Eat This Podcast
Talking about anything around food
Subscribe
Collections
Donate
Archive

Food, power, pubs and politics in Ireland Why it is easier to eat well in a pub than in a restaurant

15 October 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:01 — 16.9MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Once you get over the idea that there is no good food in Ireland, and a single trip ought to be enough to do that, you might become aware of a paradox. Go into a pub, and if they serve food, rather than just sandwiches, it is likely to be rather acceptable. Go into a restaurant, and you’re more likely to be disappointed. At least, that’s my experience. I have had some fine meals in restaurants, to be sure, but I have also had some stinkers. Pubs are more predictable.

Why should that be? Diarmuid Murphy, of the Dublin Institute of Technology explained in his talk on The Power of Policy and Its Influence On the Restaurant Industry in Ireland at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. As one wag in the audience said, it might have something to do with the fact that most of the Members of Parliament who passed the bill allowing restaurants to serve alcohol were publicans.

Notes

Diarmuid’s recommendations for good places to eat in Dublin:

  1. The Pig’s Ear
  2. Mr Fox
  3. Vaughan’s Eagle House
  4. L. Mulligan Grocer
  5. Chapter One (I can vouch for this one; astonishingly good.)
  6. The Greenhouse

Photo by Alexandre Godreau on Unsplash

huffduffer icon   Huffduff it

Filed under: Podcasts

29 thoughts on Food, power, pubs and politics in Ireland Why it is easier to eat well in a pub than in a restaurant

You might also like:

  1. Long live the Carolina African Runner Who cares whether it really is the “ur-peanut” of the American South Is the Carolina Runner No.4 peanut "the first peanut cultivated in North America" and does it matter anyway? ...
  2. Food in prison Porridge as metonymy "Food is essentially the sentence," says Clair Woods-Brown....
  3. Industrial strength craft beer What matters is not how little beer you make, but how carefully you make your beer....
  4. Prehistoric food globalisation 0h, East is East, and West is West ... Or maybe not The first farmers and their crops moved much further, much earlier, than previously thought. As they did so they grew the confidence, the resources and the knowledge to move up into the mountains and down into the river basins....
email log Instagram logo mastodon logo Micro Blog logo Email logo

Search

About Eat This Podcast

Eat This Podcast has been going since March 2013. That’s a long time in podcast world. In that time, it has twice been nominated for a James Beard Award, although it remains a labour of love rather than a search for glory.

I am a biologist with a keen interest in food and agriculture. Eat This Podcast allows me to pursue my interests and share what I find.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all the guests who agree to be on the show, to the professional broadcasters who trained me, and to the software that allows me to do all this myself.

Subscribe here to get an email for each new episode. Between episodes, Eat This Newsletter brings you a selection of choice items I’ve found.

You will need to confirm your subscription, so look out for that and, maybe, check your spam folder.

Non-podcast News

Help Keep the Lights On

Ratings and reviews are great. So is an actual donation.

Elsewhere

There are other places I write and respond.

Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread was a series of micro-episodes on the history of wheat and bread, with an episode every day through the month of August 2018.

Posts are in correct chronological order, so you need to scroll to the bottom to find the latest.