Vintage Kitchen Poolbeg Street

I've been trying to get a reservation in Vintage Kitchen for the past few months with no success.  It probably is not helping my case to know that they are taking bookings 3 months in advance and I am always ringing looking for a reservation within a week!!

Anyway I emailed them a few weeks ago to try and get a booking for Ciaran's birthday weekend.  At the time they had nothing but they said they would contact me if they got a reservation.  They contacted me at 11.30am on Friday to say they could fit us in at 6pm that evening.  Result!!!

I was so happy!

I rang Ciaran immediately with the good news.  BUT then he turned me down!!!    It seems he had made plans with some lads to go boxing,

It all turned out ok though.  My twin sister suggested I try change the reservation from 2 people to 4 people and then meet with my cousin and her friend over from London for a visit.

They were able to accommodate the 4 of us so we all made plans to meet later that day.

Amy, Kasey and Erica all met for a predinner drink in O'Reilly's while I drove all the way from Donabate through the city to my house and then hopped on a bus back in to town and finally arrived at the restaurant at 6.25pm (I had left work at 5pm, arrived home at 5.55pm and was back out the door at 6pm!!).  Luckily they had not ordered yet (and sorry again Ladies!).

I should mention that this restaurant is BYOB and they don't charge for corkage if you order two courses.  I think that is a fair policy as I am not a fan of corkage charges even though I know there is a cost to the restaurant for this service.  Kasey very kindly offered to buy wine and she brought along 2 very nice bottles of malbec(!) - a favourite with Amy and I (Thanks Kasey!) 

The food was pretty amazing.  Lots of different ingredients and some that we had never even heard of - check out the chocolate looking sauce on my slate plate below.  Guess what this is?  It's...... black garlic!

For a description of each dish - have a look here on my sister's blog.

We had Risotto, Pate, Ling and Chowder with mussels for starters (all very generous portions except for Amy's ling which looked just right).

For mains, Amy and I had lamb shank while the others had poussin.

After dinner we retired to the very authentically Irish pub Mulligans on Poolbeg Street.  Hopefully our London friend got a good feel for Irish food and craic on this night out!