N0276 Murrays

I headed in the door closest to the bus stop here; which brought me in to a games room / bar which smelled of fresh paint. However, despite the renewed decor, they still had an rare example of the traditional Irish pub game of Rings, with the board featuring the actual rings required to play it with. 

I've previously only seen one rings board in a pub, in that case ringless and bearing the branding of a 65-year defunct beer brand; but I did have one at home as a kid. However, dyspraxia and pints don't combine to being any good at it, so I didn't partake.

Darts and a pool table make up the rest of the facilities in this room, the more usual things to expect in a games room.

There are other areas to the pub, but if I held myself to trying bars and lounges in places, I'd probably be dead already. Food and music are pushed heavily on the pubs social media pages, so presumably make up the draw for the other bits of the pub

Considering how crowded the next pub was, and how busy the other bits of this pub sounded through the connection are behind the bar; I may not have got in anyway!

This is the last post before Christmas and the New Year; unless I take to doing a historical article during the time off - this has happened before

RetroReview: S4530 Turks Head

For quite some time after the pandemic, and as I worked my way down the list of RetroReviews to write, I thought this one would be off the list - I had stopped writing up places which were closed down entirely; saving them for later.

And the Turks Head was very closed down, stripped out internally and with little signs of life even as nearly everywhere else in the city returned to a normal level of activity. 

However, the pub reopened with a little fanfare in March 2024, after extensive renovations and a four year closure, end to end. Thus ensuring it gets a writeup on this series of posts.

I was here a few times, mainly on the ground floor but occasionally going to the basement club bits; but not within the last ten or maybe even fifteen years at time of writing, so the actual review section of this is going to stay short

This is, or should be anyway, the last RetroReview - I have written up every pub that I visited prior to 2016, which was still open (pandemic pause nonwithstanding) at the time I got to its writeup; and excepting any ones I forgot to put on the list. Those may get caught and written up in the future; but for now, we're done.

However, there is still a handful of places I visited but were already closed by the time I got to write about them - so there'll be some NecroReviews coming soon. A tiny few of those premises may actually reopen but most are dead forever. I'll leave these til the New Year before re-starting; as I will have a significantly reduced number of posts over Christmas anyway.

N0278 Martins Bar & Joyous Garden Restaurant

This is a replacement for a more traditional pub which burnt down in ~1993, and is more focused on its food offering - the Joyous Garden Chinese restaurant - than the quite small pub section. 

However, whoever is in charge of the signage outside must not be much of a fan of either of these...

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Every Pub In Dublin (@everypubindublin)

My pint was acceptably cooled; but the pub was quite busy, and quite muggy due to the damp weather outside, so I didn't really feel like hanging around. A bus to get me away from Rush showed up on the tracker, so I sank my pint and bailed. I need to come back and tick off the Millbank Theatre here at some point, so I'll be back to the town, at least.

RetroReview: S4448 Maldron Hotel Tallaght

Drink with Hooperman before a match in Tallaght Stadium. That's about all I can remember - Hooperman, Shamrock Rovers mascot, doing the rounds - as I knocked a quick pint in here, hiding my Harps jersey under my hoodie.

The hotel is a long term sponsor of the club, as well as the closest public bar to their ground so an obvious place for dinner beforehand and drinks before/after games.

Revisited pubs November 2024

An oddly long list this month, in part due to an accidental pub crawl of sorts. I had last been to many of these pubs pre-pandemic.

