1016228 The Mayson

Known to most Dubliners as "Vallence & McGrath", this historic pub - documented extensively on East Wall For All - lay derelict for about a decade and was the scene of a horrific murder when being used as a squat, so I had assumed it had a very limited chance of reopening.

But it has,as the main bar of The Mayson Hotel, constructed inside the shell of a warehouse next door.

A faux-Victorian interior has been presented here; with some distressed elements that may be from the original pub; or are more likely from a pub interiors firm. But the look works. There's also a real open fire, so it definitely gives the feel of a "traditional Victorian pub" and I theorise that plenty of people will suddenly decide that its Guinness is good for reasons they can't quantify!

They've done a good job with the fitout here; so those unaware of its recent history may actually think its been like this forever. They need to improve the soft offerings, however. I actually got a Guinness - by mistake, as the barman misheard me - and it's not bad. I can't say the same for the service (mistake made, poor floor service) or the food (they stopped serving at 6 rather than the advertised 7, so I never got to order!) however. And there's an extremely limited range of taps, all Heineken Ireland except for the solitary Guinness.

N1102 The Celt

I've previously mentioned I don't like going in to pubs where the door is blocked by people - be they bouncers, smokers or whatever. Its a very odd thing with no obvious explanation but I just don't like it and have occasionally pounced on a pub when it was randomly un-blocked.

The Celt was always blocked, with a woman holding food menus, every time I went past. And I always assumed it was going to be entirely full of tourists and/or blasting out awful cod-trad and/or a bit Republican based on some of the little bits of decor visible from outside.

But the menu-foister was briefly off the door when I was passing, so in I jumped. And it wasn't full of tourists, or blasting cod-trad, or anything else bad really. It is a hotel bar; so don't expect much - but there's some interesting beers on tap (I had a Larkins) and plenty of seating.

In something slightly odd, the receipts here were printed with the name of the hotels highly rated Le Bon Crubeen restaurant - which might make me more willing to try the food in case they also share the kitchen!

1015968 Moxy Hotel

In recent years, old office buildings - that have become redundant for reasons such as having too low a floor height for modern suspended floors and ceilings - are increasingly being converted to hotels. Stripped back to the concrete shell it allows the insertion of rooms (sometimes even partially prefabricated) while saving the cost and CO2 emissions required in recreating all that concrete.

The former Eircom offices on O'Connell Street became 1012141 Holiday Inn Express, former ESB offices on Fleet Street became 1012867 Temple Bar Inn, and this hideously ugly former Dublin Corporation offices and retail development has now become The Moxy - albeit with some extra floors thrown on the top too. 

Nearly the entire ground floor here is an open plan bar/cafe/restaurant and cocktails are the main offering - there are only four beer taps as far as I could see.

There's nothing wrong with it, but with The Sackville and N1084 Pipers Corner across the road one way and Briodys down the road the other... there's no reason for non-residents to come in here.

S0084 The Norseman

This is the last pub in Temple Bar for me today (there are still pubs further beyond, but I've been to them all); and it wins the Least Worst Pub In Temple Bar Award. However, I feel that's actually being quite unfair on it - its better than Least Worst, or at least was today. There was nothing wrong with it.

It wasn't full of tourists in orange wigs, it wasn't playing terrible music. It doesn't charge absolutely insane prices. Comfortable seating was available. The toilets had a functioning hand dryer. Its a small hotel these days and you would need to keep the place sane for guests, which might be part of it.

The pub is part of The Smith Group, who also run S0064 Auld Dubliner further back in the Temple Bar madness, and this visit completes that small chain for me. Having recently finished the Bodytonic chain, I feel a post coming on about the various current chains in Dublin - I wrote up the two big defunct ones some time ago.

1009287 The Temple Bar

The lowest quality 'trad' (borderline Country & Irish with different instruments), ads for their branded whiskey everywhere, a layout that would confuse nearly anyone and even vending machines for branded products in the basement. 

This probably gets the most tourists of the lot due to the name. It is, however, still not as awful as the Oliver St John Gogarty is; and its actually cheaper than it too.

1008141 Bad Ass Cafe

This really isn't a pub; but its licenced as one. So it doesn't get to try grab the Least Worst Pub In Temple Bar trophy; although it would have if I let it.

This is a restaurant with more drinks options than normal, basically. Its also relatively cheap, and I decided to have my mid-trip meal here. It was relatively quiet at the time so there was plenty of space to eat leisurely and also finish reading the newspaper I'd started on the train on the way in.

