Gruel
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Location:
68 Dame Street
Visited:
over 2 years ago
Reviewed by:
Martin McKenna
Rating:
There’s one opinion that Gruel just can’t seem to quite shake off: that the service is rude. In lots of reviews of this small but perfectly formed lunch spot, you’ll find this assertion dredged up time and time again. Speaking as someone who has eaten at Gruel regularly and frequently for the last three years, I feel qualified to flatly deny it. Gruel is an excellent, efficient, quick and delicious spot, and if you like their particular rustic, chunky style of cooking then it is a deserving addition to your lunchtime repetoire.
In the last year, Gruel has expanded its menu to include breakfast and afternoon servings, but we’ll focus on lunch, served from 11:30 to about 2:30, or until they run out. The model hasn’t changed for as long as I’ve been eating there, and I’ve always regarded this kind of confidence among eateries as a sign the food’s going to be good.
Each day, Gruel serves about four different soups with bread (€7.00), which are often laden down with enough chunky contents as to be more accurately called stew. There’s a different roast each day (think salt beef with beetroot salad, roast pork with apple sauce and stuffing, baked ham with mustard and piccalili) which is unceremoniously jammed into the aforementioned bread to make a Roast in a Roll (€6.40) —and has certainly earned its capitalisation as a proper noun in its own right.
Salads (small €4.95, large €6.95) number three or four as well, and its best to request a little of each in either a large or small bowl; all are fresh, chunky and highly flavoured and highly sustaining, usually containing such fillers as roasted butternut squash, nuts, enormous croutons and the like. Don’t miss out on the unusually delicious dressing, the hard-to-discern secret of which was revealed to me once: orange juice and basil, elumsified with olive oil using an industrial-strength mixer.
Pizzas (€4.90) resemble pizza about as much as the soups resemble soup; they’re really thick slabs of airy foccacia topped with daily-changing ingredients (spotted the theme yet?). Hunks of spicy sausage, sage and mozzarella; horseradish cream, smoked salmon and capers; yesterday’s baked ham, bechamel and emmenthal are some examples of the toppings you’ll find (there’s two each day.)
There’s a quiche too, and “deli rolls” with less masculine contents like roasted vegetables and goat’s cheese. Rarely advertised on the blackboard menu but always available is the Blue Plate, simply the roast without the roll, served with its accompaniments and a small salad on the side. Recently Gruel have begun offering a half portion of the Roast in a Roll and a half portion of soup (€6.40).
For afters, the Illy espressos are consistently among the best in Dublin—rich and thick, with no bitterness—and the characteristically chunky cinnamon buns are sticky and dark with muscovado sugar (and will easily do for two if you’ve just been fed by the lunch menu).
All this food is supremely consistent—and oft-overlooked attribute of restaurants, and one of the most important, in this reviewer’s opinion—and downright delicious. Sure, it’s usually busy, and yes, the tables are packed tightly together but if you decide what you want to eat before you get to the counter you’ll have a fabulous and filling lunch in front of you in minutes.
Gruel is one of my all-time favourite lunch spots. If their unfussy style of cooking, quick service and downtrodden-chic decoration suits your style, it is a thoroughly deserving purveyor of your lunch. But don’t take my word for it: in 2003, the legal bigwigs at the Moriarty Tribunal liked it so much, they spent €11,006 there. Make of that endorsement what you will.
