1001991 Wrights Food Court Arrivals T2

The previous post was musing on whether I should continue counting Aerodrome licences as pubs; but was actually fairly like a pub.

This isn't. This is a fridge of bottles (albeit more interesting than the Heineken, Guinness and Budweiser only fridges elsewhere in the airport) available by the checkout in what can be a quite limited food court depending on time of day.

A bottle of O'Haras and a donut on a cheap chair at a cheap table overlooking the dropoff zone is not a pub experience anyone wants to seek out - but elsewhere in the airport, it is worse.

1001987 Oak Cafe Bar

I'm still in two minds about whether Aerodrome licences should count. There's some proper absolutely, definitely pub style spaces with them - Darbys in Weston and even the arrivals bar (currently called The Angel's Share) in Terminal 1 at Dublin Airport has in the past felt really like a pub; but I've ended up drinking a bottle of Heineken at 5am in a temporary structure on the airfield because it had its own licence. And some of the airline lounges have licences, meaning that I'll have to either fly to Abu Dhabi (in Business Class) or remain incomplete.

This one has no such requirements for access; and is at least quite bar-like - it is run by an actual pub operator (Ian Redmond), rather than an airport services firm like most of the others in Dublin Airport, which probably contributes to that.

Food for those waiting for inbound passengers is the main purpose here, but  I was able to obtain an actual draught pint here, and sit in what felt like a pub - the next aerodrome licence (coming up soon) provided neither. So I'm still on the side of them counting - for now.

S4354 TGI Fridays / Dantes (Dundrum Town Centre)

All TGI Fridays are the bloody same - this one, however, shares its licence with an Italian pizza/pasta place next door which is slightly more interesting. It is definitely a restaurant by design (as are TGI Fridays really) rather than a bar, with a small range of beer and wine available; but the licence type is what matters here.

The pizza and bottle of Full Sail was enjoyable anyway, and the licence was ticked off.

N2817 Crowne Plaza Blanchardstown

I'm not a huge fan of carvery dinners - but it turns out that to get suburban hotels, I'm going to have to eat quite a lot of them

Off to the side of the Blanchardstown Centre, and sharing its building with apartments, I wasn't expecting many non-guests to head in to the bar here. However, the carvery was more than busy - but it was Mothers Day, so possibly the worst day to try and judge this on.

The food was as good as you're going to get, bar one bit of incinerated beef that had somehow come through in to my stew; and the drinks options were a bit more varied than most suburban hotels. But you're never going to go here for pints - not even with the relatively low volume of pubs in D15.

N0158 Wrights Findlater

I moaned in the last post about Wrights food-centric venues seating policies, and I suspect that this pub has the same during peak periods - but it was approaching the end of the days food service when I went in and selected myself a prime table with plug sockets. I need charge for both my laptop and my phone at this stage, possibly more critically than I needed food myself, so an obvious twin socket guided me towards a chosen seat more than anything else.

This is the remaining public part of the former St Lawrence Hotel complex; with the bulk of it having been converted to apartments. The building undeniably looks better now after the mid-00s redevelopment, and removal of the brown render it had prior to it. Howth has lost all of its old hotels, as mentioned in the N0166 Summit Inn post, but this one keeps an important part of the old hotel open and operating as well as retaining its original licence.

This was where I decided to get food, and on requesting a menu I was informed of a relatively substantial amount of options that were unavailable due to how busy they had been since the last intake of fresh food on Friday - it was an unseasonably warm weekend and Howth had been incredibly busy. The waitress provided me with the password for the staff wifi on seeing the laptop as apparently there had been complaints about the public network - I hadn't even tried it yet, but had no issues afterwards

The food - what was still available anyway - was good, the staff were friendly and attentive and the drink lineup was relatively good, with a local Hope tap alongside the usuals

The near full availability of Hope in their local pubs here is heartening, and it is interesting that even with one tap per pub in most cases, most of the range was available if you travelled around the town.

N0772 O'Connells

Yet another of the more food oriented pubs of Howth, this one probably has the best views over the harbour from the upstairs bar. I got in here in a lull between two waves of diners and managed to get given a table upstairs without ordering food - had I been ten minutes later I suspect it would have been a bar seat or standing downstairs!

The current incarnation here opened in 2012, after the Pier House pub which had closed down a few years before. PR from the time seemed more focused on the drink options (particularly cocktails) and live music; but with their current position as #2 on Tripadvisor for food in Howth - just behind my previous visit, the Abbey Tavern - food seems to have overtaken that.

N0163 Abbey Tavern

I somehow managed to skip ahead two pubs in Howth in my postings - the Bloody Stream was two pubs after the Habour Bar, and this is the first of those two.

This is a pub in an ancient building - I'm not going to try judge whether their claim that the pub itself is 16th Century is true or not. If you walk down to the pub from my actual previous pub, you get to do so via a laneway that could be anywhere back to the 1500s anyway.