There is a rare indoor plaque on the now quite obsolete "Rock'n'Stroll" music tour that used to be promoted by Dublin Tourism, as Sinead O'Connor used to work as a waitress here. That should give you some idea of how long this has been here - it was one of the first new premises to open when Temple Bar had its initial period as an arts/culture centre, well before it became a place for Welsh stag parties to vomit in the streets. I'm not sure if it held a pub licence that entire time, as it has a current generation licence number - but these are often issued for older premises when something changes anyway.

S3230 The Quays

So this took the title of  Least Worst Pub In Temple Bar quite quickly. A relatively standard Louis Fitzgerald pub, this is one of the actually new (new since the tourism boom) premises in Temple Bar - and it isn't the bar of a hotel like most of the others.

The licence was the most expensive ever bought, in the era when getting one transferred from outside the area required two licences and significant legal effort, from "The Crane", a small pub on Crane Lane which was a regular haunt of one of my regular readers as it happens.

Its quite a normal Louis Fitzgerald pub otherwise, but it does get its fair share of tourists in. There's a food focused offering here, but then again nearly all of the Temple Bar pubs try to shift huge volumes of it. I couldn't get a seat here either, but there was plenty of perching space

S0064 The Auld Dubliner

As you may have noticed from my previous post, I decided to do the touristy pubs of Temple Bar. I had to do them eventually, so a damp Sunday in January seemed like a decent time to do it. Limited tourists, "Dry January" and people being broke and so on.

It still didn't make the Auld Dubliner quiet enough to get a seat, however. A perch underneath a framed jigsaw of the pub - which I couldn't get a clear photo of unfortunately - supplied me with somewhere to park myself anyway. The name here is at least a little apt, as there actually were some auld locals here; and there's more of the normal pub bits and pieces (old photos, sports team sponsorships etc) than you'd expect in this area.

I still wouldn't go back. Its better than the Oliver St John Gogarty but that doesn't say much. Over the next few posts, I'm going to have a running 'award' for the Least Worst Pub in Temple Bar. This holds it, but for how long?

S0087 Oliver St. John Gogarty

Awful, awful, awful

1016206 Brewdog

So this posting is out-of-order, due to the pub not having a published licence number yet resulting in me missing it when sorting my records to schedule posts. This happened between the Rathmines pubs and the Dun Laoghaire pubs; not that it really matters.

Brewdog have been announcing their intention to open a pub in Dublin for probably half a decade, and announced in 2015 that they were "actively hunting" for a location. The Scottish based breweries products have been easily available here for even longer than that, and they appear to have picked up quite a number of shareholders in Ireland over the time - for probity, I'm going to reveal that I have a single share, purchased with the intent that I would likely make the cost back in shareholder discounts in their UK pubs when over for gigs or football.

The location for their Dublin premises became known in early 2019 when planning permission went in to modify the usage of the large structure known as the Quarterdeck in to a single pub unit plus microbrewery - something they had stated that Dublin would have due to its status as an "Outpost". This building is the main entertainment/recreation block of the Capital Dock development, which takes over a currently awkward to access peninsula between Grand Canal Dock, the River Dodder and River Liffey - although there are a number of new bridges proposed that will significantly improve access.

Planning was received, eventually in the case of the brewery due to various concerns including odours. Odours of brewing, in Dublin, being something we've never ever ever smelled before of course...

The pub eventually opened in mid December, with many people online quite shocked by its off-the-scale price list. The beer price list is not on the website (wisely, I'd say) but the food menu is. A burger and chips can come to 19.75; for instance. Pints of their own beers generally clock in north of  €7, dearer than nearly any other pub serving them in the city. But the location is likely very expensive to run (the rent is nearly a quarter of a million alone) and some staff would cost them well above the average rate for their roles for Dublin due to the companies various positive employment practices (living wage, pensions and benefits). Wetherspoons is cheap for reasons, remember.

If you've ever been to a Brewdog, you'll know what to expect here. except probably the scale. I've been to the vast Canary Wharf branch - probably the most comparable in terms of location actually - and I think this is bigger again, even with some floor space lost to the brewkit. The standard industrial inspired design language is used throughout.

What you may not have experienced in other branches is how awful some Irish dog owners are. Brewdog allow dogs in their pubs - the name might have indicated something there, surely? - and Irish law changed a few years ago to explicitly allow this if the premises wished, after some high profile cases, including MVP and Pantibar being told to stop serving food or remove dogs from the premises.

So while it was always common down the country, its only recently that city dwellers have found pubs willing to let dogs in, and it seems that some basic etiquette just isn't understood by some owners.

The two dogs present during my visit were a yappy little one that wouldn't shut up - and an owner that didn't care; and a stinking larger dog with owners that seemed to have little care for it, or the law for that matter. The pub has extensive outdoor areas where the feckless owners of dogs that are disrupting other customers could go; but instead I just left entirely.

