Nede: Getting things backwards

I want to love this place. So I’m prepared to look past a lot of stuff. Like when they don’t seem to have a record of our booking. And the table we get is in a pokey corner beside a fire extinguisher. And our first three wine choices aren’t available. And then a glass of wine is accidentally tipped over my husband.

It’s okay, I keep telling a glum and about to be wine-soaked dining companion. All will be forgiven when you get a mouthful of the food. It’s like dragging a loved one to see a favourite band for the first time and getting a terrible support act.

We're in Nede, which until recently was Jay Bourke's Eden in Dublin's Temple Bar. Nede is Eden spelt backwards. Former Noma chefs Louise Bannon, who is from Greystones, and Yannick Van Aeken, her partner, are behind it. So what's not to love? They're young, one of them's a woman. They're from Noma, for God's sake, and they're here in Dublin to give us that inspiring cooking for less than the price of a taxi ride to the airport.

I am a flag-waving, card-carrying Nordic fangirl. I can gush for hours about Scandi food and how brilliantly the model of eating works in an Irish restaurant. It came to Galway in the shape of Enda McEvoy's Michelin-starred Aniar. And now it's here, on our doorstep. But none of that gets me over the fact that I'm looking down at a €9 plate of four cold broccoli spears in a milky puddle with some salty hazelnuts scattered over them.

Great things first. The bread is the second-best thing to land on the table. It’s a small loaf of soft, grainy sourdough warm from the oven with luscious butter served on a granite stone. Liam’s having the smokies, a trademark Eden starter that used to come in the form of a hot bubbling dish of smoked fish chunks smothered in a creamy sauce. It’s been reinvented as a raft of rosti potatoes holding a voluptuously poached egg which tips off into a foam. Underneath there’s tasty smoked fish and some gorgeous just-wilted spinach.

My first course in the €45 five-course tasting menu (originally the waiter says the tasting menu is everything listed. “But it says choose five,” I say. “Yes,” he says returning. It is a choice of five). My oysters with horseradish and cucumber consist of two Gigas oysters, in a bowl of fridge-cold beach stones. They have a milky tapioca-ish dressing that tastes of nothing. Chilly cucumber pearls also add little to the flavour party. The oysters are fine, like a blast of sea spray. But there’s nothing happening other than oyster here. And there are only two of them. For €9.

Then comes the broccoli. It’s perfectly cooked. I’d guess it’s been blanched and then iced immediately to keep its colour and sweetness. But it’s cold. A third dish of asparagus and ham comes as three halves of white asparagus, a scattering of tiny green spears and a pale pink, thin slice of ham on the side that looks like it slipped out of someone’s sandwich.

A bowl of cod cheeks looks lovely with a green topping of peas and broadbeans. But the peas are large and starchy and it has less of the freshness I would like from such a simple summer dish. Liam’s dish of steak and hay-smoked potatoes suffers from being neither a brilliant piece of meat (it tastes watery) nor fantastic potatoes. They have no smell or taste of hay other than a yellowish hue. Has the fodder crisis hit hay-smoking in kitchens? Are they down to grass cuttings?

Desserts are face-savingly terrific. My coffee ice cream with chocolate and toasted barley is the best sweet thing I’ve had in an Irish restaurant all year. A chewy hazelnut brownie is topped with pale, creamy ice cream and has a large shard of the best dark chocolate studded with nutty pearls of barley. Liam’s dessert of rhubarb, buttermilk sorbet and pine granita is magnificent mouth bombs of textures and flavours.

I don’t doubt the talent in this kitchen and much of the evening could be put down to an off night. We meet a friend later who had a great meal there. But talented chefs need a brilliant support act and top-notch ingredients every night. Otherwise they leave newcomers wondering what all the hype is about.

Dinner for two with tap water came to €87 with no charge for wine after the accidental dousing, for which they apologised profusely.