Toby, Berni and JDW - British chain pubs in Dublin

The presence of English chain pubs in the Dublin market - currently, just a smattering of JD Wetherspoon premises and no solid plans for any more - is unpopular with many, but it isn't particularly new.

While the first JDW to actually open in Dublin was 1009755 Three Tun Tavern - since sold and renamed The Blackrock - in 2014; JDW had been sniffing around Ireland for quite some time prior to that. They had purchased a building on Capel Street with intent to convert it in to a pub in 2003, however they fairly rapidly sold this, writing down €900,000 on it and other costs involved in the abortive project.

They now operate three suburban and three city centre pubs - N2358 Old Borough, Swords, N2244 Great Wood, Blanchardstown, S3795 Forty Foot, Dun Laoghaire; 1015767 Silver Penny, Abbey Street, 1017594 Keavans Port, Camden Street and S4345 South Strand, Grand Canal Dock. A handful of pubs outside Dublin have all been sold off, and development plans for further pubs cancelled.

JDW aren't the only British pub chain to have poked around at Dublin and backed off.  Mitchells and Butlers have been reported as having kicked tyres on a number of large pubs various times up until 2014, as have Greene King - the latter apparently having gone as far as appointing advisors to negotiate with pub owners in 2013. Whitbread - the owner of Premier Inn who are expanding at a great pace in Ireland currently, formerly operated pubs (and a brewery) and were also apparently looking to buy Irish pubs in the late 1980s.

However, JDW and other assorted big chains are nowhere near the worst of what you could import from the UK, and Dublin certainly had those extremely tacky ones too.

There was a single branch of the Berni Inn pub steakhouse chain, in the premises which is now Tapped on Nassau Street. This chain was best known for offering the exceptionally cliched menu of a prawn cocktail, a steak and chips, and Black Forest Gateau; although clearly this was not compulsory. Drop the prawn cocktail and I'd be quite willing to eat that still, but anyway...

This was a joint venture with Clayton Love Group, the frozen peas to property entity, who had bought Jammets Restaurant that operated on this site before the Berni Inn. It opened in 1970 and seems to have closed in 1986 or early 1987, with there being bar and club elements open alongside the restaurant - such as the Ploughmans Bar and Mac's nightclub. There were proposals for more Berni Inns around Ireland but it appears none ever opened.

More recently, indeed after the sole Berni Inn had close, the somehow still going Toby Carvery brand entered Ireland in 1988. This brand is now owned by the aforementioned Mitchells & Butlers, but in 1988 was a subsidiary of Bass.

Toby Restaurants (Ireland) Limited assembled a small collection of large pubs - S0369 Step Inn, S1236 Mount Merrion House and N0313 Coachmans Inn; and extensively renovated them into the format of Toby Cavery pub/restaurants. These were sold off between 1991 and 1993, losing over £2m in the process between purchase and renovation costs. 

These premises kept their original names, but the renovation added "Toby Carving Rooms" to the pubs, the first one at the Step Inn being opened by TV presenter Derek Davis. The Coachmans is still a noted carvery venue. but is to be mostly demolished for a hotel development; with the Mount Merrion already closed and the Step Inn having moved somewhat up-class in its food service.

I should also add the perplexing presence of a pub-licenced former Little Chef out past the airport, but I don't think this was from a trial of having Little Chef Pubs!

The Pubstaurant - how Irish licencing laws cause restaurants to get pub licences

As I get to the difficult to tick end of the list of Dublin's pub licences - having long since finished everything you'd consider to be a "normal pub" - a reasonable amount of what I have been ticking off for the last 12 months have been restaurants.

These restaurants all hold full pub licences - I am not intending to tick off everywhere with a Special Restaurant Licence (hereafter SRL) that allows them to sell the full range of alcoholic drinks. 

Some of them are in former pubs that have since become restaurants, e.g. S0297 Daata in Blackrock is in a building which has had many pub incarnations, and there has been a licence on this site for likely over a century. The other branches of the now expansive Daata chain do not hold pub licences.

But rather a lot of them are not, and instead bought in a pub licence on opening, or at another time afterwards. Pub licences are not cheap - depending on demand they can range from €45000 upwards, and have reached over €100k in the modern era (and one traded for over £1m in the old era where they could not be moved far easily).

Pubs do this because it is significantly easier to have a conventional bar with one. A SRL limits how you serve drinks - table service only, when you serve drinks - limits before and after meals and on the minimum cost of meals, albeit that cost is now extremely low, and to who you serve drinks - only those actually dining.

