It’s finally happened.
We didn’t have time to get to a new pub over the bank holiday weekend – too busy smashing the Dublin City Half Marathon – and so, we’ve had to dig deep into our occasionally-regrettable photo archives to find what we had lying about. This can only mean one thing – it’s Spoons time.
Although as a rule we tend to avoid Wetherspoons – easily done as there aren’t so very many of them in Ireland – occasionally, needs must. The Spoons in question is Keavan’s Port on Camden Street, and, if we put the sight of the bouncers (and some punters) to one side and focus only on the complex itself, it’s a huge achievement, and well worth visiting simply to explore the building(s). Now both pub and hotel, for many years, the Georgian townhouses that make up the site were derelict, with little of the previous history visible or accessible. And the history is fascinating: these buildings have housed a convent, a boxing gym, a stained-glass workshop (some of them concurrently) as well as their original residential intent.
And the restoration work is truly wonderful – care has been taken throughout to honour the different eras and uses that have gone before, and there are explanatory panels and photos throughout the pub (if you keep an eye out). The attention to historical detail has been balanced out with accessibility measures – ramps, lifts and a variety of reasonably easy-to-navigate spaces, despite the multi-level, multi-space layout of the pub; it’s comparatively rare to find this much care given to these features in Dublin, even in many pub rebuilds.
And yet.
Despite the layers of local history, there is still a feeling that you could be in any Wetherspoons in, say, Loughborough. The ‘pub experience’ doesn’t feel local – it feels pre-packaged and generically, well, British. This is not inherently a bad thing – we love going to the UK to go pub-bothering there, especially if there’s good cask ale on. But the ones we tend to go to there (even if, as is so often the case there, part of a larger pubco) still feel like they have their own personalities and quirks. This may, of course, be very much self-selected, but a pub like Ye Old Mitre still feels like it has its own vibe, even if it’s part of the Fuller’s/Asahi empire, while the Spoons experience is much more akin to a global chain (especially when it comes to the always-underwhelming, presumably-microwaved food).
The cask offering is also a point of contention here – as cask nerds, we’ve noted before the very small number of pubs in Dublin that have any cask ale at all – on any given day, the ones you are most likely to find in action at a non-Wetherspoons are single cask lines at The Porterhouse and Harty’s Bar, respectively (though we have it on very good authority that another beer engine will soon be regularly with us at A New Pub…watch this space), while The Black Sheep has neglected this of late. And, indeed, there are up to 5 beer engines at Keavan’s Port, but on the several occasions we’ve tried, a good 3 of them have been out of service (with the working ones being rather unremarkable Greene King beers), whilst on other visits, the beers had actively gone off and were nearly straight-up vinegar. To be fair, we know others have not had this experience here, and we seem to be particularly unlucky, but it’s always proved disappointing for us.
Finally, though, there is the other main Wetherspoons selling point: the cost. You will not find cheaper pints in the city – €2.60 for a Worthington’s Creamflow, or €4.50 for a Beamish are hard to beat, which is a not-unreasonable point. It would just be nice if the experience felt more like a real ‘Dublin’ one, but if price is the main issue, that may not be relevant to many punters.
Which, of course, leads us to the other reason we tend to not go there very much – it would be horrifying to the Young Adult member of the household to run into us at a place that is very much a usual haunt of His People; best to leave it to the Youth most of the time, but it is handy for a cheap pint before a gig nearby, and you can always make paper airplanes from the Wetherspoons magazine if you are so inclined. Just consider eating somewhere else beforehand…
Where: 1-5 Camden Street Upper, Dublin, IE D02 K854
Access from the city centre: Buses 9, 14, 15, 16, 27, 56A, 65B, 77A, 83, 140, 151, 15-ish minute walk
Food: Breakfast/lunch/dinner – the usual Wetherspoons options
Sport: All the sports
TVs: All over the place, though some areas are more subdued
Music: Quite a generic soundtrack of MOR tracks through the decades
Family-friendliness: There is the standard Spoons kids’ menu, but Camden Street can get rowdy at night
Pub-crawl-ability: High – Devitt’s, Anseo, Barebone, The Camden, Ryan’s of Camden Street, The Bleeding Horse, The Portobello Bar
Local sites of note: Whelan’s, Iveagh Gardens, St Stephen’s Green, National Concert Hall, Marsh’s Library, St Patrick’s Cathedral
Haunted: Definite ‘haunted object’ vibes in some sports
Other notes: One of only a few spots with truly accessible toilets throughout the building
Socials: N/A
Broadly speaking, it’s more common to find food (beyond crisps) in Irish pubs, compared to their counterparts in the UK. This is, of course, a huge generalisation – 
This is a ‘best’ post, so we’ll focus on a few favourites for each of those broad categories mentioned above. For more-than-just-reliable pub grub – especially with kids – we love 
Moving on to pizza, it’s a shorter list, but there are a few pubs that are flying under the radar for their pizza. 
