N1433 Hartstown House

This area of Dublin's suburbia received relatively few pubs compared to earlier built areas; and those that were built were all roughly 1km away from each other, forming an accidental grid of sorts. This isn't easily identifiable on my pub map, particularly as the Blakes Tavern is now a Lidl and the Blanchardstown Centre has brought an absolute rake of licences to the area, but it does explain why some of the pubs are Very Very Big.

The Hartstown House is one of these Very Very Big pubs. It was also quite busy when I visited, with a large crowd watching a match on a projector TV - something once very common in Dublin pubs but now fading away, mainly because normal TVs are starting to get big enough and its easier to have multiple TVs rather than design the entire pub interior to face a projector screen.

This pub is run by the Meagher family, who also run the beautifully restored Meaghers on Eden Quay, and S0967 River Bar across the Liffey from it, so this visit here finishes off one of the smaller pub chains in the city.

1002519 Hungry Tree

This pub has very recently rebranded, so recently in fact that they haven't removed all of the old branding yet

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As the new name might suggest - I say might, as I'm not sure its actually intended to - there is a bit of a focus on food here, with most of the floor area set up as a restaurant when I visited. However, there is a corner of the bar - a giant snug, if you wish - reserved for drinking alone.

The current name is a little confusing to those who know the, Hungry Tree to be the tree that is slowly consuming a park bench off Constitution Hill, which is nowhere near this pub.

This area is perfectly acceptable for that purpose, although the pint options were a tad lacking. Both the dining area and this drinking area were relatively busy for a Sunday during January.

What is notable about this pub is that it is in a planned suburban residential development - albeit one that was set up to have a "village centre" feel with a core of retail. While pubs in planned developments are not new - they go back to the 30s if not before - they tailed off in the 1980s and some of the more recent ones have simply not taken. For example, the pub unit in Tyrrellstown has not been open for ~9 years; and has recently had its licence listed for sale and transfer; the landlord clearly giving up on it.

This pub clearly has taken root, and has been open under different names for a decent length of time.

1007719 Fade Street Social

A stormy Tuesday night in January is no night to go pub ticking, and realistically this wasn't a pub ticking visit - but I did need to find somewhere for dinner for two; and the first place that crossed my mind (N2805 Krewe) was showing no availability on their website, and Fade Street Social was so near to where we were that I didn't even bother checking their website

I didn't need to - it was near completely empty when we arrived, and only the downstairs restaurant had started to get a little busy when we were finished - the cocktail bar upstairs still being just us.

Downstairs is a normal restaurant, specialising in steak; but upstairs is a cocktail bar with an extensive sufficiently-outdoor-to-smoke (I presume, it is outdoors anyway) terrace as well a reasonably sized bar room and a further dining room. The food on offer here is woodfired pizza, sorry, flatbreads; which are pretty decent - if a tad odd in terms of toppings; emphasising that they aren't normal pizza basically.

Not a great range of taps but a reasonable supply of Irish craft bottles; attentive staff and all in a nicely restored heritage building (it appears to have been Freemans food wholesale warehouse in Victorian times), with a fire going to stave off Storm Jocelyn outside.

This had been missed before now as it always seems exceptionally busy from the street level; but the upper bar area is big enough that it might not actually be that difficult to get in to - something I'll remember in future.

S0301 Goggins

Google made it seem like I'd finally get food here, with various menus and even some dated positive reviews for Goggins as a Gastropub. 

I didn't.

It would appear that Goggins hasn't been doing food since The Event, so I again went hungry. However, the pub tick needed to be achieved, so I had a pint anyway.

The pub was a lot quieter than across the road in Franks; and felt a tad worn out in general - the pleather/bond leather of the banquette I was sitting on was starting to scale up and seperate from the cloth backing for instance.

Pint drunk, I headed for a train to Connolly and the welcoming embrace of a burger in N0006 Brew Dock, who have yet to let me down for food - either in provision or quality. 

