Eating my way around Dublin

How much eating can be packed into one day in Dublin? Well, if you take the earliest bus there, as I did last Thursday, quite a bit.

A need for late breakfast/early lunch took myself and Kristin of Dinner du Jour – make sure you check out her fantastic new blog at Edible Ireland –  into the The Pepperpot Café at Powerscourt where their roast parsnip and pecan tart more than lived up to The Daily Spud‘s recommendation. The shortest of short pastry made this simple dish a real thing of beauty.

There were a couple of quick coffees in Murphys Ice Cream shop on Wicklow Street – our Dublin office! – as we sat down for an IFBA planning meeting then it was time to hot foot it to L’Ecrivain for lunch, hosted by Scala Italian foods and delicious. magazine (nice new mag from on the market from the publishers called Healthy Food Guide).

L’Ecrivain was the purest of pure indulgences. The stand out dish for me was the perfectly seared slice of duck liver that I started with. Despite all that food, we still found room for these exquisite little petits fours.

We finished off the afternoon with a visit to Taste of Dublin but time was ticking and I had a bus home to catch.  The festival had just opened in the always-lovely Iveagh Gardens but was being dampened by apocalyptic rain downpours and, as I tried to leave, bouncing hailstones.  Still, there was time to have a chat with the Irish-born Gerard Coleman of Artisan du Chocolat and to nearly pour one of his liquid caramel chocolates (yes, they are liquid) all down my front. I had to pick up a couple of his bars:  a rich Espresso Dark Chocolate which is currently serving as my afternoon coffee substitute and, because I’ve become obsessed with all things buffalo milk recently, one of a creamy but not at all cloying (I’m not a milk choc fan) buffalo milk chocolate.

Rain still falling and temperature dropping,  I was grateful for a warming bowl of Jaipur‘s Bombay Railway Lamb Curry. This came with triangles of Malabar Paratha, a kind of flatbread which was perfectly suited to scooping up the spicy, tomato-based mince. Street food at its very finest.

I was sorry that I didn’t find where Messrs Maguire, Carlow Brewing Company and Trouble Brewing had their stands – after all, I hadn’t seen them since Bloom – but there was a bus to be caught and a soaking coat to be wrung out. Just as well I had to run for the bus: all that eating could take quite a toll on a girl, y’know!