Possibly more importantly than all of these issues for many restaurants, is that SRLs additionally place onerous requirements on what food and drinks you serve. 

The food requirements are very traditional including a requirement to offer soups and meat main courses; and for drinks bar must have an "adequate wine list" on a physical wine menu presented to diners,  and offer both spirits and beers "of Irish origin". So no Asian restaurants serving vegetarian food with only Asian beers allowed then! I somehow suspect these rules are not enforced to their full extent anymore, but the SI is unamended and in force to this date.

The regulations go so far as to define the types of chairs (must be cushioned) and tables (if no tableclothes, they must be polished hardwood with table mats) a restaurant must have, that the restaurant has a cloakroom, that it has gendered toilets and that "table appointments" - everything on the table like salt cellars, candles, etc - match between tables. Basically you need a prim and proper 1980s Irish restaurant to comply with the rules.

I have also seen claims elsewhere that a SRLs doesn't allow draught beer; but I cannot find any legislation to back this up; and I believe it is a conflation of how you are not allowed have bar service. Draught taps does not equal bar service, but it would certainly conjure up images of such.

You can also apply for "late licences" - special exemption orders - to serve alcohol at later hours should you have booked a function that requires this, which cannot be done on a SRL.

So a full pub licence makes for a much easier time actually serving whatever alcohol (and food) you want to serve in a restaurant. 

A recent visit of mine to 1022717 Ivy Asia shows multiple reasons why - they do not serve any beer of Irish origin, their food menus do not match the late 80s Irish idea of "proper" as specified in the SI, and you can stay drinking cocktails for quite some time after you've finished eating if you so wish. I'm pretty sure the "table appointments" weren't identical on every table either.

Restaurants that have gone down the route of getting pub licences range from relatively high end places like both Ivy branches and the nearby Dunne & Crescenzi, through to fast casual places like Captain Americas, and when still trading, TGI Fridays. 

The in house restaurants of the Brown Thomas and Harvey Nichols department stores, multiple restaurants in the former Press Up empire and odd dual uses like the Malahide Siam Thai's small cocktail bar and the now gone Dundrum Donnybrook Fair doing off-sales as well as its restaurant make up the bulk of the rest of the pubstaurants. Not all of these places welcome non-dining drinkers; but plenty do - as you can see from my many writeups on here. I may go back and tag them all as such in future.

Revisit 19 years on: S3727 Flight Club (visited as Samsara)

I was in Samsara once, for a work event in 2007.

I returned to the new entity in the same premises for a work event in 2026.

In the interim, Samsara became Sam's Bar, then closed during the pandemic for a redevelopment of the hotel it was in; which never happened. The hotel has reopened as a tourist hostel, and the bar has reopened as an "entertainment pub" as many of 2025's new openings were; this one themed around darts. 

Flight Club is a franchise, with the Irish Loyola pub/restaurant group licencing the format from a company that seems to also franchise shuffleboard bars - something nobody has yet taken as the core format here, albeit Lane7 premises do offer that.

The format on offer includes lots of games that are based on the concept of darts, but are not conventional 501 games; a bit like an advanced version of Bullseye without the risk of ending up needing to share a speedboat; and is fairly fun even if you're incredibly bad at darts.

The bar has a reasonable drinks range including one solitary Irish independent tap (Hope Hop On), and the food provided to the group I was with was top notch as goes pub finger food, quite possibly the best I've actually ever had.

Unlike the other "entertainment pub" setups, I'm not entirely sure if you can just come in here for a drink - the entire place is set up with darts boards and clustered seating areas around them; but I didn't ask.

Revisited pubs April 2026

While April did actually feature some new, in scope, Dublin visits for the first time in a while; it mostly consisted of revisits. Longer evenings, sunny weekends and a variety of reasons to be in Dublin meant this was an extremely productive month for those.

N0027 Annesley House
1000937 Bridge Tavern
N0024 Hogan Stand
N0018 Big Tree (Dublin One Hotel), fundamentally changed from my previous visit
N0020 Juno - I really need to do a writeup of Juno rather than the Red Parrot
S0088 Foggy Dew
S0106 Porterhouse
S3840 Lynotts (last visited as Graingers The Fountain)
1013579 Luckys
S1470 Swift - also needs a new writeup as this is drastically different from Agnes Brownes
S3953 DV8 (last visited as JK Stoutmans)
1022495 Old Royal Oak
S1510 The Patriots
S0031 O'Neills (Pearse Street)
S0009 Doyles (College Street)
S0080 Bar Rua (no longer a Galway Bay pub, Galway Bay having merged with Brú who merged with Carrig who ran the pub when the original writeup happened)
S0122 O'Neills (Suffolk Street)
N0082 McGraths
S0239 Murphys
S2288 Mother Reillys / Uppercross House Hotel
S0238 Rody Bolands
S0241 Graces
S0240 Martin B Slattery
S0237 Kodiak (last visited as Copan)
S0236 The Dunmore
S0235 Blackbird
S0234 Corrigans
S3727 Flight Club - last visited as Samsara

