1012522 The Maple Tree

A fairly new addition to the village streetscape of Saggart, the high-end fitout and food centric offering here are in stark contrast to most of the pubs in Dublins outer villages. Saggart, however, is being subsumed to the greater mass of Dublin - with the Luas at the lower end of the village and quick access to the N7 it will only continue to become more and more of a suburb and less of a village.

Saggart used to have two pubs before - Jacobs the other, still extant one - but Jack Kavanagh's burnt out in 2008 and still lies derelict awaiting a redevelopment of it and the adjacent empty site approved last year. (Google Streetview actually has a pass of it fire damaged, if you're feeling ghoulish); and I assumed it had stayed so - as this place opened entirely under my radar. I wasn't aware of it until it eventually appeared on the Revenue lists; something that can take many months. Suburban Dublin really doesn't have strong online coverage or attention, so there may well be more new pubs I'm completely unaware of!

So the Maple Tree appears to have opened in late 2016 or early 2017 anyway. I called in on a middlingly quiet Saturday and was able to get a table to grab my lunch and a few McGargles at easily enough; although there weren't many others free.

They brand it as a "Bar & Bistro", and food is definitely the main draw here - they open at 9 daily for breakfast despite not being able to serve alcohol for some hours after that. However, unlike some of the city centre food-centric venues with pub licences; I got the impression that there's no problem dropping in for pints alone here at any stage that they're serving.

The main similarity with many of the new city centre venues is the fitout - it has been designed, executed, and most importantly maintained (as the venue is maybe 3 years open now) to an extremely high standard. Plenty of the fancier pubs in the city could do with dropping out here to see how to keep stuff clean and looking new.

I think I may have read too many Pub Spy editions if I'm starting to get overly concerned with the cleanliness... really must get back to digging through street directories for research instead!