Chowing Down Dublin

I’m not sure if it’s apparent from my blog posts but I really love food. Like a lot. I might think about food all the time or at least it is always in the back of my mind. I’m constantly looking forward to my next meal. Does that make me sound like a crazy food-pig? Yes. Do I care? No.

My philosophy is that you only have a limited amount of meals to eat during your lifetime and therefore you owe it to yourself to only eat things that taste good*. You know, make every meal worth it because you never know if that meal will be your last.

Dramatics aside, my life revolve around food (okay, that was still very dramatic); I love reading about food, watching cooking shows, researching culinary trends; I mean, I even snagged myself a chef to shag! Sorry for the imagery… I just liked the alliteration. It’s safe to say food is and always have been one of my biggest passions. I grew up eating the most wonderfully exciting food (hi, mom!) in a home where mealtimes were considered sacred and I wholeheartedly believe that this has shaped my way of looking at food; for better and for worse.

Sometimes, I wonder why I at all pretend that this is a travel blog with some food recommendations sprinkled into it. Let’s just be honest, this is a food blog with a travel twist to it. The first thing I research after deciding on a place to go is the food. I read about the meal customs, the local delicacies and the best street foods, and I search for food blogs and look in the Michelin guide for inspiration. Sometimes, I even book trips just for the food (hello, Paris!). I imagine myself a younger, more exotic version of Anthony Bourdain… minus the substance abuse issue. I should totally have his career.

Any career within food would be my dream job. If growing up, I knew that there was such a thing as a culinary historian for example, I would definitely had studied to be just that! Alas, I will make do with boring you with my delicious observations (which I first accidentally typed as obeservations – that’s one mean Freudian slip) of the food I discover during my explorations, here on my blog.

That was a crazy long intro to a post that is “only” about what I ate in Dublin and now I will actually get to the point. Eating in Dublin was a treat! Prior to take off, I had, naturally, researched the hell out of the food scene and discovered that it was really flourishing; the Irish are true foodies! I wrote about this shortly in another post but Dublin is star-studded Michelin wised and I had a hard time narrowing down the restaurants to try out. Even while we were there, reservations were changed at the last minute because new influences kept tampering with my mercurial mind but all in all, we really enjoyed the Dublin food scene.

So below are the pictures and short blurbs about the places we went. I hope these inspire you to give Dublin a chance next time you decide to go on a trip. Bon appétit!

This is cheating a bit because we ate this in the airport. MASH is one of our favorite steak houses and since we were flying in the evening, we decided to have dinner at their airport branch. We were off to a good start.

On most days, we had breakfast at the hotel so we don’t have that many exciting reports from the breakfast scene; but we had mixed emotions about the lunches.

We did not just have the liquid lunch above at the Porterhouse Brewing Company; we also had their barbecue ribs which were surprisingly good. The sauce was sweet and tangy and the meat was fall-off-the-bone tender. Unfortunately, no pictures were taken of the food.

Another great place we had lunch, was at Bear. Oh, this place was so hipster, that it was an ironic parody of itself. The decor was industrial and minimalist, the servers were dressed in the same lumberjack shirt and high-waisted jeans so that the only way you could tell one from the other was to compare and contrast their tattoos.

I’m being mean; Bear was actually really nice; the food was good and the service kind. We had two different versions of their steak sandwiches on soft tortilla and they really hit the spot. Have their refreshing house-made lemonade; and if you’re feeling cheeky, have it with the add-in booze.

Another place we had lunch was Yamamori Noodles. I had long think about including this place at all. On our second or third day, probably due to the grey weather, we were really craving ramen. We searched and read some reviews and Yamamori Noodles had received a lot of good reviews so we decided to go there.

Big mistake. I won’t go further into it but in short, the food was bland, the decor tacky and the service indifferent. But at least the food was pretty…. pretty boring.

Luckily, we had some really good dinner experiences. The first place we went for dinner was Fallon and Byrne. This restaurant immediately found a place in my heart since it’s a French brasserie (be still my Francophile heart) and because the menu items were scrumptiously meat heavy. I know that meat is murder. I know that meat wreaks havoc on the environment and your body for that matter. But meat is also delicious and it makes me happy and lord knows that the world is a better place when I am happy, so I had the steak frites and rejoiced.

I  only have the above pictures from the place, as the low lighting and focus on food and conviviality did not exactly create the perfect “take-photos-of-your-food-and-let-it-get-cold-and-make-people-around-you-uncomfortable-and-judgy-at-the-same-time”-atmosphere and that was actually a blessing in disguise for a constant food photographer like me. I am so addicted to documenting almost every thing I eat that it was somehow liberating to have no other choice than just enjoy my damn meal. Which I did- a lot. Have the steak, some wine and go ahead, get crazy with a dessert. You’ve earned it.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, we were visiting around New Year’s, so we wanted to go somewhere special yet typically Dublinish (is that a word?) for New Year’s Eve dinner, so what better place to go than a gastropub?  Yeah, yeah I know – it’s not exactly the Irish that invented or coined the term but we just knew that the gastropub scene would be an authentic experience that we wouldn’t get many places and we figured it would be nice to eat New Year’s Eve dinner in a place where we could also get our drink on afterwards. There were a ton of gastropubs to choose from, but after meticulous research (is there any other kind, when it comes to restaurants?), we decided on L. Mulligan Grocer.

