Thus far on our journey, it had all been airport food and airplane food; nothing very interesting at all. Well, the Philadelphia pretzel was maybe one notch up on the interesting scale but that’s all. Now we had landed in Dublin and after standing in line at immigration and gathering our bags, we were in a taxi and off to Dublin city centre. We arrived at our hotel between 9:30 and 10:00 in the morning. We were staying at the Fitzwilliam Dublin right across the street from St. Stephen’s Green. We had a reservation for that night and we were really hoping that they would have a room ready for us to crash in for a few hours after our long flight. I made a quick inquiry and after receiving a very polite “No, I’m afraid not,” we left our bags with the concierge, bought some tickets for a hop on, hop off bus tour and headed out into the streets of Dublin.
Our first stop was Grafton Street. This is one of the main tourist shopping areas of Dublin and it was just steps from our hotel. Well, being it was Sunday, not many of the shops were open which was actually fine with us since we don’t do a whole lot of shopping. What we could use, though, was some breakfast. Now I was reminded of the words of the immortal Anthony Bourdain in his Dublin episode of “The Layover.” I edit it a bit for this blog, but when discussing breakfast he says, “This is no country to be f&%$#in’ around with a croissant. Go big, or go the f^&%^ home.” Well that’s exactly what I intend to do. I want to find me a traditional Irish breakfast. We walk along Grafton Street and find a couple of places that advertise it (of course, you can find an Irish breakfast a whole LOT of places in Ireland). We settle on what looks like a little café called Brewley’s.
When you walk in there is a little bakery and coffee shop on your left and a few little tables on your right. However, when you walk back a bit, there is the full restaurant. There were two levels with tables everywhere. We were sat on the first level near the back of the restaurant. Here are the stained glass windows with what appeared to be a very old opening mechanism that were right behind us:
We sit down and Joan orders some pancakes with banana and nutella. It really looked quite good (and I did sample a bit of it). Here’s what she got:
As I said, it looked and tasted great, but that’s not what I was after. I was in Ireland and I was going to sample the full Irish breakfast. I checked the menu and I saw: “Full Irish Breakfast: Potato farl, grilled bacon, sausage, tomato, pudding, mushroom, poached egg, famous homemade relish and two slices of toast, served with freshly squeezed orange juice and tea or regular coffee.” That’s it, that’s for me. When it came to the table, here’s what they put down for me:
Now, as they mentioned in “The Layover” you can’t eat this every day. Anthony Bourdain quoted Clint Eastwood when he said “A man has to know his limitations.” But I was going to do it today. It was my goal to sample everything on the plate. The potato farl was a kind of potato pancake that you see in the front of the plate. The mushroom was nothing special, just a marinated mushroom. I’m not big on poached eggs but I did eat this one. I usually prefer eggs scrambled or over hard. The runny yolk has just never done anything for me. The sausage and bacon you can see in the picture as well. They were both very good. I particularly liked the bacon which, unlike American bacon, is much more ham like. I don’t like tomatoes, but as I vowed to try everything I did take a bite. It was, well, just a tomato, nothing super special about it, so I left the rest. Now we come to the pudding. You can’t see in the picture but below the toast was a slice of black pudding and white pudding. Now, this is not what we Americans think of as “pudding.” You don’t have this for dessert, there’s no milk in it and it doesn’t come in chocolate. This was more of a sausage that is made with oats and other fillers. The difference between the black pudding and the white pudding is that the black is made with pig’s blood and the white was not. I was a little apprehensive of trying these (especially the black) but I did and I have to say that they were quite tasty. I don’t know if I will be going out of my way to find them in the States, but if I’m ever in Ireland again, I know that I can get my full Irish breakfast and be OK with the black and white puddings.
One other thing I wanted to mention about this full Irish breakfast was the orange juice. I usually prefer apple juice with breakfast but this place only had orange and it came with my breakfast. So I got that and Joan ordered a glass too. As soon as we took a drink we knew this was good orange juice. Joan mentioned that it tasted much better than the stuff she had on the plane a few hours earlier that came out of a can. On our way out, we noticed a machine that backed up their “fresh squeezed” claim. If I had been thinking, I would have snapped a picture of it, but I was still a little foggy from the flight. In any case, basically whole oranges (peal and all) when it the top and orange juice came out the bottom. You can’t get much fresher than that.
Well we ended up taking the entire loop on the Citysightseeing tour bus. Since our tickets were good for two days and considering how tired we were from the flight, we figured we would just ride today and get an idea of what we wanted to see the next day. This bus tour was suggested by the concierge at the hotel and it turned out to be an excellent way to see Dublin. There are a couple of different “hop on, hop off” tours in Dublin (notably the “red bus” and the “green bus”) but they seem to pretty much go the same places. If anyone is in Dublin this is an easy way to see a lot of different sites in Dublin without a lot of hassle.
We got back to the hotel about one thirty and our room was still not quite ready. We wandered down to the shopping mall on the corner of Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green and then back to the hotel. It was about a quarter after two o’clock when we finally got up to the room. The concierge brought all of our bags up to the room and we were able to take a small nap before we headed out to cross an item off of my bucket list.
I’ll go into that next time along with our first dinner in Dublin and a blast from my childhood. You’ll never guess what I found in Dublin that took me back to my childhood in Ohio.
Until next time,
Mike
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