So the first shall be last

Il Primo has defined fresh, simple Italian dining for years; perhaps now is the time to redefine itself, writes CATHERINE CLEARY

HERE’S A CONFESSION that may shock the food police. I have never been to the English Market in Cork. I remember a woman at a dinner table years ago who looked at me incredulously when I told her this. “How can you write about food?” she asked, as if I were a priest telling her I’d never been to mass. The simple answer is I don’t live in Cork. If I did, I imagine I would be hardly ever out of the place.

Il Primo is a little bit like that. It’s such a stalwart of the Dublin restaurant scene, 21 years on the go, with its chirpy blackboard telling jokes on the street. It’s got personality and has staked its claim as “the first”, as it’s name translates, the Italian mid-market restaurant that defined the genre. And, until a recent rainy Tuesday night, I had never crossed the threshold.

Italian food is one of the great things about being alive. Jamie Oliver wishes he was Italian. I wish we ate like Italians, fanatically and democratically, with none of the snobbery that divides the wicker-basket farmers’ markets and the chilly supermarket freezer aisles. The parish pride that we put into local GAA teams is found in devotion to food producers in Italian villages, olive oil producers and artichoke growers as local heroes.

An Italy-loving German, Dieter Bergmann, opened Il Primo at the start of the 1990s and left to open Riva in Dublin’s Docklands, which has since closed. Restaurateur John Farrell, who runs Dillingers, the Butcher Grill and 777, learned about the casual dining experience here, and built his empire on the proceeds of the sale of his stake in the place.

I’ve passed by Il Primo so often I almost feel like I have been there. I’m bound to enjoy it. Loads of people love it. It has to be good. These are my assumptions as I wander in for a booking at 7pm. But no. On the night I visit the food is surprisingly terrible. Not all of it is terrible, there’s one excellent dessert and a couple of starters that are okay. But my main course is so bad I almost break the habit of a lifetime and send it back to the kitchen.

Let’s start with what they get right. The personality of the place is good. It’s on the charming Montague Street, which links Camden Street with Harcourt Street. Downstairs some high tables and stools give it a wine-bar feeling. We go upstairs and have a little flurry of texts and confusion as my friend arrives, asks for me although I’ve booked the table in her name, and then wanders up to join me. The service is some of the best I’ve had in Dublin, friendly and chatty to just the right degree, which is a difficult balance to achieve.

Tables fill up quickly and it gets loud. There’s a pre-theatre deal that runs all evening in the early part of the week so we can do three courses for €26, which is good. And it all starts fine. Miriam’s chargrilled asparagus is a simple, well-cooked dish, smokey lines of charred flesh on the spears, fresh leaves and good Pecorino shaved over it. I go for the monkfish cheeks on the a la carte and am a bit dismayed to get a plate of Donegal Catch-esque breaded and deep-fried pieces on an okay salad with finely chopped tomatoes and a lemon mayo. It feels a bit sad to have the meaty monkfish pieces entombed in such a thick lagging jacket. But forgiveable.

Then the mains move the whole thing down another notch. A spinach and feta pizza has a good papery, crisp base but the unimpressive tomato topping has soaked into it like ink onto blotting paper. Above the smear of red there’s a cheese topping. Then, in what looks like the second part of a two-stage cooking job, some blanched spinach leaves, still watery in spots, cubes of curiously un-crumbly feta, pine nuts and, instead of the “black olive tapenade”, some whole black olives have been added to the top. It has the look of a very ordinary pizza you might jazz up at home with some fresh ingredients tossed onto it. The a la carte price for this pizza is €18.

My bowl of smoked haddock risotto (€18) is eye-wateringly oversalted. Again, the haddock is good, undyed flakes of fish, but the risotto lacks that unctuous creaminess you can get from this simple dish, and the salt just knocks it all dead. I push it around and manage to eat roughly half of it.

The highlight of the night is an almond, ricotta and polenta tart which has shavings of lemon zest on top. I get an affogato al caffe, which the waiter charmingly explains (with apologies for his bad Italian) means “drowned”. It’s two tiny balls of vanilla ice cream in a glass with an espresso poured over them. Unfortunately this was done in the kitchen rather than served separately. So the heat of the coffee had gone and it’s all a bit of a curdled concoction that I could have muddled together better at home.

With a glass each of the house wines, a pinot grigio and a pinot nero (€7 apiece) the bill with a tea and coffee came to €83.50.

There are plenty of restaurants we love for things other than their food. These “now the food’s not great, but . . .” places hold memories of a wonderful evening, the welcome from the wait staff, the comfort of knowing what to expect and getting it every time. But Il Primo has been a standard-bearer for the idea at the heart of Italian food: wonderful ingredients simply cooked. Their website says they’re closing for holidays until August 13. Maybe the rain has been getting to them. Let’s hope they come back with something better.

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