The Fancy Meal We Needed

Needless to say after the less than stellar lunch (see: Lennan's Yard), my wife and I wanted something better for dinner. Our options, though, were weirdly limited largely due to the fact that we were still getting used to being on Irish time and ended up sleeping through the middle of the day. We didn’t emerge from our afternoon hibernation until close to 8:30 in the evening, and, as I noted in a previous review, Dublin seems to start rolling up its streets around that time. Many of the restaurants we were interested in eating at were either already closed or soon closing, so we were left to scrounge around for some place that wasn’t going to lock the doors fifteen minutes after we arrived.

Thankfully there was one place we found that was still operating, and as luck would have it the restaurant was actually a nice one. Set below the Westbury Hotel in Dublin’s city center, Balfes is a French-inspired restaurant serving delicious food at only slightly elevated prices. And, best for us, they were open until 9:30 PM (and willing to serve us even as we walked up at just past 9:00 PM). Into the quiet interior we went, and the meal we got was worth walking hither and yon around the city.

For our meal my wife and I first shared their soup of the day, which that day was a potato and artichoke soup. This was everything the bisque from Lennan’s Yard was not: smooth, creamy, and very flavorful. It had a fresh flavor to it, owing to the artichokes, but the consistency was silky, and it was hard to stop eating it. And the crust baguette on the side was tasty and not too coarse. I honestly could have had two bowls of the soup and kept going, it was that delicious. It’s been a couple of weeks since the meal and my wife and I still look at each other and say, “but that soup…” It was the high point of a very good, all around, meal.

For her main, my wife got a salmon poke bowl. Part of their BodyByrne menu – which is their selection of entrees focusing on good food and nutrition, put together by Siobhán and Paul Byrne of BodyByrne Fitness – the poke bowl featured jasmine rice, radish, pickled cucumber and carrot, black beans and mushroom, with roasted sticky soy and ginger salmon. It had a fresh, crisp flavor with only a light amount of seasoning, but that is actually fine by my wife. I love more flavor in my meals but she liked how simple and elegant the dish was.

The highlight of it, though, was the sesame dressing. It was light, tangy, and sweet, and once poured over everything it gave the dish a tangy finish that it needed. The poke bowl serving was huge, but the dressing was enough to give it all flavor. All around my wife really liked this meal, from the tangy ginger to the lightly seasoned beans. It was a little more plain than I’d probably have gotten, but considering it was meant to be a health conscious meal, I get what the restaurant was going for. My wife got salmon and sesame sauce, and she was very happy.

For my meal I chose something simple, since I’d been burned earlier that day by the awful seafood bisque. I chose the steak frites, which was a 6oz steak (which I had prepared medium rare) served with fries (chips, as they call them) and a green salad, and there was a serving of peppercorn sauce on the side. The steak itself was lovely, tender and properly cooked, with enough seasoning (salt and pepper) that it really didn’t need much else. But I had that peppercorn sauce and I was going to use it, and that sauce was fantastic.

It was a simple, brown gravy with black pepper seasoning, and it was fantastic. Salty, tangy, and delicious, I dipped my steak in it, I dipped my fries in it, and I ate all of it because it was just that good. Steak and fries isn’t a complex meal by any standard, and I recognize that, but Balfes did it up right with proper cooking and tasty seasoning. If my wife and I hadn’t agreed to only do each restaurant we visited once (so we could get a fuller experience in the city instead of finding one place and never leaving) I probably would have gone back for it again.

The only weird part of the dish was the green salad. It was a mix of spring greens on top of picked greens and onions under, and the pickled portion also had the sesame dressing to finish the meal. I discovered this after eating the top part and mostly just getting green leaves and little else. That was fine, but bland, but once I dug down into the salad I realized I should have mixed everything up first. The textures were all wrong the way I ate it, but I think if I’d mixed the salad before eating I probably would have liked it better. It wasn’t bad… but clearly I needed instructions somehow.

Still, on the whole the meal at Balfes was fantastic. If we visited Dublin again we’d go there, and likely we’d visit the restaurant more than once in that hypothetical trip. The food was delicious, well made, and worth every penny (euro?) we spent… which, for a fine, French restaurant, really wasn’t that much. It’s totally worth it.