Forest Avenue

A Glass Frontage on Sussex Road

The approach to Forest Avenue does some of the work before you step inside. A small, glass-fronted room on Sussex Terrace, close to the Grand Canal in Dublin 4, it reads from the street as the kind of restaurant that has quietly decided what it is and has no interest in announcing itself loudly. The neighbourhood context matters: this is the suburban south side, not the city-centre dining corridor, and the restaurants that have built reputations out here tend to earn them on cooking alone rather than on foot traffic and location advantage.

Dublin's modern dining scene has sorted itself across several tiers over the past decade. At one end, larger city-centre rooms with international backing and Michelin starholders like Chapter One by Mickael Viljanen and Glovers Alley operate with full tasting-menu infrastructure and deep wine programs. At the other end, tighter rooms like Variety Jones and allta work with minimal-intervention menus and a more stripped-back format. Forest Avenue occupies its own position: a husband-and-wife operation at a premium price point (€€€€), with a Michelin Plate in both 2024 and 2025, that leans into creative, experimental modern cooking without the institutional scale of the city's starred rooms.

How the Meal Builds

The tasting menu format is now the dominant grammar of serious Irish cooking, and Forest Avenue writes in that language fluently. What distinguishes the structure here is that the kitchen's personality tends to emerge early. The kitchen opens proceedings with what the menu describes as 'surprises from our kitchen', an amuse-bouche sequence that signals the cooking direction before the formal courses begin. In a tasting menu context, this matters: the opening moves establish whether a kitchen is playing it safe or willing to take creative risks, and at Forest Avenue the early sequence is where that experimental edge first shows itself.

The progression across the menu is built around punchy, decided flavours rather than the quieter, more restrained register that characterises some of Ireland's other serious kitchens. This puts Forest Avenue in a different stylistic bracket from, say, Aniar in Galway, where the kitchen's foraging-led approach tends toward restraint, or Liath in Blackrock, where the focus sits on precise technique over flavour intensity. The wine list, focused and deliberately assembled with Austrian producers alongside others, is matched to that bolder cooking register. The pairing logic is coherent rather than just comprehensive.

At lunch, a lighter three-course option runs alongside the full tasting menu, which makes Forest Avenue more accessible across different visit types than a dinner-only tasting format would allow. Tables close to the open kitchen are consistently popular, which suggests the room is small enough that kitchen visibility is a meaningful differentiator rather than just an atmospheric detail.

The Broader Irish Modern Cooking Context

Forest Avenue sits inside a generation of Irish restaurants that have pushed contemporary cooking beyond its earlier dependence on classic French structure. The restaurants that define this moment — Forest Avenue among them, alongside dede in Baltimore, Bastion in Kinsale, Campagne in Kilkenny, and Terre in Castlemartyr — share a commitment to ingredient-led creativity that doesn't map onto any single imported culinary tradition. The Michelin Plate designation, held consecutively in 2024 and 2025, positions Forest Avenue within the recommended tier without the star hierarchy, which in practical terms means the cooking is consistently at a level worth seeking out, even if the guide's formal star criteria haven't yet aligned.

What the Michelin data also signals is continuity. A restaurant holding Plate recognition across consecutive years is a kitchen maintaining quality over time, not peaking for a single guide cycle. For a small, independently run room without a hotel or group behind it, that kind of consistency is the harder achievement.

John Wyer's new project, Forêt, operates just a couple of doors up from Forest Avenue on the same stretch of Sussex Road. The proximity of a second, distinct restaurant from the same team is an unusual arrangement, and one that reflects both the confidence of the operation and the particular character of this corner of Dublin 4 as an address for serious cooking. The two rooms together represent a genuine cluster on what is otherwise a quiet residential street.

Where Forest Avenue Sits Among Its Peers

Compared against Dublin's other €€€€ tasting menu rooms, Forest Avenue operates with a more domestic scale and a less institutionally polished format. That is not a criticism: the trade-off for the smaller room and husband-and-wife service model is a directness of cooking personality that larger operations sometimes flatten out. The service is described as well-organised and genuinely friendly, which in the context of Dublin's fine dining scene is not a given. Some of the city's more formally structured rooms can feel stiff; Forest Avenue apparently does not.

For international context, the modern cuisine category at this level sits in a peer set that includes technically ambitious rooms across Europe, from Frantzén in Stockholm to FZN by Björn Frantzén in Dubai, where the tasting menu format and kitchen creativity are the primary value propositions. Forest Avenue competes in that conversation at a city-level rather than an international scale, but the cooking ambition is pointed in the same direction.

Dublin's wider dining infrastructure is covered in our full Dublin restaurants guide, with further context across hotels, bars, wineries, and experiences. For the D'Olier Street neighbourhood and city-centre dining, D'Olier Street is worth cross-referencing.

Planning Your Visit

Forest Avenue is at 8 Sussex Terrace, Sussex Road, Dublin 4, in the residential stretch near the Grand Canal. The format runs across both lunch and dinner, with the full tasting menu available at both services and a lighter three-course option at lunch only. The restaurant holds a Google rating of 4.7 across 304 reviews, which for a room of this scale and price point reflects a consistent guest experience rather than a polarising one. Given the small size of the room and the consistent Michelin attention, booking ahead is sensible. The tables beside the open kitchen are the ones to ask for.