Outside Reyna. Reyna
Pop-up tacos tucked behind a pawn shop cocktail bar, dry-aged beef tartare at a canal-side chef hangout, an ambitious Michelin-starred menu in a coastal suburb, and more of Dublin’s best meals
Dublin is a village as much as a city, with the feel of a tight-knit community spread along the River Liffey. It’s incredibly walkable, especially if you want to pop from pub to pub following in the footsteps of James Joyce, Brendan Behan, and Oscar Wilde on a guided literary pub crawl. It’s also a great base for a tour of the Irish seaside, with villages like Howth, Blackrock, and Dún Laoghaire well worth a 30-minute train ride.
Famous for its pubs, Dublin now punches well above its weight when it comes to restaurants, and not just with fine dining. Young chefs, many of whom have worked in Michelin-starred restaurants in London and other European food capitals, bring a vibrancy to the city by taking more casual approaches to their menus. Central to their cooking is quality local produce, like native oysters, lobsters, and fish plucked from the Atlantic and the Irish Sea, and grass-raised beef and lamb from the wild hills of the countryside. While Ireland is not widely known for its viticulture, the wine bar scene continues to grow, with enough cellars stocked with biodynamic and low-intervention bottlings to rival New York, Copenhagen, or Paris; that’s where you’ll find some of the most creative food in the city, too.
Corinna Hardgrave is a restaurant critic and food writer for the Irish Times. She is an international food and wine judge, the winner of the Food Writing Award at the inaugural Irish Food Writing Awards in 2021, and the Restaurant Writing Award in 2022.
