Offbeat Eats

On the last day of our visit to Ireland, I had a spare hour in my schedule, so I decided to walk up from Temple Bar to Lower O’Connell Street to check out the An Post Museum (central location of the 1916 Easter Rising) and the fairly new Spire of Dublin. Neither of which really impressed me much; the An Post museum is more of a “room” than a “museum” (although it is neat to see gunshots and mortar damage to the building outside), and the Spire is basically a giant steel toothpick that’s already showing a bit of corrosion. But on the way back down to my hotel in Temple Bar, about a block south of An Post, I noticed the smell of…. fresh donuts.

Recently, my job had me heading off on a short trip to Dublin, Ireland (for those curious about my day job, I was attending the AIAA 21st Aerodynamic Decelerators Conference at Trinity College Dublin), and while almost all of my time on my work trip to Dublin was tied up with, well, work (and work-related outings), I did have a long lunch break on my second day to try and rustle up some local food. So I decided to see what I could find that was actually Irish, since actual Irish cuisine is quite challenging to find in the US, especially in predominantly Irish areas like Boston, since the Irish-American culinary traditions have diverged a fair bit from the mother country (for example, while “corned beef” is pretty much a staple food of any Irish-American place, it’s virtually unknown in Ireland), with little reference to the original. So I wanted to get out and find a place that at least was trying to do justice to the Irish culinary tradition. Well, a quick search of several sources led me to The Pig’s Ear…