I'll likely be back - I can see the pub from my office after all. But they need to address the pricing, even a little bit, and they need to bring in some ground rules for dogs. A shouting, stinking customer would be thrown out, so there is no reason to allow owners of dogs with the same issues inside.

The dog owners are the problem here, of course - I've been to a number of pubs with many dogs not causing any trouble at all because the owners wouldn't have them there if they were. My previous writeup is an obvious example; but S0368 The Blue Light is another

S0269 The Beerkeeper

Until recently, this was one of the branches of the sub-chain "Gilbert & Wrights", which were either operated by, or a franchise of, the Wright Group who are better known for their food focused pubs and former giant nightclub in Swords. Two still exist, in Malahide (standalone) and Swords (adjacent to mainline Wrights); but there was also one in Clontarf which currently stands empty.

It then rebranded to be a branch of a Waterford pub, also called The Beerkeeper - but this seems to have since closed. Can we count this as one of the rare cases of a pub moving? Probably not.

What you get here is a small enough bar, with a small to middling tap list (all tracked through Untappd), but a larger range of bottle and can options. Dogs are allowed here, with two very well behaved pooches present on the evening I was there - you will hear the opposite of this when I write up an out-of-order visit to another pub shortly - and what seems to be a core regular base

There's live music here, which is rare in craft bars. At the same time as the musician was starting - and not due to it - we left to go see if S4428 The Bar around the corner was open. This has proven elusive for me on two previous occasions, once as The Bar and once as The Beer Traders, as it runs quite limited hours - and it was closed again today.

The musician had made a comment about us leaving and I said that we may be back - our return all of three minutes later led to a clearly deserved reply! All in good humour clearly. I'd go back again if in the area, and indeed as I don't have many pubs in Dun Laoghaire left to visit but do have relations living in the area, there may actually be reason to do so.

1006999 The Lighthouse

I was always a bit unsure about whether I "had" to visit this pub or not - I was 99% certain I'd had a sneaky pint here in a previous guise of the pub when I was 17. But I couldn't remember which pub on Georges Street it was; so erred on the side of caution and marked none of them down until I (re)visited for certain.

15 years later, I've now definitely had a pint here - fully legally - and I've also completed the entire set of Bodytonic pubs. In Dublin, that is - they have one pub in Ennistymon in Clare which is significantly outside scope!

This is along the lines of the non-sportsbar Bodytonic ventures, although it does have TVs, and a ping pong table. There's a lot of pub here; and on the night we visited the upstairs was mostly closed - there was still access via the back stairs to the toilets even though there are others in the basement; but this was a weeknight in that weird bit of the year where every day is a Sunday and nobody goes far from home for a pint.

The premises received a substantial refit as "Whiskey Fair" in about 2014, a venture which did not last long, and contributes to a quite confusing interior fit currently as there is a mix of the deliberately shabby Bodytonic look along with the remains of the high end former life.

This was an improvement in atmosphere over the previously visited pub, by quite a substantial margin, but we had a dinner timeslot to go to so it was a single pint visit.

S0270 O'Neills

A narrow hallway of a place in the middle of Dun Laoghaire, without much to say about it.

The most notable feature of this pub was a customer who was sufficiently drunk to have fallen asleep in a bar stool and need assistance in not falling off it when sort-of waking up.

They were not made leave.

The pub is also already plugging its St Patricks Day music offering on their social media, in mid January.

Strange place. There's a decent and well presented range of Irish whiskey available which is probably the most positive thing I can remember from the visit.

S0272 McLaughlins

Not to be confused with S0264 O'Loughlins at the other end of the town - as Google often does, but usually the other way around - this is a fairly traditional town pub that misses out on the prized "Victorian Pub" status by 2 years. And a bit too much modernisation inside also, I'd guess. Both the age and design of the pub (and the interior upgrades since that de-Edwardianise it) are extremely common due to the expansion of Dublin and its suburbs/outlying towns in the early 20th Century.

The most stereotypical pub food menu possible - burger, chicken curry, stew, fish and chips, mixed grill, wings - is offered here but from what I could see, is executed well. The drinks lineup is fairly normal for nowadays, with some Irish craft in amongst the normal macros.

The one thing that does lift this a bit above a baseline of being perfectly average in every way is the music offering; with a mix of the expected pub rock and less expected trad sessions.

