PRESS / SABA REVIEWS & FEATURES

Irish Independent, Paulo Tullio

3 March 2007

Viewers of RTE's The Restaurant will know that the division of labour is far from even. While the celebrity chef slaves all day long in the kitchen to prepare a meal for 38 dinners, an the very efficient waiting staff work hard all night serving the food, the self-satisfied critics sit down to eat late in the evening and are then required to pass judgement.

It's certainly the easiest job of the night. What viewers may not know is that each of the waiting staff run real restaurants in their real lives. John Healy looks after diners in The Four Seasons, Lee Bradshaw is opening his own restaurant in Kerry, and Elaine Normille is a manager of Saba - an Asian restaurant in Dublin.

I thought it might be fun to pay Elaine a surprise visit, so I arranged to meet my son Rocco there. Sadly spontaneity doesn't always work out - when we got there we found Elaine wasn't working that night, but we did find a very busy, buzzy restaurant. The interior is large, buts it'd been cleverly divided so you don't feel that you're in a barn.

The wall beside us was covered pf photographs of motorbikes with entire families riding on them. I have my own photographs of similar travellers from my visit to Ho Chi Min City, which used to be called Saigon, so I suspect these photographs came from that same city of five million motorbikes. Most of them were 'Hongdas', a Chinese copy of the Japanese Honda 50. They serve all transport needs there - entire families get aboard, some are stacked 10 feet high with goods. I even saw one converted into a fire engine.

One thing I learnt about the Vietnamese is that they're obsessed with food. They're like Italians, they talk about food endlessly, plan meals for the future and dissect meals of the past. Wherever you get this food obsession you also tend to get good food, and I loved the food in Vietnam.

What Saba offers you is a kind of step up from Yamamori - you've got all the noodles, curries and wok dishes, but done with less of a canteen atmosphere. I did get the feeling though of meals I'd eaten in the vast covered hawker markets in Singapore, where different stalls prepare different dishes, and you can pick and mix.

Saba is the sort of dining room where you can come in for just one dish, or linger over several. Certainly the tables around us turned over fairly quickly as diner came and left while we ate and chatted.

The menu is quite long, listing lots of appetisers, soups, salads, Saba dishes, noodles, noodle soups, curries and side orders. The prices are also very reasonable. Most of the main dishes are under €20 but if you were feeling extravagant you could order the lobster tail with yellow beans and brown rice for €28.50. Otherwise for a one-course snack you could order a noodle dish which are all priced in and around €13.

The wine list is average in length, but the bulk of the wines listed are priced at under €30, which I like to see. Even with our high duties and VAT, there's still no reason why a restaurant can't sell you a good bottle of wine for under €30 and make a decent profit. You can find good, drinkable wines for under €10 retail, so it's not hard to produce a list with wines for under €30. I do notice a growing trend for wine lists to start at €30 and work up from there, but for me that's an expression of greed rather than necessity.

Personally I prefer beer with Asian food, and the big plus about Saba's drinks menu is that apart from wine it also lists sake, cocktails, long drinks, short drink and beers. Rocco chase a Heineken, but with a feeling of deep nostalgia for the East, I picked a bottle of Tiger beer, to remind myself of my visits tot heir factories in Singapore and Vietnam. A big bottle of mineral water completed the drinks order.

Rocco began with a tempura of sort-shelled crabs with a mango salsa, and I started with a bowl of Tom Yaam Coong, which lovely name described a spicy prawn soup with oyster mushrooms. Rocco had four crabs in his tempura, and curiously two of them tasted very good, the two had a very strong fishy taste. No quibbles with my soup though, it was very nicely spiced and the mix of flavours well judged.

For his main course Rocco had picked a noodle dish, the Pattaya, which was egg noodle with roasted duck, chilli, egg, pak choi and mushrooms. This is a very typical Asian dish and it was well executed. Both of us enjoyed it a lot. I'd picked the Gaeng Pet Nuta, which was a red beef curry with a medium chilli burn. By the time I'd eaten all the beef slivers I had no appetite left for the rice such are the portion sizes, but I what did eat, I liked.

We finished up with a macchiato for Rocco and an espresso for me, which rounded off the meal perfectly. What you get in Saba is simple, spicy food that's well prepared. It isn't haute cuisine and it doesn't pretend to be. What it does is give you a flavour of what everyday food in Asia is like, and as such it does the job well.

Remember there are main courses here for under €13, so you're getting very good value for money. Cheap and cheerful isn't always a compliment, but this time that's exactly how I mean it. Our bill was €72.70, which is confirmation of the fact.

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