Cavistons Seafood Restaurant

The absolute highlight of our travels around Ireland.
It was mid-​afternoon and we were both starving. We had driven down to Waterford and back up the coast through Wexford and Wicklow photographing since the wee hours of the morning. We were very close to Dún Laoghaire and a quick search on Unilocal!showed us Caviston’s looked like the perfect place to have lunch in this quiet little seaside town.
The town immediately reminded me of a Carmel-​by-​the-​Sea or other quaint little northern California artsy beach community. When we entered the restaurant, it was pretty clear we were the only ‘non-​locals’ in the restaurant — but we received the same fast and cheerful service.
Patrick, the owner, had just baked a huge loaf of bread — no joke, about 4 feet long. He brought it out on a huge breadboard right out of the oven and was letting everyone in the restaurant try a piece of it.
I ordered the crab salad and it was the freshest/​tastiest crab I’ve ever had in my life. My wife had the local sea bass served en papillote and she said it was by the far the best en papillote preparation of fish she had ever had.
When we left, I had to get a photo with the owner Patrick. It was one of our fondest memories of Ireland.

It’s not enough to drown well sourced fish in melted butter or oily caper crusts. It’s not fresh, it’s not vibrant. Baby samphire should crunch and release the sea, not whimper indelicately. It’s not enough to serve dishes all with a plain side salad and barely done spuds (in even more butter). I don’t mind a small restaurant dictating my sides, but change them with the terroir? And find something other than butter to finish an ingredient? This place has die hard fans; folk who come every week, I guess. It’s probably small enough to be filled with just them. They’ve been rocking an ideal learned before even Keith Floyd championed fish to the masses (he loved his butter too). Please Cavistons, take it up a notch. BTW — service is excellent, even when under pressure to clear first sittings to make room for 8pm bookings.

I have just come back from having lunch in Cavistons and it was excellent. The native oysters from Galway were devine and I would give them a mark of 15 out of 10 good presentation and they wafted with the smell of the sea.
Followed by Scallops with a mint and pea sauce which would make any one dribble with delight. They come with new potatoes and a green salad. I have to admit I would prefer seasonal veg instead of the salad and potatoes.
Followed by… if you have room… chocolate pudding with cream.
Followed by… well it was my birthday… coffee and cream.
The meal was perfectly accompanied by Prosecco and peach juice.
Lunch time this time of year is divided into 2 sittings (maybe 3?) 12noon and 1:30. We were at the early sitting and the place was half empty.

Time and again we had heard of this restaurant in Dun Laoghaire: Cavistons. It only opens at weekends, is known for high prices and excellent fish. We had high expectations, which were partially met.
A thing I didn’t care for was being seated literally in the door. When ever someone was coming in (like every second minute) I had to move my chair to make room.
My grilled salmon steak was a bit too soft I thought and didn’t have the qualities that one associates with «grilled» or «steak». Actually, it tasted just like the salmon in the canteen of my company, which is OK (and free lunch). The sauce was quite good, the potatoes were average. The restaurant had one bottle of Corona and a can of Heineken in stock. I was lucky that no one else wanted to have a beer. In addition I had some soup, oysters, a crab salad and linguini with lobster. And that stuff was really good. The damage was € 150 four people.

This is the place we go for lunch when we’re mitching from work. A stroll down Dun Laoghaire pier followed by the short walk back to Glasthule and a dish of prawns with plenty of fresh bread accompanied by a nice Pinot Grigio is your only man. Cavistons is tiny and they do two sittings for lunch. You need to time your arrival very carefully because they don’t take bookings for lunch, or at least spur of the moment mitching type lunch bookings, and a refusal will ruin your whole afternoon. If you’re really lucky the patron, Peter Caviston, will regale you with yarns as you eat. A lovely, friendly, lazy, tasty, pitch-​perfect place that will send you out with a smile on your face, all the better to sample the delights of their excellent deli next door. Can’t wait to go back — when I have a job to mitch from, that is.

The seafood in Caviston’s is absolutely out of this world and has won all the accolades that you come to expect including institutional status as one of Dublin’s nicest restaurants.
I wasn’t paying, thank God, because I’m sure it wasn’t cheap but if I had my way I’d eat delicious fishies at Caviston’s everyday.
So, if there’s a special occasion coming up I would highly recommend Caviston’s for really mouth watering seafood.

A seafood restaurant on the coast of Ireland? Really? That sounds quite unlikely… well it does! Think about it, if you go to somewhere like Portugal you are falling over fish restaurants along the coastline — all lovely and fresh and char grilled and oooohhh take me back now…
In Ireland fish diners of any sort are really quite rare and good ones rarer still and reasonably priced ones? Erm… Portugal is only an hours flight that way.
Enter stage left Cavistons Seafood restaurant who do a very respectable 1 course lunch for 10 eeuro — fresh seabass with chilli and spring onion. Nice to see someone is trying!