There have been some middlingly famous names playing here over the years, as exhibited with framed flyers on the staircase down the toilets. Music is the main thing promoted on the pubs website and social media and looks to be what they use to separate themselves from the other pubs in Dun Laoghaire that share many of their other traits

1010326 Eagle House

Glasthule is quite a posh part of Dublin - there is even an Alfa Romeo dealer on the main street of the village for instance. Yet this is an oddly run-down pub for anywhere in Dublin let alone somewhere fancy

Inside the main bar you are hit by signage for various drinks promotions, involving WKD and other options you expect to see in a student bar, not somewhere with 600 grand gaffs

Nothing is worn down to a dangerous level, but there's a lot about the pub that feels more D7 than D-my-house-cost-700-thousand from here.

The pubs been sold a few times over the years - hopefully the new owner puts a few quid in to it.

1013644 Omniplex Rathmines

About 11 months prior to this trip to Rathmines, we made a previous trip out here intending to bag a few pubs before a movie and get the cinemas licence while we were at it. Except it only opens in the evenings.

And it wasn't open this evening, for whatever reason (well, it was a few days after Christmas in that weird period where nothing is quite right); but there was a small mobile bar stand with bottles outside the screen door, so a bottle of Heineken was obtained and thrown in to a plastic pint glass so I could take it in to the screen.

That's it - there is actually a proper bar here apparently but with two attempts I've never seen it open. At least this time I got to consume some alcohol bought on the premises to meet the requirements to say I'd drunk there. The cinemas fine, modern small setup with decent kit; but my few regular readers are not here for cinema reviews. Knives Out is worth watching, if you cared.

1013644 Stella Cinema

The Stella was a fine old picture house in Rathmines, bought and closed by the old Ward Anderson setup before they opened their initially 3 screen cinema across the road; and then sort-of available for private screenings for a while before descending into polite dereliction. It even lost its classic 60s sign for apparent safety issues; but probably to stop it becoming protected.

But it was revitalised by Press Up in to a very fancy cinema with in-seat-service and all the bells and whistles; and the external facade has been restored to an era-appropriate aesthetic for when it originally opened.

And yet we didn't go there, because its entire schedule was Frozen/Stars Wars/Frozen/Star Wars, repeating in to infinity. Neither movie I could be bothered to watch if it was on free TV in my bedroom, let alone pay for

Instead, we went to the Stella Diner, in the adjacent former bank and covered on the same licence. We'd already eaten and had a movie start time deadline in the other cinema; so two slightly bonkers cocktails were obtained and consumed.

Its pricey and suffers from the usual Press Up problems (fur coat/no knickers). They may be expanding the pub scene in Dublin but they really aren't doing it justice

Revisited Pubs - December 2019

Occasionally, even I forget that I can actually go back to the same pub as on a previous occasion. I actually live in Kildare so my local pub trips never count towards anything, but here's the pubs I revisited in December (that I can remember):

S3454 Odeon - the work Christmas Party
S0264 O'Loughlins - because I had to show someone the wonders of a bar without a till
N0006 Brew Dock - because its beside Connolly Station.

If I remember, I'll do this for future months. If a pub isn't linked its because my first visit was pre-blog; and I have yet to convince myself to write up about 150 pubs from increasingly old memories.

I won't mention 1015426 Rubys on these posts going forward, because I'm usually there at least once a week, and very rarely drink anything alcoholic during those visits.

1015988 Lenehans

I found out about this place via Food and Wine Magazine's new openings posts - as some pubs turn up there - and the "Bar & Grill" element of the name suggested it might have a pub licence. The website went even deeper here, emphasising that they "do pints". The premises is a former hardware store, not the only one in Dublin and the reverse of the two Press Up pubs that are fake hardware store.

However, when I walked past it on the way to my previous two pubs; it was very clear it was set up as a conventional restaurant. I could probably have gone and asked to sit at the bar, but it'd have seemed a bit odd.

Anyway, we did need to eat so we came back and got what was probably the last table. There is a larger draught list here than most restaurants would have, which included my personal favourite (Rustbucket by Kinnegar); which is what I had with a relatively fancy burger.

I was still unsure if this was actually a pub until the January licence register update came out - and as you can see from the post title having a number, it was there with a standard pub licence. Many restaurants have pub licences as it allows them to sell drinks before and after the meal without any risk of breaching the relatively strict restrictions that a Special Restaurant Licence carries.

The owners of Fallon & Byrne run this restaurant, which may have contributed to why they closed their cafe across the road in early January; as it retains them a sit down food outlet in Rathmines albeit outside the F&B structure.

S2288 Uppercross House Hotel

If you want to feel like you're in the tiniest pub in a rural village, pop in to Mother Reillys here - and don't go down the steps to the main seating area - the bar is squeezed up to the front door with a small area packed with what I assume are all the regulars/locals drinking at it. The toilets are downstairs so you'll need to break the illusion eventually; but it should work for the first few.

