Myself and the little woman have been together for a long time. More than a decade. I know, scary! As CanuckJacq mentioned in a previous article, it’s important to spend ‘quality time’ (awful phrase) with your loved one. So, we try to go out on a date once ever couple of weeks. It’s always a blast. I refuse to call it date-night as we’re way to cool for that.

This time we went to Café Novo, which is the restaurant of The Westbury Hotel. Now, usually I don’t like hotel restaurants as they tend to have a huge turnover in customers and throw the food out, but this is The Westbury dahling, so no such problem.

As you enter Café Novo, you think “gulp, this is a coffee shop”, but, once you get past the front section, it opens up to a large dining area. The decor is very chilled-out chic; leather, deep-filled chairs, dark slate tables and floor lighting all help to give a feeling of cool without cold.

The place was pretty empty when we arrived and didn’t fill up at all, but this was mid-week and the current economic climate and all that jazz.

I flicked through the menu and looked up to comment but stopped when I saw my partner’s face. She was wide-eyed after checking out the wine list. Two words. Rip Off. Seriously, the wine list is limited to your usual chardonnays, sauvignon blancs, merlots and chiantis but they have stuck a tenner extra on the prices. The cheapest bottle was €29 and you could’ve run to Dunnes and gotten it for €12.99. It’s this kind of thing that restaurants got away with back when the Celtic tiger was roaring but you just can’t do this to customers anymore.

It’s an awful pity too as the food menu was full of delicous and very reasonably-priced choices. For starters we shared Sun-Dried Tomato Focaccia with Olive oil and spanish aioli (not sure why the oil warranted a capital letter and not Spain). It arrived on a slab of oak, and was gorgeously presented. It tasted delicious too; warm focaccia with the bite of tomato and the dip was mouth watering. A perfect starter.

Presentation seems to be high on the list of priorities here as a couple of diners ordered Roasted Vine Tomato Soup With Bruschetta, which arrived in a tall mug. It looked great but seemed to be a pain to eat as they were having problems dipping.

For our mains I ordered Seared Barramundi on stir fried egg noodles with vegetables and Thai broth. Barramundi is an Australian fish that looks like mackerel but tastes like cod. Here, it was accompanied by perfectly-cooked noodles and a mouth-watering broth. The only problem was that the noodles were covered in a sauce that tasted like MSG got in there. Why on earth you would need/use a taste enhancer in any restaurant is beyond me, especially on a dish as delicately delicious as this should have been.

My partner chose Wild Mushroom And Spinach Tortellini with a Tomato and herb cream sauce, and was happy enough except the sauce was more cream then tomato. The pasta was, again, spot on with a touch of a bite to it and lots of ‘meaty’ filling .

We decided not to go for desserts and, with a bottle of red wine, our bill came to the bones of €60.

There is some great cooking going on in the kitchen in Café Novo but there are a lot of things they could improve. Maybe spend more time taking care of, you know, the food and not so much on presentation.

As we were walking out my ever-accurate lady said “this place could easily become a fantastic cheap-and-cheerful, but they have to sort out the wine list”. I suppose cheap-and-cheerful isn’t what you get in The Westbury dahling.

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