This pub specialises in food, to such an extent that finding somewhere to sit otherwise on a busy day is near impossible. I did obtain a perch at a table towards the back but rather felt like I was somewhat in the way of what must be the more profitable business.

Going off a single visit on a single, oddly warm/sunny day, this was my least favourite of the pubs in Howth; but none of them were really bad - there's no horror in being worst of a decent bunch.

N1879 The Bloody Stream

This "Railway Refreshment Room" in Howth Railway Station is a major tourist trap, offering a seafood heavy food menu as its primary attraction. There were no tables available inside, so I headed outside with my pint of Hope to the outdoor/smoking area beside the door.

Here I ended up giving advice on where to get food/drinks in Dublin 8 to an American family which resulted in an unrequested but appreciated free pint. Hopefully they followed it and enjoyed some simple and well executed food in Harkins rather than paying over the odds elsewhere.

These kind of touristy pubs really aren't my thing; and Wrights policy of reserving the bulk of seating for those eating isn't that useful (N0243 The Anglers Rest had the same issue) but clearly makes them more money, so is unlikely to ever end. It was getting a bit dark, and the outdoor seating is facing the main road in to Howth so it doesn't have the quaintness that the Anglers Rest could offer on a good day either.

I felt like I was done for the day, so the logical thing to do would have been to get food here and head home - but I don't like fish. So I headed back in to Howth to finish off the full set of pubs in the town.

Update:

Ever since I started trying to only post one pub a day, I sometimes end up writing these posts weeks and weeks after the actual visit - this was nearly a month. I forgot something somewhat important for this one.

I thought I'd get pub #450 in on this trip, but had forgotten that I'd got an unexpected one - and didn't consider that that Summit Inn has two licences either. I got my laptop out to check here, and found that this was pub 450.

I used to try and pick out the "big number" pubs as something special - but this has quite fallen apart. #400 was not the pub I intended to go to, #350 happened due to forgetfulness and #300 happened due to circumstance. I'll try think of something special for 500 - but I have absolutely no idea where.

N0160 Harbour Bar

Formerly the Cock Tavern, this pub was closed for long enough to make it to the excellent Dublin Ghost Signs under that name. It reopened a few years ago and is now branded as a "Bar and Brewery".

The Irish Times review claims there is a brewkit on site, but other reviews state that their own beers are brewed elsewhere and there doesn't seem to be a brewers licence on the register currently, so I'm not sure about that. I didn't even remember that there was specific beers to have here and had something macro instead, and despite going to many of the many, many, many areas in the pub - it is bafflingly laid out - I didn't see any kit as described by the Irish Times either

I had to get someone to move their seat to use the in-pub ATM and got lost in the aforementioned baffling layout on the way back from the toilets - both of which could be seen as charming in some way I guess. The front bar has a decent fire, bookshelves and a record of shipwrecks in Howth all of which make it feel like a country seaside pub, not one in a hyper-expensive city suburb.

London Calling

There's still a decent backlog of Dublin posts to be put up, but a potential prime weekend of pub visiting was replaced by a visit to Wembley instead last weekend. But London has pubs too!

Admittedly, it has a hell of a lot less pubs than it had before - about 30% have closed since 2002 with some boroughs losing 50% but there are still over three times as many as in all of County Dublin - and I suspect that a decent number in Dublin would not be covered by the methodology used to decide what is a pub for those official stats (theatres, aerodrome licences and so on).

First pub for me was a quaint Victorian boozer down the road from my hotel - The Rose in Vauxhall. The two bouncers outside on a quiet enough Friday evening pub me off slightly, but in its quieter daytime form on Saturday afternoon, it provided a decent if phenomenally expensive pint of Beavertown Gamma Ray while giving me somewhere to search for a more interesting pub. This was located down the road, but first I needed something from my hotel room and decided to take a look at its bar

Chino Latino provided a cabaret singer and pianist - at 1pm - and has only two taps, both from Curious Brewing, and both priced at an eye-watering level of nearly £7 a pint after the 'service charge' has been added. The hotel next door featured a slightly awkardly named bar, but I decided that hotel bars were probably not worth bothering with - and anyway, I'd already decided where to go next.

Mother Kelly's Taproom & Bottle Shop in a railway arch on the way towards Vauxhall station has over 30 taps and a significant bottled/canned range to pick from. The range of choice here approaches the unwieldy almost but there should be something for everyone.

The next and final drinking location for the day was the lower concourse of Wembley, where the choices were Budweiser or cask Hobgoblin, the latter of which was extensively spilled over me when someone bumped in to me...


The next day, with some hours to kill, I decided to experience a Samuel Smith's pub, due to the reputation of their owner having preceded them to such an extent. On my way there, I passed this humorously named pub which I decided not to go in to!

The pub in question was the Windsor Castle, with a fine - and completely fake - Victorian interior. It was refurbished and renamed to its original name about 8 years ago. It has a subset of the Samuel Smiths beer range on offer - three lagers, the India Ale, stout and one of the Bitters - but no Mild which is what I was hoping to try as a style that doesn't really get to Ireland very often.

