The very last thing you’d expect a seasoned restaurateur to do – particularly when people are going out less – is identify the least popular days of the week and decide, hey, I’m going to open a restaurant that operates only on those days. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday are school nights, following on from a weekend well spent. With funds depleted and a focus on restoring them, these days tend to be scrubbed off the going-out map, unless, of course, you work in the restaurant industry and they’re your days off.
It’s a bank holiday Monday, we have a 5.45pm reservation, and in my book, that’s reason enough to step into a new restaurant. Well, it’s new in the sense that Mongoose is Keelan and Aaron Higgs’s latest venture, but the room is very familiar, exactly as it was when it used to house their other restaurant Variety Jones, now next door at 79 Thomas Street.
In case you’ve never been, Variety Jones is the restaurant that feels too cool and casual to have a Michelin star, until you taste the fire-led cooking on the chef’s choice set menu. Mongoose, on the other hand, offers an a la carte: four starters, pastas and mains, with one dessert or cheese to finish. There are no ordering requirements, so it makes sense to treat it as a series of sharing plates, although sharing the charred green asparagus with hollandaise sauce (€11.50) goes against all of my instincts. It’s from France – two large spears of new season asparagus, with melting slices of lardo draped over them. The hollandaise is perfect. You’ll want one each.
