Are you searching for that perfect spot for Valentine’s Day? It’s got to have great food and music and just the right amount of V-day vibes, but it also needs to be somewhere that you can hit the ejector button if your date turns out to be a total dud.
It’s only relatively recently that the affluent SoCoDu village of Blackrock has managed to attract and sustain good restaurants. Surprisingly, for most of my time living in the ‘borough of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown’, it’s been something of a culinary desert. I was thinking about this recently following the death of the wonderful chef and artist Colin O’Daly, who was highly respected and loved in the hospitality industry.
My first restaurant outing of 2024 was to the brand-new, hot-to-trot Allta in Dublin’s Docklands, which was always bound to attract critics, foodies and bloggers in their droves. There was lots of buzz about it pre-Christmas, and so, to secure a table, I found myself staring down at my iPhone waiting for the precise moment that bookings opened, managing to snag a seat online for its third day of business in mid-January.
I’ve never been one to lay sprawled by the pool in a deckchair for two weeks in some sun-drenched resort. I know that some people love it, but I like to move on to a new spot pretty much every day. Travelling this way through France, Italy and Spain over the years, one thing I noticed was that so many of the small hotels and restaurants were family businesses carried on down the generations.