A Prettier Pub, but the Food…

Ireland has a few dishes that the country is known for. We already had one when my wife and I went out for a traditional Irish breakfast (see: The Landmark Pub), but there were others that had to be tried while we were in the country. And no, we aren’t talking about corned beef and cabbage, which is actually an American-Irish dish (although we did find one restaurant in Ireland serving it, even if we didn’t actually sample it ourselves). We mean real traditional food, the stuff you’re going to find in any pub worth their salt.

Lennan’s Yard was one such pub, and for lunch on our second day touring around in Ireland they were the place that caught our eye. The restaurant had a clean, neat interior with less emphasis on old wood and older ales (although as a pub there was still some of that). The pub went in for a bit of a higher scale vibe, trying to see themselves as a more haute experience than your average pub. The decor certainly suited that, but the real answer to that would come from the food itself.

For our meal my wife and I each selected a traditional pub item. I went with the Irish seafood bisque, while my wife went with the very traditional fish and chips. Of the two, she made the far better choice, although I can’t really say that the restaurant made my food wrong (as we’ll get to soon enough). It was more that what I ordered wasn’t what my American brain was expecting, and that threw off the experience for me.

Her fish and chips were pretty solid. Battered and fried cod, served with fries (chips, of course) and tartar sauce. The fish was light and crunchy, with a good weight to the fish. It was very moist but that didn’t detract from the crunch of the coating. It could have used salt and pepper, which, honestly, went for a lot of the food we had in Ireland. It felt like, by and large, the food was under seasoned so that diners could salt and pepper themselves, which is a stark contrast from American where everything is loaded with salt.

The fries were good, with a soft, fluffy interior and a good bit of bite on the outside. Unlike the fish they didn’t need salt, but they were good when dipped into the tartar sauce. Which, tartar sauce isn’t really my thing normally, but this stuff was pretty good. It was lightly sweetened but not too cloying. It was actually worth eating, which I normally wouldn’t say about tartar sauce at all… although maybe that’s because this was homemade and the stuff I’m used to comes out of a bottle with the “Heinz” name on the side.

As for my food… it sucked. The bisque, despite its name, wasn’t really bisque-y enough. Bisque should have a smooth, creamy quality to it, but this was more like a seafood broth with some cream thrown in. It lacked that smooth quality, but then it also lacked for flavor as well. It really needed a lot of salt and pepper just to make it palatable, because it had this very earthy, kind of gross quality to it I just didn’t care for.. Just based on the soup alone this was already a miss.

Worse, when they said seafood I clearly didn’t understand what was intended. In fairness to me, Lennan’s Yard didn’t list what seafood was actually going to be in the bisque. Seafood, per my American brain, means shrimp or crab or lobster or some combination of those. Hell, a traditional bisque, per the French recipes, uses lobster, langoustine, crab, shrimp, or crawfish. Any of those, or a combination thereof, would have been to me. That was what my brain expected from the term “seafood”, but that wasn’t really what I got.

Irish seafood bisque, as I came to learn, contains shrimp, whitefish, and mussels. I don’t much care for mussels at all (and they’re what gave the dish its earthy quality) and white fish is just… blobs of meat without much flavor. Shrimps were there, and they were tasty on their own, but they weren’t enough to elevate the meal. It was a soup with a lot of fish I didn’t expect, in a combination I didn’t like.

Now, I do have to note that had I gone to any other restaurant I would have known not to order this soup. Those places list the fish that goes into it, saying both “seafood” and then defining what that meant. But Lennan’s Yard didn’t do that, and it was still early enough in my trip that I hadn’t learned what the recipe called for. So you can put some blame on me, but some is also on Lennan’s Yard for not saying anything on the menu at all. It didn’t work right.

I think if I had known then I would have skipped the soup and gone for something else. It can’t say the soup was bad, per se, as this might have been tasty enough (even if it did need more salt and pepper) if this was the kind of thing you were looking for. As it stood, though, I didn’t enjoy it and I ended up pushing most of the whitefish and mussels off to the side, after trying to eat my way through them, so I could at least finish the broth and not completely reject the dish.

In the end, then, this felt like a bit of a miss. Whether this was the food you wanted or not, there’s no denying that the meals were underseasoned. They were decently cooked, and there were some highlights to what we ordered, but on the whole we weren’t impressed by what we got at Lennan’s Yard. They weren’t awful but they also weren’t stellar either.