Maybe I need to take a break from fish and chips.
The specimen in question comes from Molly Darcys, an Irish pub that opened this September in the Seven Gables Inn in Clayton (26 North Meramec Avenue). I want to put Irish pub in quotation marks -- the place looks like it was built from a kit -- but the pub is the sibling of a Molly Darcys in Killarney, Ireland.
At any rate, the menu is mostly sandwiches. There is a daily special, the same each day each week. Thursday is chicken pot pie. I wasn't in the mood for chicken pot pie or a sandwich, so I ordered the fish and chips.
As I said, maybe I need to take a break from fish and chips. It was greasy, but not overly so -- I mean, it's deep-fried fish, after all. The batter was crisp, the cod snow-white and flaky. There was nothing wrong with it, strictly speaking. Yet it had no taste whatsoever and sat in my stomach like a big ball of battered bland.
(Malt vinegar helped, but not much. I didn't touch the tartar sauce pictured. Would you?)
On a related note, Jason Sheehan, the incomparable restaurant critic for our sister paper in Denver, last week wrote his rules for opening a great Irish bar. I wish he'd shared these with the Molly Darcys people before they hung their Guinness ads on the wall.