Beers ranged from very cheap for central London (the Bitter) to still reasonable (the India Ale), and the food was acceptably priced and of acceptable quality. Contrary to very recent media reports, phones and tablets weren't banned as even some of the staff were using them!

After finishing eating, I decided to head closer to the airport for my next pint - although I still had a vast amount of time to kill. So the relatively new Brewdog Canary Wharf was next up. This is in a low building beside vastly taller buildings and as such gives an impression of what the new Dublin branch is likely to be like, except for the brewkit in Dublin. The bar is card-only (well, I presume phone pay apps work too) and offers a beer - Hop Exchange - the price of which is index-linked to the FTSE - presumably safe in the knowledge that any deep drops will reduce the spending power of the local workers anyway!

My final beer of the day was a pint of something so forgettable that I have forgotten it, at The City Bar in London City Airport. This was picked as it was the only one with a free seat in it!

N0165 The Tophouse / McNeills

In standard opinion Howth and Expensive go hand in hand, and the prices of the houses on the walk down from the previous pub definitely slotted in with that. However, a pint for €3.80 isn't dear by any means - and that is on offer in McNeills.

This is a big enough premises, with a bar, lounge, food options and some guestrooms. I think there was a fire burning in the bar, even though it was a rather warm day outside; and the bar is fairly cosy and traditional. In addition to my cheap pint (of Beamish - still using its price point as a selling point), they also had Hope on tap so a further pint was had while I read a few more of the studies in More Than Concrete Blocks Volume II - a Dublin architectural book series which has yet to feature a pub, but still covers other interests of mine!

This was the quietest pub of the lot in Howth, presumably due to being relatively far from the seafront and slightly more hidden away than the others - so if you're out there and looking for a few pints or food it could be the best option for that reason.

April 2019 Licence Update

Only one change of interest this month

Re-added after removal:

S0041 Neds of Townsend Street - this is currently a building site for a new hotel and licence will almost certainly be used for it.

This was only removed last month!

N0166/N0178 Summit Inn

Howth once had a significant number of hotels - 7 by my count - from the days when it was an actual tourist resort and not just a painfully expensive place to live near the city. It now has none.

However, three of them still operate as bars. The Summit Inn still retains its hotel licence, as well as a separate pub licence (inexplicably to me) but does only does food and alcohol trade now - and what a volume of that it was doing when I visited.

The proximity to the actual summit of Howth Head, as well as the bus stop serving it bring customers by the door and the weather that day was very pleasant to sit outside with a pint (or a coffee, in the case of the sizeable number of motorbikers using it as a rest stop)

There used to a nightclub - K2 - here, and to the rear there is a former snooker hall although I think not operationally connected; but the days of travelling to a distant nightclub died off soon enough after late licences became more generally available, and there isn't really sufficient walking distance trade to justify one.

The food offerings look decent - I didn't need to eat yet though - and the drinks range includes the nearly local Hope Brewery on tap, which I did buy. The views are nice in good weather, and while it can't beat S0380 The Blue Light in those stakes, it does have more modern facilities and no tourbuses of American tourists!

N0162 The Waterside/Fishermans Bar

This is, or at least was, an early house and the only (or last, if it has ceased to be) one trading outside the city itself. Come Here To Me's 2019 early house listing still states that it opens at 8am, but I was there a bit later than that.

There's multiple sections to this premises - two bars and a restaurant. I opted for the Fishermans Bar, expecting it to be somewhat like the pubs back on Arranmore Island, and it didn't fail in that regard. It felt quite specifically like Phil Ban's - which has very few photos on their Facebook, so you'll just have to believe me.

Like anywhere on the seafront in Howth, the bar was busy with tourists considering the abnormally good weather for the time of year. Its quite an old-fashioned bar, but I suspect that is part of the selling point for the tourists and may also be what it needs to get the actual harbour trade customers in the off-season - these will be who the early house licence is for, at least nominally.

Heineken's sales reps have been busy getting Beamish in to pubs across Howth (and well, everywhere) so that is what I picked here. May as well try to keep the costs down, as this is quite an expensive endeavour! The rest of the standard expected macros are also available.

S0105 Kavanaghs (New Street)

This is diagonally opposite Peader Browns of the previous post, however as far as I know it is still the original building - the only one along this section of road which was significantly widened in the 1980s and 1990s.

This is quite a traditional inner suburban pub, relatively similar to Peadar Browns in that regard. However, its a larger premises and was slightly quieter as a result. Its a bit hard to figure out how to write something even semi-unique about pubs which are fundamentally quite similar; something I hadn't really thought of as an issue ~250 pubs ago when I decided to write up each one.

It was here that I found out that the "Samsung" phone charger I'd bought in a shop down the road was a complete dud - there were no obvious sockets available in other pubs. Probably expecting too much for a fiver!