I’m done with not complaining in restaurants. When the cream in a friend’s recent Irish coffee was horribly sour, she was reluctant to send it back – it was just so embarrassing. So I did it for her. I thought I’d figured out the trick: don’t take the problem personally. They didn’t pour in rancid [...]

An caller to Liveline  recently complained of being charged €2.90 for dash of Mi-Wadi and some tap water. It reminded me of two separate experiences on a break in Wicklow last week . This post should perhaps have a question mark with the Bad Value category. At the Brooklodge, I had a glass of Pinot [...]

[nggallery id=3] There’s been lots of talk recently about underground restaurants: in various papers, we wrote about them here before, and when Peter was interviewed on Ryan Tubridy’s show on RTE, one of his fellow guests was an amateur chef who has run a restaurant from her own flat.  As Peter said in the previous [...]

Pop your head into Campo di Fiore, and you’ll step back in time to 2007. Here’s a restaurant that’s full every night, and yet its prices are relatively high. I took my sister Cathy there for her birthday a few weeks ago, and my then-pregnant other sister joined us too (she’s since given birth to [...]

A few of us headed out to Killruddery House the weekend before last, to see the very lovely Enchanted Garden outdoor exhbition.  It’s a beautiful place, with huge gardens.  There were loads of families there on the Sunday that we went out, but it didn’t feel overcrowded or frenetic at any stage. We got our [...]

Some of my friends won’t eat out with me anymore. I spend a lot of the meal poking them and asking if their food is good. The problem with reviewing restaurants, of course, is that you spend a lot of time looking for faults when, as an ordinary punter, you’d often completely overlook them. I’ve [...]

The other week, I loitered around the Brooklodge Hotel near Aughrim in Co. Wicklow, contemplating fantasies as to how I could stay and eat there once a month. My delusions wavered between winning the lottery and accidently stumbling on some dark secret that I could hold against the hotel. I wasn’t stalking the place (honest), [...]

When I lived in Dublin I daydreamed of being able to head to the country, go for a walk in a cinematic back-drop and then nip to a cosy pub for a well deserved homemade feast in the perfect country setting. I now live in Wicklow near such a haven where you can nestle a [...]