1008082 Peruke & Periwig

This is one of the smaller, if not the smallest, of the Press Up venues in the city and is one that I would not have dropped in to except on a specific pub-bagging mission normally.

However, nothing's quite normal now; and I wanted lunch on Dawson Street. Some long-standing food/drink outlets are now gone entirely for the redevelopment at the Nassau Street end, some are still not open and some were full, but a walk-in table was available here.

There's three floors to this pub, and currently the top two floors are operating on reservations with a total of four tables for walk-ins on the ground floor. Most of these tables can only comfortably seat two; with four or maybe six possible on one set of higher tables.

As is the norm now, contact details for one person at each table are taken and you must order food. There is a basic enough dinner menu and a 'small plates' option that satisfies the €9 limit and arguably the requirement for the meal to resemble a lunch or dinner. If you don't just order the patatas bravas at a fiver, that is!

The pub is wig-themed, which is not a phrase I thought I was ever going to write; and has a cocktail-heavy drinks menu with just six taps and an Irish Distillers heavy whiskey list beyond the cocktails. The cocktails we had - a mojito and a sazerac - were competently executed, and the food was good. 

We definitely didn't get the standard experience of the place - I'd expect the downstairs is usually heaving with people rather than a total of eight punters spaced out - but its as good as its type of cocktail bar gets. It does actually feel like a "normal" pub experience now, as there are no screens etc (the spacing suffices), but you wouldn't sit here to read the papers, even if you didn't have a time limit.