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A Taste (or two, or more) of Dublin

 

Corned beef and cabbage, and a pint of Guinness—Irish food, right? Well, no. Not that we started with that assumption, but it was quickly dispelled by our Dublin food tour guide, Ketty Quigley. Dublin's a city with strong old traditions, but also with a thriving and innovating food scene.

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We didn't make many stops on this tour, but each one added to our understanding of Dublin and Irish food, and the city itself. Our guide was one of the most unusual we've toured with, whether guide or true foodie. Ketty is a well-known an influential food blogger, who writes French Foodie in Dublin, great to read even if you're not going to Dublin.

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A native of France's Loire Valley, she's lived, worked, eaten and gone to a leading cooking school in Ireland since 2004. Our three-hour tour with her gave us not only flavors, but a real sense of Dublin food history and changes in the areas we passed through, often including history of the places we visited.

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Stop one, since it was still morning, had to be for coffee. Vice, where Ketty took us, offered us tastes of three different coffees, each prepared differently to take advantage of specific beans. Vice is in an unusual relationship with Wigwam, a bar and restaurant that operates mainly in the evenings; in the middle part of the day, both are open in different parts of the space.

10808961080897On the way to our next stop, we passed some of Dublin's appealing traditionally-styled pub storefronts, like the Boar's Head, and also Brother Hubbard, one of the many new restaurants making Capel Street a food magnet. The sign above the door identifies the cafe; the restaurant entrance is around the corner.

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And then came Camerino, which describes itself as a 'bakery, cakery, coffee' place, which would seem too cute if there were another way to describe it. Everything is made on-site, and it ranges from breads to buns to cupcakes and serious cakes and everything in between...including soups and gorgeous salads. It's a tiny shop, too small to really eat in, but it does a serious take-away business, especially for lunch.

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Now that we've browsed dessert, here are the more-restrained choices. And a healthy option: the red-and-white quinoa salad with soy-ginger dressing.

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Moving along, past more picturesque pubs, we came to our major lunch stop, Boxty, which is both the name of the restaurant and its main menu choice.

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I'd never heard of a boxty before, but we soon had our lesson: It's an Irish potato pancake, with potentially as many variations as potato pancakes can have. It's originally a tradition of central Ireland, but appears to have spread far and wide.

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Yes, two kinds of potatoes on the plate!

Unlike the Jewish latkes and potato kugel of my history, the boxty has no onion, but it has several added ingredients, including flour, baking soda, and buttermilk. It uses a mixture of grated and mashed potatoes, giving it a finer grain. And delcious. And, as seen below, plenty of choices of beverage.

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And then some more scenic Dublin as we walked along to our next stop...

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...at Murphy's, which brags that its ice cream knows where it's coming from, which happens to be from dairy farms in Dingle in the south-west of Ireland. They have six shops now, only one in Dublin, and say it's hand-made down to breaking the eggs.

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It comes in a lot of unusual flavors, even a lot of unusual chocolate flavors, as well as some easily-recognized flavors. My favorite was the Caramelized Brown Bread, which had small crumbs of dark soda bread and a strong caramel flavor, but the Dingle Sea Salt was wonderful, too.  1080960

Having once again done 'dessert first,' we moved on to another dairy mecca, Sheridan's Cheesemongers, which started as a market stall selling farmhouse cheeses and has grown to four shops, a warehouse and maturing room out in the countryside and...market stalls selling farmhouse cheeses.

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They also stock European cheeses and gourmet condiments from Ireland and elsewhere in their shops, and sell cheese wholesale to other shops in Ireland; it's worked as a way to create a broader market for hand-made farm products.

Sheridan's also hosts, at its County Meath headquarters, an annual Farm Food Festival. While at the shop, we saw the poster, and went the following Sunday. There's a Gumbo report on that HERE.

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And our last stop: the Celtic Whiskey Shop, where we learned more than we knew there was to learn about different varieties of Irish whiskey. At home, when I've looked, I've seen about four brands and perhaps two varieties each; here, even familiar names like Bushmill's have a dozen variations of age, aging barrel and perhaps more. Sadly, for all their effort, I'm still not a whiskey drinker. Or a whisky drinker, if you're talking about Scotch...oops...Scottish. 

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And just to finish the day: Here's what not to do. Spotted in a bakery along the river, these cannot really be donuts. No. Please!20180523_205602

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The best part of every trip is realizing that it has upset your expectations

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