N0313 Kealys, Cloghran -  for the last time (for now) as I change employers and hence work locations

N0063 Cumiskeys, Dominick Street - first pub on the accidental pub crawl, due to its convenience for the Luas

N0057 The Kings Inns, Bolton Street - back here on said crawl

N1081 The Confession Box, Marlborough Street - I've never taken a shine to this pub, and it continues

N1062 The Flowing Tide, Lower Abbey Street - hadn't seen the place since the takeover

N0906 Fibber Magees, Parnell Street - I'm too old for this now (the noise, that is)

N0099 The Big Romance, Parnell Street - the end of the crawl

N0082 McGraths, Drumcondra - train delays still happen, so McGraths will still get the odd visit

N0006 Brew Dock, Amiens Street - dinner before a train, more than once in the month

1017216 Dockers, Sir John Rogersons Quay - my new work "local"

N0284 Harbour Bar

The second of the food-focused pubs, in Rush, this one is sited very close to the harbour - but as it had started tor rain again, I decided not to take a look at said harbour despite my families maritime/island connections

The Harbour Bar has a fire in the lounge, most welcome with the rain but with all the nearby seats taken. There's a wider range of drinks here than the other pubs in Rush; at least on the taps that I saw - with a pub-branded Hope Pale Ale here as well as some other Hope products.

Whiskey, however, seems to be the primary focus here - there's a locked cabinet in the wall, on the customer side of the bar, containing a large range of numbered Dingle releases; all sealed, coming to easily a big five figure sum if the bottles had to be bought on the secondary market now.

I wanted to get back to the last-first pub that was missed, so didn't hang around here to see if I could get closer to the fire. In hindsight it was a significantly nicer place to be!

RetroReview: S4419 Copper Face Jacks

I've been here three times, which was three times too many.

I can confirm that you don't have to be heterosexual to end up The Shifting Wall here; or a nurse/Garda for that matter, but I did have to affect far more of a Donegal accent than I ever have normally.

Beyond its reputation for country nurses, GAA finalists and the shifting wall; the most interesting thing about here is how much money the cloakroom makes. This figure used to pop up in media reports, as it was once separated out in financial reports. The last figure I can find is receipts of 217k in 2011

N0283 The Carlyan

An extremely difficult to spell pub, my brain constantly thinking it should be Carl Ryan or similar.

The interior here is somehow incredibly familar to me despite never having been here before - a small older pub building to the front, with a long, low, extension out the back holding the lounge and a games area.

I can't identify any specific pub that looks basically the same as this, but I just know it has to be a common enough layout. The long building isn't quite wide enough to have been a dance hall; and I may be confusing it with somewhere that was clearly a dance hall tacked to the side of a pub. But it just seems weirdly famililar.

The pub wasn't hugely busy for its size, but there were enough customers there for the single bar staff member that was on to be kept active. 

December 2024 Register Update

Not a big list of changes this month:

New:

1021705 Porters, Camden Street - new pub in a former bookies

Re-added:

S4354 Fujiyama, Dundrum Town Centre - the former TGI Fridays / Dante's Pizza unit re-opened in July but didn't appear til now

RetroReview: S3781 NoLIta

A pub I've spent many, many hours in - but only a very few in its current incarnation, at a work party of some description that I now can't remember. 

However, as The Dragon I spent probably every second weekend here for the guts of two years. And I can't remember much of those, either; but for very different reasons...

Slotting in to a place in the market for gay bars that possibly doesn't really exist anymore, the crowd here was younger than most places but also not targeting students - except on the specific student nights. 

A former bank, this was converted to to a pub in ~2000 - initially SoSuMe, which was fire damaged in 2005; then The Dragon, and briefly a bonkers "Scandinavian Asian" bar called Soder+Ko before its latest conversion to NoLIta.

What was a very interesting premises got replaced by a generic cocktails-and-pizza place; which might do better for its owners - and certainly eliminated the internal competition with The George under the same ownership - but just isn't of interest for me to go back.

N0281 The Strand

Moving on from the more traditional pubs, we get Rush's (first) example of the more modern type of food-led pub - the lounge having full table service, and indeed most empty tables were marked as reserved. I was able to locate a table, however.

Another case of a pint not available occured here, but it was Hope Pass If You Can that I couldn't get, rather than Smithwicks, 'forcing' me to have lager twice in a row, this time Hope's Underdog pilsner - a much superior product to what I had to reduce myself to before!