Our Reviews 1

24 January 1998 By Paolo Tullio

Lunch

A few weeks ago I went to lunch in the Indian restaurant in Ballsbridge called Chandni. I took my mother and my friend Antonio Breschi, the Italian pianist and composer, which meant that we could all speak the same language. At the time I thought it might be nice to pick another ethnic restaurant in the same area and compare the lunches. Today I put that plan into action and set off for the Moroccan restaurant that I remembered being just across the road from the Indian one.

Just occasionally, in this essentially malevolent universe, things go unexpectedly right for no discernible reason. My wife and I arrived at the door of the restaurant to find that it was now Cuban and that the Marrakesh had moved to South Anne's Street. Yes, I know, I should do my home-work more thoroughly, but Cuban did fit my plan of ethnic eating, the Pope was visiting there and anyway, I'd found a parking place.

A flight of stairs leads you up to Bella Cuba's small, but comfortable dining-room. We were met by a charming lady who turned out to be Ukrainian but who had spent eleven years in Cuba, which I can't help feeling says something about Dublin's increasing cosmopolitanism. The lunch menu is £8.90 and for this you choose any three courses from four on offer - starter, pasta, main course and dessert. It's occasionally been my experience that the best part of the food in a restaurant is reading about it on the menu, which doubles the disappointment when the food actually arrives. Here it's the other way round. The simple descriptions of the dishes don't give you a clue as to the delights in store.

The wine list is short, but well-chosen. There are two reds and two whites for under a tenner and some good quality South African and Chilean wines in the £15 to £20 bracket. We settled on a Provencale rose at £10.95 which was good for the price. For starters my wife chose the black bean salad and I chose the guacamole. The guacamole was served on a bed of salad and garnished with sweet potato chips. Until today I thought that I made a good guacamole, but now I know better - this was a delight. While I enthused over my starter, my wife was ecstatic with her bean salad. Served like mine on a salad bed, the beans were mixed with avocado and flavoured with garlic, lemon juice and chilli.

For main courses we had char-grilled chicken breast and pork with Cuban sauce. Both of these dishes were exceptional, which brings me to another hobby-horse of mine. For me, flavours are like colours: mix them well and you can get a new colour - mix them without skill and you get muddy brown. The Cuban chef here has that great gift of mixing his flavours to perfection and he knows exactly how to use salt - which is harder than you'd think. The clarity and the precision of the flavouring put this meal on a par with some of the best that I've eaten. Excellent desserts, coconut pudding and tropical fruit slices with ice-cream, made every part of this meal memorable - an event that I encounter far more rarely than I'd like.