How lucky we are that we live in a beautiful country that produces such a wide variety of high quality foods - I don't think as a nation we give ourselves enough credit. In the past we seem to have lacked any sort of 'esteemed international food image' however that has been changing and rightly so. In my experience, a large proportion of Irish people don't consider that we have a food culture specific to us, to those people I say get thee to Chapter One...

Chapter One is so called because it is found below the Dublin Writers Museum, it has been serving food since 1992 and attained a Michelin star in 2007 -which it still holds. This year has seen the release of a Chapter One cookbook An Irish Food Story by Ross Lewis (co-owner of C.O.).

We went for the Pre-Theatre Menu which is great value -especially as we didn't have any vino because we were happily sipping away on Hendricks G & T.

Please excuse the quality of the photos, I was using my phone and the lighting was low - I have an issue with pulling out an SLR in a restaurant.

I had cured mackerel with crab mayonnaise and pickled sea weed to start, it was super zingy and a perfect way to enliven the senses. S had game terrine with pickled cherries, quince and mustard.

Cured Mackerel

Game Terrine

For the mains we had pheasant with salt baked parsnip, a pheasant and foie gras sausage, potato croquette, apple and horseradish compote and butter poached chestnuts -delicious but I would have preferred a plainer spud component -the flavours were so intense, earthy and rich and I'd have liked something to counter that. S had ray with salt baked celeriac and rope mussels, served with a cider apple dressing. You really can't beat a perfectly cooked piece of fish. I wouldn't have imagined a combination of apple and fish together but S thought it worked really well.

Ray

Pheasant

Dessert; I went for the warm chocolate mousse with vanilla ice cream, confit orange, lemon jelly and praline mousse- I love nutty flavours and the praline mousse was bloody gorgeous, could have eaten a whole bowl of it. S has baked apple with molasses sponge and a quinnell of pumpkin seed ice cream - we both agreed that the ice cream was the stand out piece of the dish. The apple was presented beautifully in a carved wooden bowl unfortunately this made it impossible to photograph.

Warm Chocolate Mousse

The whole experience was very memorable, not only because of the food, but also because of the relaxed atmosphere created by the staff.

We had two Hendricks G & T's, two starters, mains and desserts -total E94.

Chapter One
18 Parnell Sq
Dublin 1
01-8732266