Those of you who are enraged by excessive phone use might enjoy proposing a fiendish new game to your friends.  A Californian blogger, sick of his friends spending meals engrossed in their phones, came up with this challenge: when a group sits down to eat, everyone has to place their mobile in a stack on [...]

Minor grievance #7,763,985: you see them here, you see them there, you see them everywhere. They’re the bored-looking souls employed as human signposts, sitting or standing in the cold holding up an ad for a nearby restaurant. The restaurant is always 100 metres that way, or just around the corner. For some reason, I find [...]

Let’s go out to dinner. Let’s have Christmas lunch. Party of ten. Table of six. I’m not drinking. I only had two glasses of wine, everyone else polished off a bottle. Back in the good old days – were you there? I’m struggling to remember them – people went out to dinner and split the [...]

This is spooky. A journalist from The Guardian newspaper reports that he was accosted by Tesco staff last week for the “crime” of writing down prices on a notepad. The manager told him that Tesco policy forbids people writing down prices. Presumably, they’re afraid that people will discover they’re not such good value after all. [...]

This is our 1,960th post on this site.  I think it might be my favourite so far. Liam Moore, a friend of mine with a sense of smell that would put a hound to shame, writes a very gorgeous blog about the scents of this planet, and he kindly agreed to write a guest post [...]

I leave the country for two weeks. Two weeks, and the curse of the new improved recipe strikes again. I used to love the Natural Confectionary Company’s Unbearables, eating all the purples to get them out of the way, and hoarding all the yellow and greens. Then, I come back from India, and they’ve ditched [...]

Last weekend, I suggested an “ironic” visit to the notorious, wildly popular meat market that is CopperFace Jack’s on Harcourt Street. I’m 30 and not a participant in the meat market, while my mate is married. Continuing a search through horrible scoring joints, we decided to pass and ended up instead in the equally awful [...]

I’m always bleating on about food waste, and I’ve written before about rescuing food from skips. Waste not, want not. One Norfolk man, a producer with the BBC, has taken this philosophy to its logical conclusion. He’s picking up, butchering, cooking and feeding his family dead animals from the side of the road. No, he’s [...]

Happy new year! Now I know it’s a bit miserable being back at work and all that, but we’ll hopefully bring some measure of cheer to the dark days of January with the usual mix of recipes, reviews, special offers, and competitions. It’s January, so everyone is especially broke, including us. Just before Christmas, I [...]

Christmas = cheese, hot port, and a stroll through town. At the weekend, I took my eight-year-old nephew into Dublin city to soak up the lovely atmosphere. Living in Bray, he had no memory of Dublin or any other big city. This was also his first trip on the LUAS. We went to lunch, were [...]