
I know what does but if I insert that tag in my review it seems to mess up the formating, as it seems to break some other tags so that it breaks my theme - I’ll leave it like that for you to check out until tomorrow morning. Same for the other nextpage tag.
The other problems with this plugin are that it takes out the wp editor, I don’t see the wysiwyg and code editor anymore I just see one editor, so I can’t change any “code”…
Furthermore the plugins I used for inputting meta keywords and meta description right from my write post page don’t work with this microformats plugin anymore.
And the excerpt has disappeared 
I will gladly check out the links to the loudervoice site and see what it is all about.
thx for your help and time
ovizii on February 14, 2007
one thing I forgot is that I am also interested in this “review thing” because it offers a new unified input mask while blogging and might give me a proper structure for my blog => what I actually want to use this for is this site: http://sibiu.zice.ro its a romanian site, about every event that happens in Sibiu (a town in Romania) so actually I want all my cinema, festivals, theater events, etc. to look similar so that readers can easily distiguish between them, I am not overly concerned about the machine readable part of my blog…
Hope that made sense now 
conor on February 14, 2007
Basically the plugin was released in Dec 2005 for a particular revision of Wordpress. Then when a new Wordpress version was released it trashed all the nice integration of the plugin. The plugin code has barely been touched in over a year. A pity but it just never took off the way they had hoped.
conor on February 14, 2007
Your interest matches what they hoped to achieve. However unless some developer decides to take over the code and work on it for free, I doubt you will see any of those problems fixed.
In an ideal world, this type of thing would be part of the blogging platform. Maybe the Six Apart guys will do something similar with Vox?
Owen on April 3, 2007
Hi,
I got interested in the structured blogging plug-in (and the ideas behind it) and I have tweaked the WordPress plug-in to provide excerpts - because I wanted them too
I also altered the main display a bit.
I have begun adding book reviews to my site. There are only two at the moment but you can see the result from here where the excerpts are: http://www.owenkelly.net/category/reviews
Owen on April 3, 2007
Sorry. I should have remembered to say that I also wrote in some detail about what I had done to the plug-in here:
http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/03/21/structured-blogging-digging-inside/
conor on April 3, 2007
Having no joy connecting to your site Owen. Sounds interesting tho.
conor on April 3, 2007
Ah the problem was on my end. Site looks great.
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JD on December 5, 2007
Just saw some comments on Cafe Paradiso. Along a similar line myself & herself visited the Quay Co-op restaurant (& Shop) on Sullivan’s Quay, Cork city on Sat last. Fantastic vegetarian foodstuffs. The shop is also excellent. Well worth a visit.
conor on December 6, 2007
Still haven’t got in there yet. Must do soon.
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Kieran on March 29, 2006
It is one of my favourite restaurants in Ireland, and I only wish I could get there more regularly. Dennis Cotter and his wife are lovely as well.
His cookbooks are also well worth seeking out. I have “Seasons” and everything I’ve made from it has gone down a treat…