Smart restaurants don’t actually give the customer what the customer wants. Smart restaurants give the customer what they want to give the customer, which is to say that they give you what they do best, and not some stuff that they aren’t confident about or happy to cook and serve. The House is one of those smart places. They offer you what they like to cook and eat, which means the food isn’t really like restaurant cooking. Instead, it’s polished domestic cooking that greets the hungry with open arms at any time of day, from their breakfast bacon sandwich through a lunchtime dish of courgette and potato pancakes with asparagus and crispy eggs to an early dinner of West Cork mussels with crab cream and fries to a lazy weekend dinner of Rockwell chicken with sage and onion polenta with bacon gravy.
The cooking keynotes are a see-sawing sweet and savoury punch that you find in everything Ian Connolly sends out from the kitchen, allied to a becoming modesty – they want to feed you, and want to feed you well, and they want you to come back. That’s a laudable ambition, and they achieve it with gracious ease.
