Review 05: Potager, Skerries

A fine dining neighbourhood restaurant with a tasting menu that makes Sunday Lunch a service worth worshipping

We had a lengthy lead-in before we began publishing restaurant reviews. We agonised over whether we should simply recount or properly critique. Should we award ‘star’ ratings and publish receipts? We questioned: have we enough experience eating out to assert a little authority from a diner’s perspective? It took us years of telling ourselves “who are we to critique?” ’til eventually we landed on “who is anyone else to critique?” 

It’s not a divine right reserved for someone whose whiffed enough wines to be WSET-certified, gotten gout from all the good livin’ or trained as a chef in a past life so they can lift the lid on “both sides of the pass”. Most critics aren’t even a fondue of bits and pieces of the above. The bulk fall into restaurant reviewing from some other side of the journalism beat, and it’s the ones who are proper wordsmiths that make their mark, not those with a finer palette or who can sniff the best plonk from across the room. 

Potager elegantly opened its doors in the well to-do coastal town of Skerries in 2019 and almost every piece written about this fine dining neighbourhood restaurant in the three years since has harmonised in hitting the same bum note. That note being the madcap notion that Skerries is some sort of obscure, faraway land that will take light years to venture towards. Given, it may be in the far reaches of North County Dublin, but not the farthest; Skerries sits a mere 35 minutes by rail from Dublin Connolly on a fairly busy train line, hourly or several times-hourly most days. We’ve spent longer on Dublin Bus snaking from Trinity to Terenure. We’ve stop-started like involuntary hiccups through the constant line of traffic between Donnybrook and Drumcondra for at least twice that length of time, countless times. You can even take-off from Dublin Airport and land in Farranfore Airport in Kerry in a similar length of time.