The Final Quarter: The Road Ahead

I'm sort-of three quarters of the way through this entire project now. If you calculate it in raw numbers, a little short; if you calculate it in terms of what's open, a little beyond. I'll give those figures now:

As of the time of writing this, I've visited 743 of the premises on the February 2024 Revenue licence release (plus one that I'm sure is coming soon but still isn't listed; and about 30 places no longer registered).

There are 1005 premises in-scope on that register. 35 of them are either not trading, or trading in a manner which makes it improbable to tick off - they're an off-licence, or a hotel that does not serve non-guests despite having a full pub licence. One place left to visit has two licences, a pub and a theatre, on the same premises - there are a small few others that have this that I have visited already.

This leaves ~220 premises left to tick off; and pickings are starting to get quite thin - and this could lead to a slow down on here within a few months. 

In that ~220, we have:

* 33 theatres, galleries/event spaces, cinemas and racecourses that require ticketed entry

* 16 places that are definitely restaurants and will require booking, eating (and paying for) dinner

* 13 hotels that are unlikely to allow walk-in drinkers

* 6 golf course clubhouses, which may be difficult or impossible to drink in without a member

* 3 strip clubs, which I have no reason to go to and don't even understand *how* you go to them

This leaves ~150 "normal pubs" (which includes a sizeable number of hotel bars and places more like restaurants that are willing to serve drinkers)

With the exception of a few relatively easy to do clusters - Finglas village is one I've just never got around to and may do very soon - and the towns of Rush and Balbriggan which have a reasonable amount each; this leaves me with scattered single premises that cannot be ticked off quickly.

A recent, yet to be written up, trip taking about as long as I'd normally ever devote to a Winter days ticking - and which I had a driver for - got four premises done; and I expect this is going to be the norm going forward.

I've got another driver-assisted trip planned which will kill off much of the rest of the car-only ones and longer evenings coming may make some weekend or half-day schleps a bit more palatable. 

So my attempt at having a post every two days, which frequently falls apart, is definitely going to have to slow down to maybe every three from now on. Unless there's a sudden pub opening boom, which is unlikely to happen with current licencing laws - and I will probably cut off the list anyway at the date the proposed new ones come in, if they ever do.

S4239 FX Buckley Monkstown / Franks Bar

After the last pub being too busy for food, I headed up to the bar of a pub-licensed, reknowned steakhouse, thinking that I might get some food there.

It was too busy to even ask - maybe I should actually ask, and I might get fed. But anyway, there were clearly no tables downstairs.

It wasn't too busy, however, to get the last seat at the bar counter of the upstairs bar - Franks - and get a pint of their house ale, brewed by O'Haras in Carlow and delivered in a dimple mug. 

In two decades of drinking, including frequently in the UK, I have never actually been given a dimple mug before, so I briefly lived my inner Bullseye winning dreams - I'll gamble the Commodore 64 and the set of matching luggage for the speedboat, Jim - and drank up.

The bars name, Franks, references the FX of FX Buckleys - Francis Xavier. There is also a Xaviers Bar in their Pembroke Street branch, but this does not have a pub licence.

Revisited pubs January 2024

The monthly places-I-go-back to list isn't terribly long most months, but there's a few more than normal for January

S0123 Grogans - first pints stop on a record-shopping-and-pints trip in to town

S0086 The Palace - and the second

N0006 Brew Dock - dinner after one of the new pub ticking trips this month

N0082 McGraths - while waiting to go for dinner in Drumcondra

S3908 The Well - regular meeting venue 

N0002 Madigans Connolly - somewhere to sit down while waiting for a train 

1020516 O'Regans - after a first visit somewhere else I haven't written up yet.

February 2024 register update

One new entry, which is likely to be an absolute pain to get ticked off, is all we get in a fairly small update

New:

1020524 Royal Irish Academy of Music, Westland Row - presumably has a bar in their performance space

S0287 Sallynoggin Inn

Have you ever felt like you really wanted to go drinking in, say, Solihull? Because it turns out, you can. Sort of. The pub is nowhere near as grim as it would be in Solihull. 

