Review 07: Lignum, Galway

For better, for worse, in sickness and in health... Lignum has lit a fire in East Galway and the smoke signals a star, if not two

We rose from our seats and removed ourselves from Lignum mid-way through the meal the first time we dined there, and then we never went back.

The original idea here was to relay that one of us “tasted half the meal twice”, but that felt a bit crass. On what was a pretty miserable evening in late January 2020 we cut an excitable path to a fairly recently-opened fine dining restaurant we’d heard about in East Galway called Lignum for the full tasting experience. However, one of us got progressively more ill as the day turned to evening, not to mention the more food consumed, and we had to forcibly eject ourselves and stop the experience without getting much farther beyond snacks and starters. The irony is that the one who got ill caught it from the other who was just over it themselves, and seems to have been a bug picked up on a trip to London earlier that week. We sheepishly snuck out, defeated and dejected at half-stepping something we’d waited months to enjoy. Since then, the experience of Lignum had been tarnished, haunted by the bout of digestive malaise that hung over the whole impression of this new restaurant, then lockdown happened and Lignum closed.

2.5 years later, several lockdowns under our collective belt and Lignum finally finding its stride again, having navigated the pandemic to re-open; It was time to replace a negative experience with a (hopefully) more positive one. We’d been bickering between ourselves about having to wrong the right, cancel the past and get back here but the dates kept evading us until, in late Summer 2022, we made our way back –– and happy to report that, this time, we lasted each of the ten rounds in the ring.