Cafe Mao started its life in Chatham Street where it carved out a niche serving really good reasonably priced Asian fusion food. Then it closed for unfortunate reasons and when it re-opened, it had thankfully lost none of it’s oomph. There is now a Mao in the Dundrum Shopping Centre just beside the water feature, which literally springs to life while Bocelli is singing in time to the spurts. If you sit outside the cafe it can feel distinctly moist on a May Day but would be delicious in Summer. The cafe menu offers a good mix of lightly spiced starters and main courses with starters of crispy squid and spring rolls and main courses cooked as stir-fries and curries and freshly made salads, noodle and rice dishes covering every part of the Asian experience from India to China to Vietnam to Thailand

The food is stunning: we had a mixed platter of crispy vegetarian spring rolls moistened by soft golden nuggets of butternut squash; roast baby back ribs and juicy chicken satay skewers, all cooked fresh with the crispest salad sitting underneath (18.95 euro). The dressings (a sweet honey, then a chilli, then a sour saltier one) were just right offering the salty, sweet and sour flavours that are a fundamental plank of Asian cooking. We shared this and a Coconut Lamb Korma (17.95 euro) which came with coconut jasmine rice. The meat was soft and plentiful, the sauce sweet had a light chilli warmth though it but the rice didn’t taste any different than plain rice. Service by our Hungarian waiter was charming and he negotiated with the bar to get us a glass of wine from an opened Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc bottle instead of selling us those awful quarter bottles that they insist on offering instead of wines by the glass. The other diners were relaxed shoppers or people who work in the shopping centre taking a break after a hard day standing on their feet all day  (what a daft phrase, what else would they stand on).

We would have to rate Cafe Mao in Dundrum highly for the price, the service and most of all, but an increasingly rare commendation for restaurants in the mid-price-range, we recommend it for the food.

Download the Cafe Mao Menu

Kenny’s pub in Lucan is one of the friendliest bars we have visited. The interior is modern with lots of wood, the staff are genuinely among the most helpful we have encountered in the city. They offer a home-cooked carvery at lunchtime, and when we visited with an older lady, the woman serving immediately came out from the kitchen side of the counter so that she didn’t have to shout. They make a good toasted sandwich, the salads are fresh and crisp though the chips are frozen and can be missed. (The loos smell of neutradol which is a bit of a shame.) Lucan is a delightful village through which the Liffey flows so while it’s a bit of a detour, it is an attractive stopping off point.

Freshly roasted coffee. We loathed the sickly taste of it when we were younger, the overpowering ‘thereness’ of it in a world that lacked colour and flavour and texture. There was a posh shop that sold fresh coffee in pull-out gilt-lettered drawers bearing exotic names that had a whiff of the English. Every time we passed the shop, we would open the door for punishment and stick our beaks in and make ourselves inhale the strong burnt aroma of freshly roasted coffee. We hated it. Read more »

It’s hard to believe it now but I don’t think we really ate or drank olive oil until the early eighties. That’s not to say we didn’t know what it was or even own some. Mother always had a bottle of olive oil in the cupboard, or the safe as we called it, a cupboard with a hole in it to keep things cool until the fridge arrived, some good years later.

Oh yes, we had olive oil allright in a small mean spirited bottle covered in dust. Mother warmed it on a hot spoon and dribbled it into father’s ear when he had too much wax and he would have to lean over on his side while we gobblers counted to sixty. Then a small white dot of cotton wool was wedged into his ear hole to stop it falling out and onto his suit jacket, which he always wore when he was watching the television. Read more »

We lived in a city so we ate out of tins. A man we met once said that his mother, as soon as she saw potatoes in a tin, bought them immediately. She felt she was doing right by her family, that if you went to the trouble of putting food in a tin, it must be better.

Mother and father told us about another life when they ate fresh food, sometimes pulled straight from the ground. ‘I remember a lovely beet I ate once straight from a field in Carlow,’ my father used to tell us. But then he wasn’t a reliable witness. We once passed a man on the street who had a huge fleshy carbuncle obscuring one eye. ‘What happened to him, daddy’, we asked. ‘He got it caught in a fish hook ‘, he said, without taking a breath. He had never seen that man before. Read more »

The preoccupation with health and healthy food was not one that we were familiar with as little gobblers. A pulse was something the doctor checked when father came home from work early with a suspected heart attack. Grains we found on the beach on the high dunes, soft and warm under our toes. Puce pink grains passed through the egg timer in our kitchen, sparkly and fair-fine, they slowly flowed into the glass bowl on the bottom rung and magically, before our eyes, left little shards of sand behind in the top bowl to graze. We observed as grain was fed to lumpen animals in our second-hand geography books, wide-spread on the desk, the middle spine taped. Read more »

When there was no money when we were young gobblers, we had sugar sandwiches. Granulated not caster.There is something wonderful about the grittiness of sugar with soft salty butter on sliced processed bread. Try it. Think ration books, small children wearing home-made dresses, their knitted pixie hats hanging from a hook in the hall, eating their tea at a formica table off plates with slash-red roses and gilt leaves.

It’s like a glass of Laphroaig whisky is more than the sum of its parts. Smoky peaty aromas. Tension on the tongue. Poverty in a glass. In your mind’s eye, you can see a small beleagured community pulling together and people giving out about war injuries and old people with no teeth who have no chance of getting well-fitting dentures. With the sugar sandwich, somehow my mother brought her childhood into ours. Her response to austerity in her adult life was to give us what her mother gave her when she was faced with greater concerns. Read more »

Tea is an institution in Dublin, and indeed in the rest of Ireland. Mrs Doyle, Fr Ted’s housekeeper who is rewarded by making tea and offended by the refusal of it is more than a little true. A mother who didn’t make tea for her family was suspect.

When you were old enough your mother gave you an inch of hot tea smothered in milk to cool it down. The tide rose as you got older until eventually you reached your early teens and you could see the miniscus of the tea from the top of the cup. Read more »

thedublingobbler appears to be one of the few fans of the Saddle Room, the landmark restaurant at the Shelbourne Hotel, certainly among the food writing fraternity or if anecdotal comments are anything to go by. However, given that we are food critics, it is with great sadness and regret that we say it is not because the food is excellent, the oysters being the rare exception.

So why do we eat there and spend our good money? Read more »

The daddy of artisan bakeries, the Bretzel Bakery in Portobello, Dublin has lost a little of its charm and variety over the years but it’s still a great bakery. They do the usual line-up of breads and cakes (though some of the classics like curd cheesecake seem to have disappeared) but the bread is good and their chocolate eclair is just like the one you ate as a child. They also make good pizza and gingerbread men, the must-have for any small bakery and classic light sponges. Read more »