The Dubliners Best 100 Bars - 2007

Some years, I was in a different job and we were in the process of moving buildings - from a run down 1960s shed of a building to a wobbly set of "demountable offices", which you'd normally know as Portakabins or a generic thereof. This involved a deep clearout of the entire building to see what needed to be moved. Of all the random things to find hidden in with 1980s manuals and obsolete software, I unearthed a copy of The Dubliner's Best 100 Bars from 2007.

This slim volume, priced at €6.99 although I suspect generally bundled with the magazine, is sponsored by "Classic Cellar - the clever little wine with the hologram" which seems to have been an attempt to sell upmarket snipes of wine in bars, and which has zero internet presence I can find now.

A microcosm of pub/drinking culture at the very height of the Celtic Tiger, there is rather a lot in this small book. There are many references to the impact that the late pub and club owner / music promoter John Reynolds had on the city, as well as signs of a move to fine dining with drinks as an offering.

The book applies no positional ranking - there is a Top 10, but they are not rated 1-10; and the remaining 11-100 are also not ranked in any way. Everything is listed alphabetically with just a flash to indicate the Top 10. 

There is an interesting mix of premises, from tourist attractions to high end hotel bars, and pubs from the city centre to suburbia. While its unlikely any specific person would match their Best 100 to this; its hard to disagree with the selection as a whole.

Despite The Dubliner having closed in 2012, I think this might be a bit new for the near wholesale lifting of listings I've done with older content, but I can definitely give a quick summary of the changes.

82 of the premises exist today as they did in 2007 - which is probably above average as a sample compared to the totality of Dublin's pubs then. All ten of the top ten are intact.

11 have been renamed
Bleu Note - now N0084 The Black Sheep

Lillies Bordello - now Lost Lane, and licenced with 1008963 Porterhouse Central

Ocean - now S3626 Charlotte Quay

Porterhouse North - now N2405 The Bernard Shaw, but was The Whitworth when visited

Pravda - now N1994 Grand Social

Ron Blacks - now S3947 37 Dawson Street

Solas - now S0122 The Jar

Spy - now S3731 Farrier & Draper

Tonic - now 1009755 Three Tun Tavern

The Tram - now S3953 JK Stoutmans

Village - now 1006303 Opium Rooms

gone
N1097 Conways - sitting derelict on Parnell Street to this day, but will return. Eventually

N1490 Floridita - never a successful location, this has been stripped out for offices

S0149 Howl at the Moon - licence will reappear in the hotel that's replacing it
S1299 Renards - demolished for an office development
N0098 Welcome Inn - also sitting derelict on Parnell Street, but highly unlikely to return

Two were never pubs to begin with, and are gone anyway:
Centre Stage Cafe - a restaurant, now Stoned pizza on Parliament Street

Eno Wines, a restaurant on Custom House Square which now has the indignity of being a Boojum

One is still not a pub, but is still there. I haven't counted it as changed, but it shouldn't have been there!

Trinity Pavilion - a students union club

I can't find much record of this book online, but there were a few different editions. Another mapper is working their way around Dublin and used a 101 pub version of the book as their baseline