That bit aside, the rest of the setup is quite standard for a small urban hotel in an urban area - there's a mixed bar/restaurant area in the basement, with the small bar up in an extension over what would have been the garden of one of the houses that have been merged to make the hotel.

We guessed that there was probably a bit of trad played here, from the small seats beside the (gas) fireplace and the large lighting rigs pointed at it; and it seems that there is - along with a variety of other live music and an open mic night - going on the frequent events posted to their Facebook page.

All the pubs in Rathmines are at least a little bit different from each other; and the accidental rural element provides the difference here

S0238 Rody Bolands

Rody Bolands is a huge pub, oddly large for an area with quite a decent number of places to go for a pint, and operates as one of two late bars in Rathmines village - the last proper "nightclub" at Tramco having closed some time ago and will be downsized to just a bar if the hotel it is in is ever redeveloped as proposed.

Their website *was* exactly what someone like me wants - it detailed every former name of the pub in a very obvious place that ensured I didn't have to do much more work when putting it on the map. But it doesn't anymore. It does, however, explain how the second shopfront (when you go through the front of the pub, you end up in the smoking area and not the front of the pub) and much of the interior were moved here in the 1990s for the last major refit of the pub; from the Boland family pub in Nenagh; where it had apparently lain unused since 1937. I don't know if the twin shopfronts thing was done in the 1990s with incredible foresight for the 2004 smoking ban, or if it was done later.

I had somehow built up an idea that this was a bit of a grab-a-granny (or grandad) place; however the crowd there when I visited didn't indicate that at all. Maybe on a different night it might be that; but I think that scene is mostly dead now.

January 2020 licence register update

Only new entries this month, and a relatively large amount of them

1015966 - East Lounge, Dublin Airport. This has physically replaced 1013188 Etihad Lounge and that licence has not been renewed yet this year - and I doubt it will be. There is no need to cancel aerodrome licences for reuse as they aren't standard Publican licences so they are usually just let lapse.
1015968 - Moxy Hotel, Marlborough Street
1015988 - Lenehans, Rathmines. I have already visited this as I guessed from its website that it would have a pub licence. As you'll see when I write it up, it is basically a restaurant.
1016072 - Jacobs Inn, Talbot Place

N2431 Jurys Inn Parnell Street

I was stuck in the city centre for a number of hours on the final Saturday before Christmas - without the car, thankfully - and saw queues for food even in fast food outlets near the main shopping areas.

Not really wanting to queue to then probably have to stand while eating, or wait for a significant period in any of the casual sit-down places I was seriously considering getting a bus out to somewhere quieter when I remembered the glut of hotels near Parnell Square. I've been to most of them, and many have relatively quiet bars - but I hadn't been to Jurys.

And it probably has the quietest bar of the lot, being on the second floor and not massively promoted from outside, although they do willingly let non-guests in. As probably the only non-guest there, I was able to get a comfortable table and read my way through the paper as well as get a fairly good lunch.

I would warn that they certainly know how to charge here - a pint, soup and a fancy sandwich came to over 30 quid - but if you need somewhere to escape its probably the poshest/nicest of options.I forget to get any pics of anything other than the bucket-of-condiments (Tabasco sauce *and* vinegar that's probably actually allowed be called vinegar - they really are spoiling us), but it is quite plush

By bucket I mean it's actually in a bucket. Even have Tabasco which you don't normally get in the bowl-of-sachet places pic.twitter.com/I1xL36jY4v

— Cian Duffy (@cian_duffy) December 14, 2019

S3416 Camden Court Hotel

Most readers of this blog would be familiar with the concept of a "tasting flight", generally a selection of 4 or more small servings of beers you may not have had before; with a variance of styles and tastes.

The Camden Court offers such an experience to its patrons - except its three half-pints. And they're Guinness, Smithwicks and Harp.

There are only a handful of premises outside of Northern Ireland and Louth still serving Harp at all, and this is a very odd way to try foist it on people. Diageo - or possibly pre-merger Guinness even - did market this combo as "Three Beers Strong" at some point in the 80s and 90s but I haven't seen it pushed as such for a very long time

Anyway, I didn't go for the tasting flight. I did go for a very off-tasting pint of Chieftain; and had to move seats after the fluorescent lights above my head started flickering at a very perceptible level. Just go to the Bleeding Horse next door instead.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this was my 550th pub, going on my current-count system. Basically I use a running spreadsheet of pubs that are on the licence register / haven't been explicitly removed yet. In reality I've been to about 20 more, and pubs come and go which is why there may not be precisely 49 different pubs between each x50/x00.