Avoca
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Location:
South Andrew St
Visited:
over 2 years ago
Reviewed by:
Martin McKenna
Rating:
If Fallon & Byrne is the café/shop/restaurant king of the Dublin scene, then Avoca is surely its queen. With a similar three-floor setup, Fallon & Byrne’s battered wooden tables are to Avoca’s florals and ginghams; where the former is dark and conspiratorial, with no phone coverage downstairs, the latter is light and Mum-sy.
You’ll find the edible parts of Avoca downstairs, in the food hall, and upstairs, in the café. The café is immensely popular with ladies who lunch, and I mean that with no disrespect at all to ladies who lunch. The consequence of this is that it can be tricky to get a table around lunchtime, and it will be tricky to get a table during the weekend. Nonetheless, the staff run an efficient and fair system of taking the names of guests as they arrive and the nature of the place means that tables turn over fairly quickly. The café is the place for plates of hot food, coffees, cakes and scones, all served with table service. Of course, you pay a premium for this table service; so if you want to be spared that, head downstairs to the food hall.
Downstairs, you’ll find two well-stocked salad bars, a hot counter and a cold counter, and a set of convivial small tables with one or two canteen-style long tables with an unceremonious heap of cutlery and paper napkins and cups. All told, the setup is designed to serve large amounts of people quickly and efficiently, and does so. Of course, all setups like that can be a bit daunting when the system is not at first clear and particularly when the queue is snaking around the floor. Don’t despair! There are two queues: one for the hot counter, where daily specials are served, and the cold counter, where sandwiches and smaller portions of quiche, salmon fillets, chicken, lasagne and sausage rolls are served—all of which can be heated. Salads from the salad bar can be paid for at either (where they are weighed too).
For your cooperation with this system, you will get some really excellent food at excellent prices. A personal favourite are the sausage rolls. For just €3.25 you get a chunky fist-sized mix of sausage meat, apple and sage, wrapped in a flaky glazed sesame pastry, with a heap of green leaves and dressing. In fact, “chunky” is a description that applies to much of Avoca’s offerings. A slab of pork and chicken terrine is laced with apricots and hazelnuts and served with Ballymaloe relish, and with an equally monumental slab of their delicious seeded bread makes a lunch that is anything but dainty.
“Pizzas” are rounds of foccaia with sweetly roasted vegetables and an optional slice of ham, crisped around the edges by the grill. These are kept warm in the hot counter and towards the afternoon begin to suffer a little for it, however.
Soup changes daily and also benefits from a slab of bread. Scones are more delicious than scones ever deserved to be; seeded, plain, cheesy, with berries or chocolate, all excellent. Salmon fishcakes are anomalously bad value, with far too much mashed potato to salmon to justify their €7.95 pricetag. Salads are varied, creative and fresh, though watch out for filling the deceptively large boxes as you quickly won’t see change out of a fiver with just a few scoops of salad.
Avoca serves consistently excellent food and somewhere in their three floors, you’ll find exactly what you want and in the time that’s available to you, be it a take away prepared sambo or a main served to you at a table. Avoca is no secret, and their reputation is thoroughly deserved.
