Thursday, 16 January 2025

Revisited Pubs December 2024

A month of social interactions mostly in Kildare leads to a fairly small list of revisits:

S1451 Mollys, Francis Street - last visited as Anti Social, which was very different

1015887 Hyatt Centric - work Christmas party - the formal, company wide one

N0097 Underdog - The Beoir Christmas party

4 Dame Lane - Work Party 2: The Pintening

Tuesday, 14 January 2025

S3903 Pygmalion

This is a pub that had eluded me for quite a while, as it is often very busy - even when other places aren't.

I swept up a lot of the South City Centre busy pubs over two Easter Sundays (2018 and 2019), and on both days, Pygmalion had ticketed events on. Other times I've gone past, and there has been a queue outside, with door staff using tickers to confirm the numbers inside.

However, on the day I visited, the city centre was oddly quiet for the time of year, and Pygmalion was even quieter, so I had no issues heading inside. Indeed I think I may have been the only customer inside, as most people were sitting in the external seating area on Coppinger Row.

The other reason is that it just isn't my type of pub - a very hip cafe bar that becomes a nightclub that primarily plays music I have no interest in listening to.

As far as I can tell, this space - in the Powerscourt Townhouse shopping centre which itself is a redeveloped Georgian mansion - only became a pub for the first time in the early 00s, as a branch of the small Ba Mizu chain that also existed in Howth and Belfast. 

I think, but cannot be certain, that the space was originally Timmermans Wine Cellars - its the only unit that goes in to the cellars, that I know of; but this would have had a wine licence, and the pub licence serial number is early 00s. Timmermans vanishes from newspaper records in the late 80s and I don't know what was there before Ba Mizu appears in about 2003.

Ba Mizu lasted under a decade, but Pygmalion is now well in to its second decade, so clearly it is keeping up with changing tastes in pubs and clubs; and I'm not.

Saturday, 11 January 2025

NecroReview: 1009202 Hangar / Andrews Lane Theatre, Andrews Lane

As I write this, its pretty close to Halloween (yes, the post are currently scheduled that far in advance) so what better time to get vaguely spooky, and follow up my RetroReview series of pubs I visited (for the first time) pre-July 2016 by filling in the gaps I left.

These gaps were left because the premise was closed by the time it came to do the RetroReview - properly closed, not temporarily closed. I did start the RetroReview series during the pandemic after all, when they were all shut.

As before, this is in licence number order, ish - I managed to leave some out, often by de-scheduling a post to replace it with something more important and only realising later - and the first licence up is the former Andrews Lane Theatre on, well, Andrews Lane.

As a theatre-class licence, I can be fairly certain that the hotel that replaced it, 1018129 The Wren is not using a conversion of this licence.

The initial theatre opened in a converted building on the site in 1989, but was sold to developers and closed in 2007. However, like a lot of things sold for development from 2006 onwards; it didn't get redeveloped for quite some time; and the theatre, minus its seating, became a nightclub for the interim.

I'm pretty certain I did attend a play here in school - I had some teachers very in to theatre and I also attended a play in the Riverbank Theatre, now the Merchants Quay Night Cafe; but I didn't drink here until it was a nightclub unsurprisingly. As ALT until 2014, and latterly as Hangar, it survived until 2018 as a club until the demolition crews finally came.

I never particularly cared for it as a club venue; but at the time I was attending Dublin had so many, many more club venues - a lot of this series is going to be a series of the lost clubs of Dublin.

The building was in extremely poor condition, the two rooms didn't work from a sound separation perspective, the cloakroom was a mess and and the toilets were a problem. But I'd prefer we still had the space even with all that. May have been a dump but it was *our* dump, etc etc...

Thursday, 9 January 2025

January 2025 licence update

Nothing. There's a file, it has some bits and pieces of ownership changes in it, but nothing worth mentioning here. But if I don't post this, it'll be obvious in a future month.

Tuesday, 7 January 2025

1020767 Premier Inn Castleforbes Road

A flat pint of Smithwicks for 7.20

Just go to 1000012 The Green Room, pretty much directly across the road. Or to 1015426 Rubys around the corner if you want food.

Saturday, 4 January 2025

N0021 Seabank House

This pub, a 2001 replacement building for the old Wharf Tavern which stood as East Wall's only proper pub (they had plenty of spirit grocer type premises though), was badly damaged by fire in late 2018

The pub reopened in 2021, as much as any pub could with the restrictions still in place at the time; after a refit to incredibly high standards. Lots of quality finishes, stone, wood, brass etc with nicely coloured textiles and so on, providing something that feels (very) nice and cosy rather than sterile or over the top. Whoever designed this did a very good job, and whoever agreed to pay for the presumably very high costs of doing it right needs to be commended. You could easily aim for this and miss, badly. Many pubs have.

I was there early enough in the evening, so the pub wasn't particularly busy, but with a full schedule of sports and live music, I presume it gets a lot busier. There's a pretty large tap range here, albeit all from the big macros - so there's IPAs, but they're Cute Hoor and Open Gate Citra for instance.

This pub is a bit out of the way for most people; but with huge apartment developments on East Road and Sheriff Street under construction there is a large potential customer base here. Definitely seems to be worth a visit.

Thursday, 2 January 2025

N0277 The Top Shop

We start the ninth calendar year of this 'project' with a writeup from six weeks ago; but this backlog can only get shorter now that I've all but exhausted the well of "pubs I visited before 2016"...

The last pub in Rush was rammed; the lounge area of the first pub in Lusk *sounded* rammed (I was in a bar area) and this pub was rammed; both in the bar and the lounge. 

Which don't appear to be connected to each other internally, for customers at least - something I've rarely seen.

And in terms of connections (I'm really straining this segue), I also don't know if this pub shares ownership with Murrays - as the owners of The Top Shop are also called Murray; but are not the same as the name on the licence for Murrays. It isn't that odd for an owner or a family of owners to have pubs very near to each other - directly across the road in Balbriggan for The Milestone and The Harvest for instance - but owning the only two pubs in a town isn't common.

I initially sat outside, but drizzle began and I found some space inside in the lounge as someone else was leaving - which was useful, as due to the relatively poor bus service here, I had quite some time to hang around.

I believe the GAA club bar takes quite a lot of trade in Lusk, which may explain there only being two pubs - there was once a third, Murtaghs, significantly outside the town on the old N1, which closed at least in party due to the loss of the passing food trade when the M1 opened. This was sold, minus licence, a few years ago - the ad is still up as of time of writing.