There's more to Ireland than Guinness

I’m back from Dublin, and I do have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of food I ate while there. There were definitely some misses, but all in all it wasn’t a disaster. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I will touch upon the highlights…

Breakfast

Day one, we stopped at Keough’s Café for a quick bite while we waited for Dublin to awaken (we landed at Dublin airport at 4:45 am). Penelope and I each ordered a pear and vanilla scone with a white coffee. (White coffee is basically just coffee with milk, or some other “whitener.”) While the cup of coffee was very welcome after the long trip to Ireland, and the long day ahead, the scone was to die for. It was absolutely the best scone I’ve ever tasted. No description can do this scone justice – moist yet crumbly, flavorful yet delicate. In a word, perfection. We would have gone back there every morning for breakfast if we could have figured out how to find the place again.

We couldn’t leave Ireland without having a traditional Irish breakfast, and we found one on a Sunday morning at Foley’s Bar. An Irish breakfast consists of bacon and a fried egg, accompanied by toast, sausage, a grilled tomato, baked beans, mushrooms and black & white pudding. Okay, “traditional” is up for grabs, but this is what I was served. I know soda bread stands in for toast in a more traditional Irish breakfast, but that wasn’t a point I was going to argue with for various reasons (the primary one being that I don’t particularly care for soda bread). I ate the toast, egg, tomato, baked beans and mushrooms. I sampled the black & white pudding. While I naively hoped for one of those chocolate and vanilla Jell-O pudding cups, I fully expected something that was nothing like its name. The white pudding wasn’t that bad – it tasted of grains and reminded me of haggis. The black pudding was just too unsightly for me to try more than the tiniest of bites. For those of you who don’t know what black and white pudding is, I invite you to look it up on Wikipedia. I can’t bring myself to give you the details…. It’s that bad. Oh, and the bacon, where do I start? I don’t know what they do to bacon in Ireland and the UK, but it sucks. It’s very hard to ruin bacon, since it’s one of those foods that makes everything taste better. But these people ruin bacon. They just do. I don’t know what bacon did to deserve this harsh treatment.

Lunch

On our first day, we waited too long to eat lunch, so we were starving by the time we sat down to eat. I’m telling you this to explain why we ate lunch at the restaurant of a tourist site, the Old Jamesons Distillery – it was pretty much the first place we saw when we reached the point of no return. They have a café called The Third Still. We each ordered the Shepherd’s Pie. It was fine – not great, but not bad either. The most interesting thing to note is that it was served with a side of French fries. So, a mashed potato topped casserole was served with a side of fried potatoes. Yes, they do love their potatoes in Ireland. I can’t fault them for that, I love potatoes too. But it was definitely the work of an amateur chef to choose to serve that many potatoes on one dish.

After watching several travel shows on Dublin, we knew we had to have a meal at Gallagher’s Boxty House. A boxty is a potato pancake filled with some type of meat or fish covered with sauce. (Think a traditional pancake made with potatoes versus a latke.) I got the Gaelic boxty, which featured prime Irish filet steak medallions, marinated in whiskey and finished in a creamy mushroom and pepper sauce. I can’t stop thinking about it, it was that good. It’s up there with the pear and vanilla scone. I’m not typically a fan of cream sauces, but I love mushrooms and steak, and I wanted to try one of the specialties of the house, so I went for it. I devoured it. I may even be a cream sauce convert. We also ordered dessert, the bread and butter pudding. It sounds delicious, right? Guess again. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t good. It was definitely a dessert that would get the chef kicked off of Top Chef. It was a tough way to end an otherwise delicious meal, but I’m left with the memory of the boxty and the yummy waiter who served us (soooo hot…), therefore I can try to forget about the bread and butter pudding. (For the record, this wasn’t a scary blood sausage type of pudding, either. Oops, did I give something away about my breakfast?)

Afternoon Tea

After having afternoon tea in London, Edinburgh and Boston, Penny and I knew we could not leave Dublin without partaking in this tradition. So on Sunday afternoon, we had tea at the Westbury Hotel. It was not the best experience… the waitress screwed up our order, and in her attempt to correct her error, she screwed it up again. There was a hair on one of the finger sandwiches (which were a little too big, by the way… they should have been called hand sandwiches), and the smoked salmon tasted a tad bit off in my opinion. And once the food was on our table, we never saw this chick again. Seriously, we sat there for at least 30 minutes waiting for our bill. We finally had to chase down another server to get our bill. We were prepared to not leave a tip because the service was just that bad (and tipping is not as customary in Ireland as it is here), but they included the service charge in the bill and I just wasn’t comfortable complaining about it. Besides, we wanted to get out of there and the thought of facing another 30 minute wait was worth the €7.50. I felt a little queasy later that day, but had a ginger ale and was good to go that night. Penny, on the other hand, woke up in the middle of the night and was sick for the next 24 hours – she spent the entire last day of our trip in bed (or in the bathroom, as the case may be). I attribute her sickness to the smoked salmon. While I had a bite and felt queasy, she ate the whole thing and could have been the MVP in the all Ireland hurling championship that was played that day, if you know what I mean. (There really was a championship hurling match played that day – congratulations Kilkenny – but it’s a legitimate and super cool sport that has nothing to do with being sick all day. Just want to set the record straight on that one.)

Dinner

Not a lot of highlights to speak of for dinner. Pizzas at Bewley’s Café v (eh), steak and chips at The Restaurant at Marks & Spencers (actually, really good), and McDonald’s. Penny pointed out that I have to eat at McDonald’s in every country we visit. I hadn’t thought about it… I don’t think it’s so much a mission of mine but a convenience, and I do love me my McDonald’s. Okay, it was a mission in Paris. I had to order the royale with cheese. (Believe it or not, they were all out. I had to settle for a frommage burger.)

All in all, the food was pretty good. It was my first trip overseas where I didn’t start to feel sick after two days, nor did I need to resort to eating strictly pasta with marinara sauce as I typically do (I lived on Italian food during my 12 day trip to Greece last year). That is definitely something for me! I’ll add pear and vanilla scones, as well as Gaelic boxties to my “to cook” list. I may even throw on a shepherd’s pie (hold the fries).

And while I did say in my title that there is more to Ireland than Guinness, I can’t neglect to mention how unbelievably excellent the Guinness is in its homeland. So smooth and rich, it’s significantly better than the Guinness you can get around here. Maybe it’s the perfect pour, or maybe it’s the water from the River Liffey. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter how bad the food may be in Ireland, the Guinness alone is worth the trip every time. Now, when can I go back? Slainte!