There’s an air of something when you walk in the power-assisted door of Shelbourne Social. The shape of it crystalises after we head out towards the glow of the Mercedes showroom up the road. It’s certainty, the sureness of a particular generation, a corporate box set with collars of cashmere coats turned up against the elements. There’s a forest of cranes on the city skyline. That low purr of money is pumping certainty up through the soles of expensive shoes.
Shelbourne Social is Dylan McGrath’s latest restaurant, his first outside the canals since his days in Ranelagh with Mint. It’s in the prow of a new glass and steel building deep in the embassy and rugby belt of D4. The front end is a place to gleam, as brightly lit as the Mercedes showroom. My friend is in the mercifully lower-lit restaurant end when I arrive.
The tables are leather clad and brass bound. There are beautiful linen napkins and the glassware gleams. The all-male staff deliver food to the table with sprinklings of compliments. Dishes are brilliant or amazing, they say.
The menu needs a sat nav. There’s some serious serversplaining going on. Prices are an indication of what size the portions are but it’s not clear whether some dishes are sides or standalone plates. Several people are having the meat platters, those notoriously spendy slabs of Dexter beef or smoked duck carved tableside by McGrath himself.
This would be lovely
The curd bread is the obvious and simple starting point. It’s a pan-grilled potato bread made with sheep and goats curd. Matt Orlando in Copenhagen’s Amass cooks a similar round of fermented potato bread, finished with a glossy slick of butter and served, as it is here, in a freshly laundered towel. We order it with butter and “Irish honey”. And “chef sends” a bowl of egg, artichoke crisps and trout roe. This would be lovely, all crunch and squidge and pops of salty fish with tarragon leaves if it were warm, but it’s cold. The bread is fiendishly delicious as only something that’s hot, crisp and almost too salty can be.
There’s another lovely plate of wild forest mushrooms, with Tete de Moine, a Swiss cheese made from the raw milk of cows fed only on grass. It’s been shaved into frills so thin they’re barely solid and tweezered through the plate like some kind of fairy fungus that melts on the tongue.
But then in a dish from the raw section, scallop meat comes cut like thick rounds of sausage rather than quivering petals. These sit in a gluey almond cream with not enough lime zest to lift it all out of blandsville. It’s a curious miss. Thinner slices and a better sauce could have saved this one so easily.
Batter needs fresh air
We go for the crispy rice pot. Hot plates are delivered to the table, but by the time the food arrives they’re cold. McGrath comes out to explain the dish. It’s served in a vanilla-coloured Le Creuset pot that looks like it has never seen the inside of an oven. There are crispy rice cakes in the mix, designed to be like the bits of a risotto that stick to the bottom of the pan, he says, as he pours the corn mole over it all. Soft shell crab are good, but their batter needs fresh air, not steam, to stay crisp. There are wonderful prawns but also crescents of cucumber and spoonfuls of swollen rice that taste watery. Soon it all succumbs to the sauce and begins to cool, a hot mess that ends as a tepid soup.
The pork belly is all the pig, distilled down to mouth bombs. You can taste the hours of cheffing that went into the shredded meat that’s been breaded and fried. There are tasty baby squid and a blackened jerusalem artichoke. It’s probably the dish of the night.
Dessert is a car crash. Soft serve ice cream should never be grey, but tile grout is the colour you end up with when you make it with smoked banana. The colour is poor, the taste is worse. Cooked banana is nobody’s idea of a good time. The “caramelised rice crispies” grow soggy on the outside and if there’s miso caramel here, I miss it. It could be the other browner ice cream which just tastes of sugar.
Deep dive into Tiger 2.0
There's an obvious market niche for this: a safe space for CEOs. One eye is on the tech crowd and all that Google and Facebook money, but Shelbourne Social feels more old-fashioned than that. Talking to Una McCaffrey of The Irish Times, McGrath says he's not aiming for perfect meals, but great nights out. Steer clear of the platters and you can eat here without a shocking bill. You'll get a fascinating deep dive into Tiger 2.0. There are true flashes of brilliant cooking, but the swerves from delicious to disaster feel dizzying. This is about showmanship, carving up the prosperity tableside – to heck with the eco-worriers and the uncertainty generation of renters and gig economy workers. This ship is sailing to the land of living it large.
Dinner for two with a glass of wine and shared dessert came to €118.50.
Verdict: Shanahans with bells on for the burbs
Facilities: Fine
Food provenance: None. Plaudits for the cheffing, not the farming
Vegetarian options: Slim pickings
Wheelchair access: Yes
Music: Inaudible over the buzz
