A Historic Location with Decent Grub

The first day we were in Dublin, Ireland, we were pretty out of it, to be honest. Jetlag is a real thing, especially when you fly across six timezones, and we also hadn’t slept much on the plane from Washington over to Ireland, so we didn’t really have much brain power for thinking. And we also couldn’t check into our hotel for another couple of hours as we technically got in at ten in the morning Dublin time, even if it felt like four in the morning our time. As such we needed something quick, easy, and functional for breakfast (dinner, fourthmeal, whatever) that didn’t require any kind of thinking.

Thankfully my wife had heard from a friend about a pub they liked when they used to live in Dublin (a small world, I guess), and it just so happened to be down the street from the hotel we were staying at. So after dropping our luggage off with the front desk (since they were willing to watch it while our room was readied), we headed off to check out the restaurant and see if it was worth the friend’s hype. Or, really, we just wanted a place to sit down while our brains lived in a haze, and this was as good a place as any.

The Landmark (its actual name, which does make it a pain to look up after the fact since Googling “Landmark Dublin” returns a ton of actual landmarks) is a classic style pub. Open from early in the morning until late in the evening, it’s as much a place to get a bite to eat as it is a popular spot to grab a pint and sit for a while listening to live music. Really, it’s about what you’d expect if you sat down and imagined an Irish-style pub, and it’s really not that different from the two other pubs we eventually visited during our trip to Dublin. This was just the first one we hit, and we happened to catch it for breakfast.

The breakfast we ended up ordering was a traditional Irish breakfast. Those of us in the United States might not be so familiar with this kind of dish, but over in Ireland and the U.K. you can find a few different variations on this style of dish. The Full English consists of bacon, sausages, eggs, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, and toast or fried bread, frequently with black pudding (blood sausage) being included in the mix. The Scottish version (aka, the Full Scottish) includes bacon, Lorne sausage (square sausage), black pudding, haggis, tattie scones, fried eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, and toast. For the Irish version we got bangers (sausage), rashers (Irish bacon), eggs, black pudding, white pudding (similar to blood pudding… just without the blood), a chunk of tomato, a fat mushroom cap, a couple of fried potato halves, beans, and a couple of slices of Irish sourdough bread. It was a lot for that early (or late) in the day, which is why my wife and I split it.

Of the items on the plate, our favorite were the bangers. The sausages were moist and flavorful, with a solid amount of salt and seasoning. They were thick, with a lovely, hard skin on the outside that provided a solid bite and good chew. Normally I’m not a sausage fan, preferring bacon when given the choice for a meal, but this sausage was so good I’d absolutely order it again (you know, if I actually lived in Dublin).

Surprisingly the bacon wasn’t nearly as good. Irish bacon is a different cut of meat from traditional American bacon. It’s a leaner cut taken from pork loin from the back of the pig, sometimes containing a bit of pork belly. It’s chewier and doesn’t crisp as much and, honestly, I love crispy bacon. While this bacon wasn’t bad, it certainly didn’t suit my tastes, so while salty and flavorful, it bumped up against expectations for me.

One thing we enjoyed in every breakfast meal we ate in Ireland, this one included, were the eggs. Farm free and more flavorful than American eggs, these had a darker yellow yolk. They were rich and dense and I wish we could get eggs like these here in the States. Sometimes you can, if you get them direct from a farm, but our grocery eggs never come to the same quality, so they don’t match what we had here on our plate.

And that really was about it for the stuff we truly enjoyed in this meal. The tomato, mushroom, and potatoes were fine, but they weren’t anything special. They were simply cooked and then put on the plate without much seasoning, so while they weren’t bad, they also weren’t spectacular. The bread was nice and crunchy, but it was very basic bread so it was really saved by the Irish butter that came along with. And the baked beans, while more tomato-y in flavor and less sweet than American beans, were really just baked beans. I’m honestly not sure why these are a part of this kind of meal.

The parts we absolutely didn’t like, though, were the white and black puddings. Of the two the white was preferable as it was basically pork bits, oats, and seasoning. It had a tolerable flavor, but it really wasn’t anything I wanted to eat more of. The black pudding, though, was gross. That had a very strong flavor, owing to the blood that was part of the mix, and it tasted very… pungent. Like the flavor of organs, just without the meaty chew. It was strange and not very appetizing, so after a couple of quick bites to say we’d tried it, we set the pudding aside and ignored it entirely.

And that was really it for our experiments with Irish breakfast. We knew we had to try it once, so we did, because when you’re in Ireland you have to eat a few traditional items. But in this case the mix of items felt weird to us, with enough constituent parts that didn’t really work for these silly Americans. After this we stuck to more familiar breakfast fare (like breakfast sandwiches or French toast) and left the Irish breakfast for the natives.