Forêt

A French Room Above an Irish Pub

Dublin has always had a complicated relationship with French cooking. The city's most decorated table, Patrick Guilbaud, has held two Michelin stars for decades and remains the clearest proof that the Irish-French axis runs deep in the capital's fine dining culture. But formal Franco-Irish restaurants at that register are few. What has grown instead is something more casual and more interesting: kitchens that absorb French technique and vocabulary without the white-tablecloth ceremony, dropping it into neighbourhood settings where the cooking can speak without the formality getting in the way.

Forêt operates in exactly that register. The address is 8/9 Sussex Terrace on Leeson Street Upper, Dublin 4, and the room sits above M. O'Brien's pub — a detail that manages to be both genuinely funny and somehow entirely fitting for Dublin. The contrast between the signage downstairs and the menu upstairs is the point. When a wine list references vin jaune and a kitchen sends out rillettes and steak au poivre, the pub beneath becomes context rather than contradiction.

The French Kitchen in an Irish City

French vocabulary on an Irish menu is not new. What separates committed French-leaning kitchens from those that simply borrow the terminology is execution: whether the technique holds under pressure, whether the sourcing matches the ambition of the menu language, and whether the whole thing coheres as a point of view rather than an assemblage of borrowed references.

Forêt comes from the team behind Forest Avenue, the well-regarded modern restaurant next door on Sussex Terrace. That lineage matters because Forest Avenue has spent years building a reputation for produce-led cooking with careful sourcing, and the kitchen discipline that makes a restaurant earn sustained critical attention. The Sunday Times Ireland named Forêt among Ireland's 100 Best Restaurants in 2025, placing it in a peer group that includes Bastible, Glovers Alley, and Chapter One by Mickael Viljanen — all kitchens operating at the sharper end of Dublin's restaurant offer.

The menu language is instructive. Pâté, rillettes, au poivre, vin jaune: these are not trend terms. They belong to a more durable French culinary tradition, one that prizes technique over novelty and flavour concentration over decorative plating. The tomato tart with piperade cited in the Sunday Times review is a useful signal , piperade is a Basque-French preparation built on slow-cooked peppers and tomatoes, and its presence alongside a tart suggests a kitchen interested in the depth of French regional cooking rather than its surface markers.

The Wine Angle: Reading Between the Lines of a French List

A menu that name-checks vin jaune is making a declaration. Vin jaune, the oxidative white wine of the Jura produced from Savagnin and aged under a film of yeast in a style that has more in common with fino Sherry than with Burgundy Chardonnay, is not casual list filler. It is a wine that requires both conviction on the part of the buyer and a food program capable of handling its intensity , nutty, waxy, with a finish that can outlast almost any white wine on the table.

Its presence on the Forêt menu signals a wine program with genuine range. French regional wines, particularly from less-travelled appellations like the Jura, the Loire, or the Rhône's northern reaches, have become a reliable marker for Dublin lists that are built on knowledge rather than commercial convenience. The city's most interesting wine programs in recent years, across the €€ to €€€ bracket, have moved away from Bordeaux-and-Burgundy defaults toward a more exploratory French geography. A kitchen that cooks rillettes and poivre-sauced proteins wants wines with texture and grip, not just clean fruit, and a Jura reference on the menu suggests the list has been assembled with that match in mind.

For context on how French-influenced wine programs sit within the broader Irish restaurant scene, Campagne in Kilkenny has long maintained one of the country's most focused French-leaning lists outside Dublin, while Aniar in Galway takes a different approach entirely, rooting its wine selection in terroir-expressive producers that support rather than overshadow its ingredient-first cooking. Forêt sits closer to the former in spirit: a list that should reward reading carefully.

Dublin 4 and the Leeson Street Dining Strip

Leeson Street Upper and the Sussex Terrace address place Forêt in Dublin 4, the postcode that contains some of the capital's most established hospitality real estate alongside its embassies and Georgian terraces. The neighbourhood dining culture here skews toward the reliable rather than the experimental, which makes Forêt's French positioning something of a local outlier. It is not attempting to reflect the neighbourhood so much as create a destination within it.

The broader Dublin restaurant scene in 2025 has continued to add serious kitchens at pace. D'Olier Street has extended the city's modern cuisine tier, while outside the capital, Liath in Blackrock, dede in Baltimore, Bastion in Kinsale, and Terre in Castlemartyr have raised the ceiling for what Irish kitchens are doing with European technique and local produce. Within the city itself, the Sunday Times 100 Best list functions as a reasonable proxy for the current high-water mark , and inclusion in that list puts Forêt in company that justifies the trip.

Planning a Visit

Forêt is located at 8/9 Sussex Terrace, Leeson Street Upper, Dublin 4, on the upper floor above M. O'Brien's pub. Given its inclusion in a national best-restaurants list and its connection to the Forest Avenue team, booking ahead is advisable, particularly for weekend sittings. The venue's position on the Sunday Times 2025 list will have increased its profile, and tables at this level of the Dublin market tend to fill quickly once critical attention lands. For a broader picture of where Forêt sits within the capital's dining offer, our full Dublin restaurants guide maps the field across price points and cuisine types. Those planning a full stay in the city can also consult our Dublin hotels guide, our Dublin bars guide, our Dublin experiences guide, and our Dublin wineries guide.