It doesn't really feel like an English suburban pub, but by feck does it look it, in a large number of ways. First off is the actual presentation and location of the pub itself.

Being sited behind a petrol station isn't the most common for a urban or suburban pub here - it is in rural areas, where the pub may be the shop, petrol station and undertakers all in one of course - but it is fairly common in English suburbs built in the early era of more widespread care ownership. 

There weren't that many of these, but Sallynoggin *was* developed in the 30s-50s, with the pub coming in 1951 it seems, and the petrol station listed as "recently added" when being sold in 1958. While a lot later than the 30s builds I'd expect for equivalents in England, Ireland was poorer and slower to take to private motoring as a result.

When you can actually see the wood for the trees pub for the petrol station, it again looks like an English pub - mock Tudor, with a full width greenhouse style area at the front, added about twelve years ago it seems.

And on walking in to the large, single room with a U shaped bar, slightly too many televisions, a poker machine, another betting machine, a vape dispensing machine and a semi-separated area for pool and darts.

Once you can look beyond the, well, looks; and the too many TVs, its actually a normal suburban pub. It has become the only pub for a fairly large area since the demise of The Thatch (an interesting story could be told at some point about a pub with that name being in a Power City industrial unit - it was a replacement building) and the Deerhunter in the late Celtic Tiger era; and seems to keep a good locals business.

1002229 The Graduate

No Reservations was the name of one of Anthony Bourdain's famed TV series, and the series included a visit to Ireland, albeit its usually his later The Layover Dublin episode that is better remembered.

And indeed, I had No Reservation(-s) when going in to The Graduate, which nearly became fatal to actually obtaining a pint. Every single table in the - large - lounge area was either occupied or, in the case of about 40% of them, empty marked off with a reserved sign. These didn't appear to have any time markings, as is common in other pubs that reserve tables after a specific time; so all must be considered out of use.

I had been intending to get food at this stop, but my eventual seat at a giant, awkward table in the window of the bar area didn't seem quite conducive to this; and I didn't think I'd be granted access to one of the reserved seats if I asked, so I had a pint and left. 

Clearly very popular with locals for Saturday evening dinners, this is the only normal pub for a decent distance - there is a hotel up the road - and they're lucky to have it. The original pub burnt down in 2009, but was rebuilt almost identically.

S0286 Igo Inn

Ah, a pub with a pun name. We don't get that many of them in Ireland.

Or do we? The previous pub could count - Lough Inn... Lock In? It is a locational name, but still.

Anyway, the Igo Inn appears to have been called this for a very, very long time. It was one of the note "bona fides", pubs with the ability to sell alcohol after hours to those who were considered en-route to somewhere else. Much the same as the provision that still exists for airport and railway station bars as well as on trains (when they have bar services, something very scant since the pandemic), planes and boats. Sam at Come Here To Me has covered this topic well already.

The first newspaper reference to the name I can find is 1932, in an advert cleverly placed below those for cinemas and dance halls - making a point of how it could serve you late if you'd come all the way from the city, without ever saying as such

Evening Herald, October 17th, 1932

Its quite a big pub these days, a far cry from its apparent size shortly after the bona fide era, although it is actually recognisable as the building from that photo to this day.

This was the busiest pub I'd been in since, well, Christmas; although there were plenty of seats in the front corner of the bar, an area that seemed to be more reserved for those watching the racing rather than those watching rugby or football in the rest of the pub.

It was a tad hard to actually get *to* the bar to order here, due to seats being placed near it and a row of bar stools along the length; but I was able to get my pint regardless. This was semi-swiftly drunk in the aforementioned racing corner, as I was very much bus bound for timing on this trip and had the option of drinking one fast or two slowly; and slowly would cut the potential number of ticks.