You’d be forgiven for missing Assassination Custard, run by Gwen McGrath and Ken Doherty, on Dublin’s Kevin Street. The only thing announcing its presence is a small cartoon of the titular dessert, hanging from the sign. If you’re feeling hungry after dark, even precise directions will do you little good, since it’s only open for a few hours at lunchtime, three or four days a week – a schedule designed to allow the couple to spend time with their two kids in a city where childcare costs – like rent, produce and every other thing involved in running a business – are sky high.
Assassination Custard takes its name from the hastily made dessert James Joyce and Nora Barnacle offered Samuel Beckett, when the latter was convalescing in a Parisian hospital. (He’d been stabbed by a pimp.) It’s said to have been a rich, crème brûlée type affair, stiffened with a generous drop of brandy. And it’s the perfect name for the most precisely chaotic and singularly wonderful restaurant in Dublin.
I’m dining with my friend Greg, with whom I generally talk about three things: food, the trials and tribulations of Liverpool Football Club, and Dublin itself. He’s remained my cultural metronome for the city since I left 15 years ago, keeping me abreast of the musicians, writers, artists and restaurants doing bold, innovative, exciting work, almost inevitably preceding news that they’re finding it nearly impossible to make a living.
‘Bafflingly good’: bitter leaf salad & guanciale
It was he who first introduced me to this place six years ago and, on a cement-grey day in October, we take our seats for another go. Those seats are easily found, since the first thing you’ll note when entering Assassination Custard is that it is tiny. There are three tables, one large (boasting four seats) and two small (two persons apiece). I’ve been told they’ve had as many as 40 in for special events and I can only imagine that this involved judicious application of baby oil and/or some light amputation. So cosy are its dimensions that the guest sitting nearest to said door is deputised with opening it for anyone wanting to enter, a task one of our fellow diners takes to with supreme grace during our visit. I am later informed that this is Carlos Henriquez of Restaurant Elm in Helsinki, on a pilgrimage to check out a restaurant known as much for its extraordinary food as its utter lack of airs and graces.
The seasonal menu changes depending on what produce is available, with a preponderance of light, Italian and Mediterranean flavours. This menu is also handwritten on brown paper pastry bags, in a scrawl that suggests, were the thrill of fine dining ever to depart its chefs, they could make a creditable living as GPs. We promptly signal our intent to have the entire menu, mostly because we want to, but also because we’re not entirely sure what some of the scribbles describe.
‘Deliciously sticky’: lamb ribs, smoked aubergine mash
Our first dish, it transpires, is the white wine taralli with cannonata; crunchy little biscuits served with a sundried tomato and artichoke paste, flecked with barbs of chilli heat. Then comes the pumpkin agrodolce, thin slices of al dente pumpkin bathed in oil and pepper. Its rooty, sweet flavours make for a dish so simple and so tasty, it almost defies the senses. Just as simple, and as bafflingly good, is the bitter leaf salad and guanciale: fronds of lettuce drizzled with pencil-eraser sized chunks of piping hot guanciale, their still-rendering fat combining with butter to wilt the leaves to perfection.
Assassination Custard is so gloriously, Irishly, casual that it makes me want to sing the national anthem. A tube of kitchen roll serves as our – necessary and welcome – napkin for the afternoon. Earlier, we’d been told there was no orange wine because they were waiting on a delivery. This, it turns out, is literal. As the delivery arrives, we are offered some straight off the trolley. That would have been the most Irish thing that happened on our visit, had I not popped outside – thanking Carlos for unbolting the door as I did so – to take a phone call, and looked across the street to see puzzled Gardai chatting with an older woman in an elegant scarf, whose car appeared to have rear-ended a 20ft-long Guinness truck, replete with a cartoonish bounty of kegs.
Mussel, grilled bread & curry leaf aioli
Back inside, the casual brilliance continues with the grilled bread and mussels. These come in two thin strips, the bread coated with a curry leaf aioli, harmonising with the pickled mussels for a medley of creamy, zesty richness. Exquisite, too, is the confit veal tongue and piccalilli which follows, the stiff ox-tongue blending perfectly with the sweet, sour relish they make on site and sell by the jar. Last among the savoury dishes are the lamb ribs, deliciously sticky and sweet and accompanied by a smoked aubergine mash, although the slight lack of meat on its bones might register as the closest thing to a dud note we experience all day.
Having sampled everything on the menu, including wine for two and a generous tip, our bill came to just over €100 a head. A treat? Yes. A marvel? Most certainly. We sit, pondering the quality of a restaurant that beguiles head chefs in Finland, but remains unknown to many people two streets away; a world-class eatery supporting an everyday family, in a country that creates so many beautiful things and just as many barriers against them being made. A country in which 600 restaurants shut their doors between 2023 and 2024 alone – one of them Assassination Custard itself, which bounced back from the brink earlier this year, in time for its 10th anniversary.
‘A spectacular quartet’: meringues with coriander seed and hazelnut
Such dark ruminations are, however, difficult to sustain in a place as joyously convivial as this. Not least when Ken’s mother, the visual artist Patricia Hurl, barrels in as we finish our desserts (a walnut and honey cake, and a spectacular quartet of meringues; four delectable sugar shells containing coriander seed and hazelnut, and served with lashings of fresh cream and cocoa) telling a tale of true woe. She was just driving over the road, she says, unfurling an elegant scarf, and sure didn’t this Guinness truck came out of nowhere.
Assassination Custard, 19A Kevin Street Lower, Dublin D08 C9C5, Ireland (353 87 470 1577). Small plates €8-12, large plates €13-18, desserts €9, wine from €34