Menu of the month

Yes, your eyes are deceiving you. £17.50 for this restaurant dinner menu? Are we joking?

No, not joking, just taking a trip down memory lane to 1991 and our research for the first Bridgestone 100 Best Restaurants in Ireland.

This is a menu from Belfast's Roscoff in 1991, when lunch cost £11.95 and the set dinner was £17.50. It was also a year when ­ just consider this ­ you could at different times in this kitchen have seen a crew that included Robbie Millar (Shanks Restaurant, Bridgestone Icon), Eugene Callaghan (La Marine Bistro, Bridgestone Icon); Noel McMeel, formerly Trompets, Bridgestone Icon) and Neven Maguire (MacNean Bistro, Bridgestone Icon), alongside Paul Rankin himself (Roscoff and Cayenne, Bridgestone Icon). Can there ever have been such an alumni in one Irish restaurant at the one time?

What is also interesting is just how classic Roscoff cooking was at the time: beef with pomme fondant and red wine; lamb shank with potato gratin; game terrine; fennel soup; chocolate truffle cake. But if it was classic, it was utterly new-born and convincing, and for us Roscoff was perhaps the most influential and successful Irish restaurant of the nineties, not just because of the stellar cooking and because so many good cooks were taught there, but because it achieved its success in the face of such overwhelming odds. A mighty achievement.

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text © John & Sally McKenna
illustrations © Ken Buggy