Fit For A Jester

19-11-2012

This weekend, actually Friday, marked the one-year marker until my upcoming nuptials to the lady friend.

So with my concept of time that's roughly four Jester weeks away .

To mark the occasion we went and had dinner in the restaurant of Darver Castle, the place we will be holding our wedding reception. While it wasn't intended as a sneaky recon mission it might as well have been.

After arriving we were shown to our table by the gentleman that oversaw the running of the restaurant. Out come the menus, in go the orders, all goes well.

It has to be said that the atmosphere of Darver Castle's restaurant is fantastically inviting. Relaxing and not rushed in the least. There is no bellowing of orders from the kitchen or smashing of pots and pans in panic. The waiting staff are not racing around carrying dishes on every limb they possibly can. In all it is a well oiled machine, which only adds to the relaxing environment.

What we really liked was that, unlike every other restaurant I have ever eaten in in Ireland, the staff don't hound you during your meal. Waiting for that perfect moment when your mouth is full of food before diving in to ask you a question. Out come the dishes and just after you take the first, maybe second, mouthful somebody comes over to check everything is right. An even nicer touch I thought was that the progress of your next course is told to you. You don't simply finish one course and then wait around for the next to arrive, the gentleman running the show comes up and informs you exactly how long the next course is away from being ready and he doesn't get the timing wrong at all.

The food itself was amazing, a food coma was very much on the cards as we munched through the meal. As each dish came out the lady friend was more and more pleased that we had picked here for our reception. She even had a dessert, that I reckon will be making a reappearance a year from now, something that she never does. If she has something sweet and then plans to eat the same thing again a year later you know it has to be good.

We found out from the gentleman running the show that the chefs in the restaurant are actually the same ones that cooking on the day of a wedding in the castle. This was nice to hear since the quality of the food was so good it would have been a shame to have different chefs working at bigger events in the castle.

All in all I think our stomachs, bloated as they were, were more than happy with both the level of service and level of food. In many ways it helped to put our minds at ease over the location selection. So tick tock goes the clock.

Blue_jester