Tucked away in a secluded laneway off St Stephen’s Green, Comet made an assured arrival on Dublin’s restaurant scene in the summer of 2025, when the folks behind Dublin 8’s beloved Bastible teamed up with accomplished young Irish chef Kevin O’Donnell and his partner Laura Chabal leading an experienced team front-of-house.
O’Donnell’s obvious natural talent was well-honed during a 6.5-year stint with the celebrated, ingredients-led Kadeau restaurant in Denmark, where he rose from sous chef in Kadeau Copenhagen and to head chef on their Bornholm island outpost to overseeing the menu in both restaurants as Head of Research and Development. Before returning to Ireland, O’Donnell and Chabal also worked together for six months in Le Doyenné farm-to-table restaurant, guesthouse and working farm just outside Paris.
Though Chabal says she came late to the restaurant game, she grew up with a restaurateur mother in south-west France and is clearly a natural, and the welcome here is as warm as the space is inviting. Clever use of mirrors and light by Aoife Mulvenna of FADA design studio has transformed a challengingly poky dining room into an intimate and calm setting for O’Donnell’s understated, ingredients-led culinary style.
The restaurant is conveniently located close to several smart bars on Dawson Street, but the drinks offer at Comet is so strong that you might prefer to keep your whistle dry until you arrive here and enjoy their signature Comet aperitif of white vermouth with Guindilla peppers and brine, or a glass of grower Champagne.
Much love and attention to detail has gone into the two wine lists, an 11-page cellar list categorised by producer and a short but smart edit listed more traditionally. They both major on smaller, quality-focused wineries, especially those committed to low-intervention farming methods. Both lists reward the adventurous and the well-versed team can happily guide you to something interesting, whether reassuringly traditional or intriguingly off-piste. Real effort has been made to offer excitement at approachable prices, including by the glass, but also evidenced by, for example, several Aligoté-based Burgundy as value alternatives to Chardonnay. The cellar list is particularly strong on grower Champagne while Burgundy and the Jura also figure large, with curiosities from Spain, Italy, Austria and elsewhere.
For food, guests can choose from à la carte options or a ‘carte blanche’ menu, which is described as four-course (but feels considerably more generous given that you get to share both a fish course and meat course as well as two different snacks, starters and desserts) and is an excellent value way to relax into the experience, as is the set Sunday lunch menu.
O’Donnell cooks as though you were a guest in his home with whom he is excited to share his bounty; this is skilled but un-showy cooking that feels instead like a celebration of beautiful ingredients sourced with love and pride. The presentation underlines this impression, with the star snacks of baked clams in vodka sauce served on crinkled baking paper like an excited home cook might.
The menu changes regularly, influenced by the seasons and by what treats O’Donnell’s suppliers can offer. Snacks include house-baked sourdough with tangy, cultured farmhouse butter from Wexford’s Saltrock Dairy, and olives and pickles gently warmed to enticingly aromatic. If you go carte blanche, you’ll get several of these teasers – if not, order with abandon.
Texture and colour are treated in a painterly fashion in starters. These might include perfectly ripe tomatoes and apricot beneath a riot of wild herbs and peppery nastursium leaves and petals, or a parcel of near-translucent strips of yellow courgette that yield to a delicate crunch of fresh almonds in creme fraiche, or pristine mackerel dry cured in a roasted kombu seaweed salt offset by bursts of tomatillos.
Main course might be roast quail served on toast with a Vin Jaune sauce, or saddle of lamb served juicy and pink with the rich homely topping of bagna cauda – that life-affirming northern Italian sauce of anchovy, garlic and olive oil – and a ridiculously decadent swirl of pommes boulangères with crispy edges of which dreams are made. Fish lovers are in for a treat as O’Donnell is particularly adept at handling seafood in creative ways: think lobster tail with yeast sauce and brioche, or monkfish, kohlrabi and fermented plums, or blue fin tuna and strawberries, or confit pollock in beef fat with girolles and maitake mushrooms, hazelnuts and butter sauce.
Desserts are equally exciting and dance joyfully between nostalgic dishes that you wish you’d grown up eating (loganberry fool, or baked Alaska) and jewels that speak of a chef with a magpie’s eye for exotic thrills (Mayan Red cake with mezcal caramel and olive oil).
All in all it’s a thrilling and whimsical yet wonderfully grounded dining experience, one that marries refined luxury with what’s bountiful made extraordinary, wrapped in the loveliest of heartfelt hospitality. It’s somewhere to bring food lovers for a life-affirming splurge or loved ones for a slow-paced, family-style Sunday lunch. Lucky Dublin.