This gastropub has a heavy focus on Irish produce (hello, authentic!) and is, in their own words, “keen” on whisky and gin (hello, me too!) so it was just the place we were looking for; and we were not disappointed. Ooh, it’s also worth noting that all menu items have a beer recommendation; Martin was in a beer buff’s heaven. The desserts each had a whisky recommendation; how cools is that?

We had several rounds of appetizers because we couldn’t decide on what to get; we wanted to taste every single thing on the apps menu so we did, except for one item! Thank you, Martin for being supportive of my gluttonous hedonism, and for not judging me but rather giving me a run for my epicurean money. It was excessively redundant while at the same time being so deliciously gratifying. I trés recommend the scotch eggs. We could have stopped right there and been full for the rest of the night (and next day) but why would we? After catching my second wind, I had the steak, obviously.

And dessert of course…

Have the chocolate shortbread with ganache and mint creme; it was like an After Eight after dark; soft, creamy and sexy.

It goes without saying from the look of my face below, that every single thing we had was perfect. It was good, honest food and I highly recommend going there if you have the chance; if you only have one meal in Dublin, it should definitely be eaten here.

The picture of the sourpuss above does in no way indicate the experience; it just indicates that the gin and tonics were potent. And that I needed a good and heavy brunch the day after. Fortunately, WUFF delivered. Look at that baby-faced babe below, for contrast to my own crazy face.

WUFF was another hipster paradise. It was the breakfast equivalent to the above-mentioned Bear in my opinion and I really mean that as a compliment. The service was young, hip and quick and the food was tasty. We both had big fry-ups on account of hangovers and the looming afternoon flight home and it was glorious. This makes me think about why I don’t eat breakfast out more often i Denmark; I love having the first meal outside my home, while looking at people starting up their day. It makes me feel luxe. It’s the little things, people… the little things. I know I have made it in life when I can watch people go to work while having my morning meal out, every day of my life.

While the Irish fry-ups were enough for Martin, it wasn’t for me. Not that the portions were small or anything but I don’t really feel full before I’ve had a dessert of some type. Someone once asked me, if I realized that I actually have dessert after every single meal, even breakfast. I was like, DUH! that’s why pancakes and waffles were invented, dummy! So naturally, I had the waffle. It seemed obscene having this for breakfast. I mean it’s not as if the Belgian waffle weren’t sweet enough, they had to add ice cream, chocolate sauce, toasted nuts and powdered sugar. But I loved them for that.

Dublin seems to do sweets quite well. I did not have many cakes; contrary to common belief (read: office rumors), I’m actually not much a cake person; I am a food person. And cake happens to be food so I eat and enjoy it on the same level as say, a stew- it’s neither better nor worse than savory items. Anyways, I did not have any of the delicious looking cakes above, I just thought they were purty but I did have the glorious Murphy’s Ice Cream.

Murphy’s Ice Cream is handmade in Ireland, more specifically Dingle and they use Irish cream (no, not Bailey’s) and other local ingredients to create the creamiest and most creative ice cream. They’re no Humphry Slocombe, but with flavours like gin and caramelized brown bread, I think they hold their own.

I thought it was so good that we went twice in one day (again, dessert after every meal) and the lady recognized me. It was a bit shameful but not as shameful as the time the ticket lady recognized me from the night before- at a Las Vegas titty show. But that’s a story for another day, kiddies…

Dublin was really a culinary surprise. I know that early research showed that Dublin was a foodie paradise but I was still so surprised of how good the food really was. I want to say that I’ve never eaten this well on a holiday, Paris exempted, of course, and it’s true; I was truly blown away. We didn’t eat anything crazy fancy or innovative as such but almost everything was exactly as it was supposed to be**. And sometimes that’s what hits the spot and not that New Nordic funny business. If you want to have great food experiences that are wholesome, delicious and honest, go to Dublin. And take me with you.

*This does not mean I only crazy unhealthy food. I don’t buy into the “healthy foods are supposed to taste like sticking your tongue out the window (it’s a Danish saying that’s awesomely descriptive)”-notion. When I eat healthy food, I make sure it tastes good. And anyways, I believe that all food is healthy… or at least it’s healthy for the soul, so I don’t discriminate.

**The term “exactly as it was supposed to be” is a term Martin and I use often about good, honest food. Sometimes tiny meals covered in foam on a bed of some kind of reduction of an herb is wonderful but often you just  want a steak that tastes like a scrumptious, bloody morsel of happiness and a potato that is fried in a well of oil- such as God intended it to be.