Boulevard Cafe, 27 Exchequer Street, Dublin 2

I had been to this restaurant a few months ago and had a bad experience (they mixed up an order and then said they couldn’t make what had originally been ordered because they had turned off the oven).  However,  as it generally looks busy I thought I’d try it again.  We went on a Saturday night for their €60 deal for two people – 3 courses and a bottle of wine.

The restaurant was packed, and there was a lively atmosphere.  Although the decor is more day-time cafe than evening meal, it is still nice, even though the tables are a little too close together. 

We both ordered the goats cheese tart for starter.  This is a fairly simple dish to make, yet they had managed to not quite get it right.  There was far too much cheese- a big squashed slab of it – sitting on top of a miserly bit of pastry. 

For main course I went for the fish.  The cod was sitting on top of a bed of mashed potato and garnished with fennel and drizzled with a tomato and pepper sauce.  There was a lot of faults with this dish.  Firstly, the skin on the fish was not crisped up nicely.  Secondly, the fennel was very undercooked, so instead of a sweet aniseed flavour to complement the fish, there were raw chunks.  The sauce didn’t really taste of anything and the mashed potato… well it was standard mashed potato!  Never going to be the most inspired accompaniment for fish, least of all when there’s no other flavours to bring the dish to life.

Rob chose the roast Barbary duck with cabbage and potato dauphanoise and a berry jus.  The a la Carte price for this dish is €24.  It was also a sad disapointment.  There wasn’t enough sauce and it wasn’t strong enough so the duck, which was a bit over cooked and tough to begin with, remained dry and fairly uninspired.  The potatoes and cabbage were fine, but nothing to write home about.

Dessert was a forgettable affair of a sticky toffee pudding.  It was so boring that I didn’t even bother to waste time taking a photo of it!  A lump of cake and some sauce and cream, which tasted vaguely like school dinners.

To top it all off, the service was really bad.  There were not enough staff and one of the waiters in particular was quite unfriendly and stand-offish.  To be honest, I really don’t understand why this place seems to be doing fairly well.  The only thing it has going for it is it’s location.  They are charging top-end prices for bog-standard food.