Escape into the Secret Garden – The Gardener's Cottage

Intrude

The middle of October was met by return to The Gardener's Cottage. This once condemned to rot graveyard garden, has now blossomed into an entrance which invites your black boots to stroll in the late autumn moonlight,directly through a well-trained vegetable patch.

A thick felt curtain greets your intrusion as you grip down on the iron handle and enter. Feeling the size immediately, you shrink down to manoeuvre through the narrow corridor, packed with extra ingredients and wine. The cottage has two rooms consisting of four long tables and to save space, the Kitchen is alive in front of your eyes.

From the Kitchin to Falko konditori, The Gardener’s cottage has the experience from the blade to the spoon. The menu is a set six course meal, though if any dietary concerns are there, or joining your eve are stereotypical Irish decision making (with a set course meal you thought decisions were easy!!) the chefs will change it to suit you, with no reduction in the quality of your meals.

Lucky hand 

Before the set course starts, slices of sourdough bread and pheasant pate find their way to the table, as a brambly apple juice lightly stings the tongue.

Smoked haddock soup greets with well-balanced flavours. Putting the leg of the recently departed partridge through the incisors forms a sharp smile. As you place the partridge’s herb infused foot/claw upon the

plate (unless you vice the flesh from the feet), a pickled pear and onion purée give a caramelised contrast away from the meat.

Gilt-edged Gluttony

Moving to the dessert end, an Apple & Sloe berry sorbet cools in fruitful motion while a gin cream cleans the palette softly. 

A cheese dedicated to New order’s hit ‘Blue Monday’ created by ex-blur bassist Alex James, is fantastic to put subtly. Accompanied by crackers and chutney, the taste buds that sat dormant for last sequence have now been reactivated.

Depart

Bringing the evening to a close with hay ice cream where you can feel the bristles amongst your mind and murderous slice of carrot cake sided with sea buckthorn-carrot mousse. This evenings theatre has come to a close, as the curtain is drawn on your way out.

The cost for the evening starts at 30, continuing through on wine, you can kind of tell the bill. Though for the experience, daily changing menu and quality this is by far one very good evening.

Review by Dominic Lynch