Is there anything more heartwarming and welcoming than steaming hot spicy Indian food on a bleak winter’s day? Indeed, it only gets better when you can enjoy excellent food at reasonable prices, more particularly at this time of year when our budgets are tight after Christmas and most people are waiting for that end-of-the-month injection into their bank accounts.
I was in a subterranean haven at Cellar 22, a new wine bar on St Stephen’s Green, where Randy Crawford was belting out her ’80s hit, One Day I’ll Fly Away, over the sound system, and I honestly could have stayed there all day. In fact, this is not just any cellar. It has a considerable hospitality history down the years, having once been The Country Shop, opened in 1930 by Muriel Gahan, a staunch pioneer of the Irish Country Women’s Association, eventually closing its doors in the 1970s.
Liam Forde has been named the new executive chef at Ferrycarrig Hotel, and has already unveiled a brand new seasonal menu filled with award-winning Wexford prod.
ASTOPIA Eat in or take out at this cyberpunk-themed Asian cuisine mocktail bar on Aungier Street, from a menu (€4.99-€23.99) that includes Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean grub like bao buns, gyoza, Taiwanese crunch wraps, mini hotpots, and ‘space’ bags. There’s also plenty for vegans. astopia-dublin.com
There was quite a splash five years ago with the opening of the burger chain Five Guys in the upmarket SoCoDu village of Blackrock. Its location was a prime road fronting unit in the redeveloped Frascati Shopping Centre, which already had, and still has, a very popular branch of the much cheaper opposition Mickey D’s, which every young fella and girl attending the nearby Blackrock College and Sion Hill College pretty well grew up on for the last 30 years.