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

1010753 The Open Gate

The target of my (so far, still single) "pub" trip to Dublin was tourist attractions with licences, which is something Diageo has a few of. There's the famed S3723 Guinness Storehouse, and the quite new 1015607 Roe & Co Distillery as well as the Open Gate, which is the operational Guinness pilot brewery coupled with a taproom and restaurant. 

The Open Gate was the second of these to reopen after lockdown, and has undergone a number of changes to do so; including a significantly expanded outdoor area and the currently compulsory table service only. You can't tour the brewkit at the moment, but there is now no cover charge; and bookings are required - previously, walk-ins were possible if there was space.

You are now brought to your table upon arrival, with sanitised menus delivered to you on a platter arriving with a taster - it was their Summer Pilsner when we visited. The food offering is modern pub grub - burgers, wings, flatbreads and a absolutely massive vegan dirty fries using make up the current menu; and the 14 taps are a mix of Irish guests, beers brewed on-site and a trio of products made on the breweries (vastly) bigger brother. There are beer-derived cocktails available, which I didn't try but did see one of the bar staff producing with an exceptionally energetic, two shakers at a time routine.

I tried six beers in total - mostly tasters, not pints! - with five made on-site and one from Rye River. All met expectations and while many were going for the summery/fruity thing, none were even close to the undrinkable fruit cordial flavours that can turn up

The taproom opened in 2015, with a kitchen being added more recently. Without this move it would have been significantly more problematic to open, and while I'm sure some food trucks could have been obtained it would have eaten in to the outdoor area; so I'm sure this is seen as a lifesaver now.

The brewkit, which would be of a decent scale for a microbrewery but is absolutely dwarfed by the overall James Gate operation, is - if I remember what Padraig Fox, the GM told me - is a 10Hl main kit and a 1Hl experimental kit; with the vast majority of its output being sold directly in the taproom. The fermenters sit close to the taproom, and placards above state what is in each vessel as well as the brewer responsible; and the supply of fresh kegs stand tantalisingly behind the wire rope that separates the making from the drinking.

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Kegs - the ultimate in reuse. This 1991 pre-merger Guinness branded keg currently contains a ginger and goosebeery sour at their Open Gate brewpub and restaurant #pub #pubs #Dublinpubs #Dublin #guinness #opengate

A post shared by Every Pub In Dublin (@everypubindublin) on Jul 18, 2020 at 10:49am PDT

The table service works well, and if you ignore the few other COVID-related changes, this feels very much like normal times again. This viewpoint was shared by The Beernut, who visited a few days before me, and had much the same beers as I did. I could easily have spent quite a lot longer than the mandated 105 minutes here and will need to ensure I return when this is possible. 

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.

1009868 Teeling Whiskey Distillery

Teeling were the first of the tourist-places-with-pub-licences out of the traps to reopen after lockdown, resuming tours on the first allowable day back on the 29th of June. As I wanted to go to at least two places if bothering to mask up and head in to the city, I waited for some others to join them.

They have put significant effort in to providing a socially distanced setup for the tours; with a limited number of places on each tour and marked off "pods" to stand/sit with those you have come in with at each stage of the tour and in the tasting bar at the end. 

As the only people on our tour (the one after had a healthier number), this pod system did not become particularly important except in locating where our pre-poured tasters were in the tasting bar afterwards.

The distillery was very much in action, with both open top fermenters bubbling away and two stills pouring in the spirit safe - this is no museum tour; and the tour guide was well informed on the topic in general as well as the Teeling specifics. 

You can decide what level of tasting you want afterwards, with cheaper and dearer options available - we went for the Trinity level which is their main Small Batch product, the Single Grain and the Single Malt; but there is both a cheaper (Small Batch & a cocktail) and dearer (Small Batch, Single Malt, "Distillery Exclusive" and Single Pot Still) level available. I've never been great at writing tasting notes for whiskey, but I'd rate them in the order of Single Malt -> Small Batch -> Single Grain; with even the Single Grain still being decent. I believe these are all still distilled elsewhere, as the distillery has only been operational for 5 years.

Distillery and mainstream brewery tours rely heavily on tourist traffic, both bus tours and walk-ins from those visiting the city. With none of the former and very little of the latter at the moment now would be a good time to head in

Newspaper trawl "complete"

I've now reached the end point of the specific newspaper archive trawl that began in April by searching for all ads by William J Heron. 

After hitting the end of Heron's adverts, and shortly afterwards, his obituary (in 1957)

Well, that's the natural end of that specific archive search pic.twitter.com/qF0GYFVbRZ

— Cian Duffy (@cian_duffy) May 11, 2020

I moved on to the other firm mentioned in my previous post - Archbold, Corry & O'Connor; which I found out to be the continuation of Andrew J Keogh's operations after he died in 1934. Another advertisement from 1934 was by the aforementioned William J Heron pointing out that he had started as a licenced trade specialist by working with Keogh, pitching for his trade now he had passed!

 

Keogh's work goes back to before the time period I cover, and between these three firms - and any other ads that end up being on the same pages - I have added significantly over 100 former pubs to the map.  Keogh operated until 1934, and then Archbold Corry & O'Connor took over until 1974.

Additionally, I have added the street address (where relevant) to all former pubs, which has clarified locations and reduced duplicates. Finally, specific detailed advertisements have allowed me to remove multiple entries that turned out to be off licences or unlicenced hotels that had got on to the map.

Due to the questionable quality of OCR, I'm not sure whether this was any quicker than just going through the papers manually, looking for the commercial property listings. But there's four different relevant papers on the INA, with different publication histories (Irish Independent, Irish Press, Evening Herald, Freemans Journal); and with no fixed day of the week for where the ads get printed. They were traditionally on the rear page, starting in column 1; but that alone doesn't stop there being around 750 issues a year to check.

Most pubs were listed for at least two weeks in at least two of the papers, so the chances of one falling entirely through the cracks is relatively low; but there are entire years where basically nothing turned up. Some are explainable by the domestic economy being extremely poor at the time (1931), and some aren't (1907); but I think there is no more time efficient way to turn up significant volumes of data. And its not likely that I'm ever going to have this more spare time again!

July 2020 Licence Update

These updates have been coming out on schedule the entire way through lockdown, with very little changing - nothing new has been opening clearly

There is one single change of note this month

Removals 

1006793 - 3 Spirits, Capel Street. This has already been converted to offices. 

Revisited Pubs - June 2020

For some time there, it felt like I'd never be able to make this post (or for July); and this would turn in to solely a history project. But now there are limited circumstances that you can spend a small amount of time in a pub; and maybe half of Dublin's pubs are open. There are more open in suburbia than the city centre, due to premises size and needing to offer food, but you should be able to find a pint somewhere.

I visited one pub in June 2020, and had one pint with a substantial meal. 

That pub was 1015426 Rubys, which is beside my office and gets visited quite frequently - although usually without pints being consumed.