Review Of Powersfield House Restaurant by John & Sally McKenna For West Waterford Good Food Guide

Eunice Power has created a huge success with Powersfield House, a fine home and restaurant a couple of miles outside Dungarvan on the road to Lismore, but from the second you walk through the door, the creativity and skill which has enraptured locals is immediately evident. This is a stylish house, but its style is all the more admirable when you learn that it has been created on a budget. The 4 guest rooms are admirable tone poems of good taste, each detail carefully considered, while the restaurant itself a charmingly intimate room. When you sit down, you quickly realise Mrs. Power is as gifted a cook as she is a decorator. This is not conservative country house cooking: this is gee-whizz food from a cook with real verve.
Piadina with goats' cheese, grilled peppers, roasted onions and basil oil is the smartest pizza you can eat; roast aubergine soup with a twist of lime is inspired. Fillet steak - sourced from Michael McGrath's superb butchers' shop in Lismore - is nothing less than meat ice cream: sweet, tender, melt-in-the-mouth delicious. Roast duck with plum and date cake is superb; and desserts are raucous concoctions: benchmark lemon tart; fabulous sticky pear and ginger cake. Do make sure to book well in advance, for getting a seat in the restaurant at weekends is already one of the hottest tickets in the town.

© John & Sally McKenna

The original review can be read here.