Irish food had a poor reputation for a long time and a fair amount of it was deserved — a combination of colonial history, a food culture broken by the Famine, and an economy too poor to sustain restaurants. Almost none of that has been true for twenty years.
What Ireland has is exceptional raw material: grass-fed beef and lamb, dairy that is genuinely among the best in the world, cold-water seafood, and a farmhouse cheese movement that started in the 1970s and is now serious. The last two decades have produced a generation of cooks who use it.
The breakfast
The full Irish is the thing to eat once and then not again for a while: bacon, sausage, egg, tomato, mushrooms, black and white pudding, and soda bread or toast.
Black pudding is blood sausage. White pudding is the same without the blood — oatmeal, pork and spice. Both are better than they sound and Clonakilty is the brand you will see most.
Soda bread is leavened with bicarbonate rather than yeast, because Irish soft wheat does not suit yeast baking. Brown soda with butter and smoked salmon is the better breakfast.
Cafés do it better than hotels, and almost every café does a version.
The markets
The Temple Bar Food Market on Meeting House Square, Saturdays — small, good producers, oysters shucked in front of you.
Newmarket in the Liberties at weekends, which is where the roasters and bakers are.
The Liberty Market on Meath Street, Thursday to Saturday, which is not a food market for visitors and is worth walking through anyway.
Fallon & Byrne on Exchequer Street — a food hall with a restaurant above and a wine cellar below, and the best place to assemble a picnic for St Stephen’s Green.
Sheridans for cheese, which is the thing to bring home.
Seafood
Underused by visitors, given the coastline.
Howth, thirty minutes on the DART, is the day trip that is also the best fish meal — chowder, crab, and whatever the boats landed.
In the city, the oyster bars and the seafood restaurants around South William Street and the Docklands are where to go. Irish oysters, particularly from Galway and Carlingford, are as good as any in Europe and cost a fraction of what they do abroad.
Where the good restaurants are
Geographically, the interesting eating clusters in a few streets rather than being spread across the city:
Drury Street, Fade Street, South William Street — the densest concentration of the newer places.
Camden Street and Aungier Street, running south, which is where a lot of the more adventurous kitchens have opened.
Stoneybatter and Smithfield on the north side.
Clanbrassil Street in the Liberties.
Dublin has several Michelin-starred restaurants and a strong mid-range, and it is the mid-range that has improved most.
What it costs
Dublin is expensive, and eating out is where visitors feel it most. A main course in an ordinary restaurant is substantial, a pint costs more than in most European capitals, and a bottle of wine in a restaurant carries a markup inflated by high excise duty.
Ways it comes down:
Lunch menus and early birds. Many restaurants run a set lunch or a pre-theatre menu at a fraction of the à la carte price, in the same kitchen.
Pub food at the better pubs is good and much cheaper than a restaurant.
Cafés for the main meal. Dublin’s café scene is very strong and a lot of the best cooking in the city happens at lunchtime.
Supermarkets — Marks & Spencer, Dunnes and SuperValu all do good prepared food, and the Green is five minutes from all of them.
Tipping
10 to 12.5 per cent for table service, and check whether a service charge has already been added for larger groups.
Not at the bar. See the pub guide — tipping for a pint is not done.
Things to actually eat
Coddle, a Dublin dish of sausage, bacon, potato and onion simmered together. It is pale, it is not beautiful, and it is the city’s own food.
Boxty, a potato pancake.
Seafood chowder with brown bread, which is on every menu on the island and is a reliable measure of a kitchen.
Irish farmhouse cheese — Cashel Blue, Durrus, Gubbeen, Coolea.
Barmbrack around Halloween, a fruit loaf with a ring baked into it.
Tayto crisps in a sandwich, which is not a joke and which every Irish person has eaten.
Vegetarians and coeliacs
Better served than the reputation suggests. Dublin has a strong vegetarian and vegan scene concentrated around Camden Street, Aungier Street and Georges Street, and gluten-free is well understood — Ireland has one of the highest rates of coeliac disease in the world and menus are labelled accordingly.
The one thing to book
Dublin’s better restaurants are small and the city is busy. Anywhere you have specifically read about needs a reservation, particularly Thursday to Saturday. Walk-ins are realistic at lunch and optimistic at eight in the evening.