"Your Bollix will be out soon"
Wow! what kind of drinks do you serve here? Sobriety to public nudity usually takes more than a couple of ciders so I have to ease your minds by steering you to the starter menu over at Lis Doon Varna.
It's a stroke of marketing genius to include a dish with such a delicious pun as "hot bollix" for a bar that's back story relates to the matchmaking tradition and can be quite the icebreaker on a date. Let's just say that the idea of hot sauce on my bollix is ONLY appealing in the appetizer sense. a nice soft center of potato, onion , bacon and scallions , battered into balls and fried. you get a pretty robust buffalo sauce to heat it up with.
Now that I've stopped talking bollix lets get onto the rest of the meal.
About the only innovation I've seen in Irish pubs in the USA occurs on the appetizer menu.Since no one seems to want to mess with the main courses too badly what follows shouldn't surprise anyone.
Main.
We had. The Beef and Guinness pie and the Bangers and mash. E.g typical. Firstly the pie. Ahh separate pastry , yes it's easier to cook that way but I really prefer it if the crust and meat enter the oven as one which gives a wonderful gravy soaked soft under layer to a contrasting flaky top. This was all flake. The filling was really good, generous and quite rich. Accompanying veg of green beans and carrot rounded it off nicely
Now to the bangers and mash. Potatoes were just too smooth to be "real" potatoes and came off as packaged which given that we identified the gravy mix supplier wasn't unexpected. The sausages were fine but this dish is phoning it in.
Bread Pudding.
Oh dear, the base was a raspberry concoction that was out of place on this dessert. While whiskey or rum sauce would have been nice a sickly raspberry ,a la pop tart, wasn't doing it for either of us. ( Kinda like UK Virgin cola:) . The dish looks like it came of the bread pudding assembly line and is way too neat for my liking. I prefer the more organic one over at Tim Finnegan's which degrades gloriously into a heavenly mess.
All in all we'll be back to check out the rest of the menu
*edits to improve grammar / typos still a work in progress.