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.