S0135 Gaiety Theatre

I'd been to the Gaiety before, a number of times at that - but every single one of them was when I was in school. We went to see some random plays here in primary, including a panto; and then also went to see King Lear here when doing it in secondary.

I never got to attend the famed Velure nightclub here by virtue of being far too young; and even though the theatre-licence-for-late-opening loophole lasted in to my adulthood, the Gaiety was stopped from using this in 2004 for various reasons.

I'm a much more regular attendee of the cities other fine old Victorian theatre, the Olympia, as it has fundamentally become a music venue rather than a dramatic theatre; whereas the Gaiety rarely has anything other than traditional plays and musicals, with occasional stage magic and even more occasional comedy gigs filling out the year.

The Olympia is known for its bars, or at least for Maureens bar - and the Gaiety does have a named bar as well, the almost unsearchable John B's Bar - search engines will redirect you to the bar in Listowel once owned by John B Keane rather than this one named after him. This appears to be restricted to those in the fancy seats downstairs, however.

The bar I was able to visit was, unfortunately, the quite crowded and very modern bar for the upper circles. Selling a limited range of Diageo only beers, you'd do well to get in here early before a show and also to use the interval pre-ordering if available, if you want to actually get a drink during the interval. I was at a fully sold out performance, though, so this may have had an impact.

I often state that I'm not a restaurant reviewer, and I'm going to even more strongly state that I'm not a theatre reviewer so there will be no coverage of what I saw on stage!

1022717 Ivy Asia

A new Dublin "pub", and yet again, its a sodding pubstaurant.

Only a few doors down from its sister restaurant, this is another pubstaurant where you aren't going to get in for just drinks at any stage - the licence is here to make it simpler to manage the sale of cocktails and beer to diners rather than for operating as a normal pub.

The setup here is extensively done for Instagram, which is why I've not taken photos of any of it - the sliced agate (I think) floor and the statute at the urinals are already over-photoed. This level of setup doesn't usually bode well for the food...

...however, the food was actually well above my expectations. I'm not a restaurant reviewer, so I'm not going to get in to detail about it. It's pricey, but I wasn't disappointed.

Every Pub In... Dunboyne

The first of these trips to go beyond the county I live in, Dunboyne lies just over the border from both Kildare and Dublin in to Meath. It is accessible by Dublin Bus or Irish Rail, and is within the commuter fare zones, unlike some of the extremities of County Dublin!

With a 7,155 population in 2022, Dunboyne is notionally smaller than Kilcock; but supports four pubs (and a hotel) unlike Kilcock's two.

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 I started in Brady's, specifically in the bar, which I suspect would have people raving about if it it was in Dublin. A plain, traditional bar with no TVs, this provides precisely what you'd want from a traditional pub. Further in, they do have TVs, but it is still very traditional. This is apparently CMAT's local too.

Slevins was up next, and sort of unfortunately I don't have a lot to write about it - because its absolutely fine. There was just nothing that particularly jumped out to me.

O'Dwyers, basically next door, ticked a lot more boxes for me. It has a more coherent layout, despite still being split up in to many areas, and its outdoor areas step out from a sort-of conservatory to some coherent outdoor seating bays that somehow make you forget that they're actually in a car park. There was also a bouncy castle for kids today, but I suspect that's not a permanent feature. 

Across the square from both of these was Mulvanys Fingal House, which I just didn't quite warm to. Repeated signs inside the bar about photos and videos being banned raised massive questions, and the pub just didn't feel great for me. However, it was busy enough, and there was also signage about needing to book tables (despite them not doing food); so presumably it has a large regular crowd.

I didn't drop in to the bar of the Dunboyne Castle Hotel, not because it was particularly awkward to do so (it isn't), but because I'd already been there. This mid 2000s hotel was built around a former mother and baby home, itself a Georgian manor house; and as a good place to have a wedding relatively close to where I live, I have already attended a wedding here. Plenty of pints were purchased there, so I don't need to return to tick it off!