Finally, we move on to the pubs that we go to for special occasions, because the food is just that good, but that you can equally go to for simply a pint or some nibbles – airs and graces are not required. We love 
It must be New Pub Season – everything around Dublin seems to be 
It’s time for another pub re-brand, but this one does seem to be purely a name swap and a bit of a paint job, rather than anything more drastic. We speak, of course, of 
The Read family did run their business from what is now 
In truth, beyond some more sober colour choices and nods to both the Read family and a portrait of Michael Collins, little has changed – but this is no bad thing. The more recent trend around Dublin has been for pubs to remove their independent beer taps when they renovate, but happily, Thomas Read’s remains a Galway Bay Brewing pub, so there is the usual range of their beers and a few guests, although there are, perhaps, a few more Guinness and Heineken taps than there used to be. 
And it’s a change that makes sense from a tourism point of view: if we’re being honest, 
We are back in action this week, now that the Paddy’s Day crowds have moved on, and, as so often, we find ourselves in 
With one recent glorious afternoon of sun, however, making the most of it was a moral imperative – and so, we repaired to Lucky’s. The main pull was their large and well-appointed 
As a sister bar to 
Beer-wise, there’s a nice, rotating mix of local independent options from Whiplash, Rascals and Hopfully (among others recently on tap), along with the usual Guinness; bottles of flavoured cider seemed to be the thing the Young People were going for. Rather unusually, there’s also Hoegaarden, plus a range of cocktails and non-alcoholic options.
Back in the 1990s – before Trainspotting, as it happens – Robert Carlyle and Shirley Henderson starred in Hamish Macbeth, a vastly-underrated Scottish cosy crime comedy-drama, with a bit of quirky/folksy paranormal goodness thrown in here and there for good measure. In the show, Carlyle played the titular Macbeth, a police constable with an adorable Westie, a fondness for the odd herbal cigarette and a work ethic that isn’t overly-dedicated to solving crimes, but who, nonetheless, keeps his small, eccentric village in good order. Shirley Henderson’s character starts off as a relatively conventional love interest (this was, after all, the 1990s), but as with all the characters in this excellent show, we discover much more as we go along.
In 2024, Dublin craft beer OG Against the Grain closed abruptly, not long after a renovation. What had been a friendly and welcoming Galway Bay pub with an excellent tap lineup of own-brand and guest beers was replaced by the wildly-underwhelming 
Although initial chatter was the Barebone would be ‘just a restaurant,’ we’re happy to report that it does still feel like a neighbourhood pub – but one that also happens to do quite good food. Yes, the décor has been upgraded even a smidgeon more – lots of dark tiles, mirrors and subtle brass fittings (including very handy coat/bag hooks, which we don’t see enough) – but it’s all thoroughly welcoming, both for the person stopping in for a quick (or not-so-quick) drink and their more relaxed-dinner counterpart. While the taplist isn’t quite as extensive as it was during the Galway Bay days, there were independent options from Hope, Whiplash and Trouble, as well as more ciders than one usually sees, both on tap and in bottles. The cocktail list is interesting, and the only especially ‘expensive’ drink was Beavertown’s Neck Oil, which you can skip nowadays in any event. And there’s both Guinness and Beamish for the stout-comparing person in your life.
And so while it’s true that we didn’t need to quite go to the extremes the townspeople of Lochdubh did, we’re thrilled that the place that replaced the place that replaced Against the Grain is a worthy successor. And if you haven’t binged Hamish Macbeth yet, what are you waiting for?
BrewDog is, once again, back 
Inside, the look is straight out of 
Nowadays, we are rarely in this part of town, and if we were looking for pre-show drinks, we’d be more likely to hit up 
We have no insights into ‘what will happen’ with BrewDog’s uncertain future (though it’s difficult to imagine a space of this size continuing without global private equity money). In our ideal world, this would continue as an independent tap room and community space with the same staff, but we also know that’s highly unlikely. It’s also possible a buyer will swoop in and continue running BrewDog’s portfolio as-is (for good and ill), but as of this writing, it’s all guesswork.
We admit we are stretching the boundaries of the blog this week, as our profiled location is neither a pub, nor, in any meaningful way in Dublin. The clue, indeed, is in the name: we headed a long way out of town to visit 
First, though, the practicalities and context: it’s a good 90+ minutes on the bus (or train and bus) from Dublin city centre out to the industrial estate that houses Wicklow Wolf’s production brewery and taproom. The occasion in this instance was a 
Once there, we got the usual friendly brewery tour, made a little more in-depth and interesting as we could skip over a lot of the basics that one might get on a more general brewery tour for The Normals (which they absolutely do – the tour after ours was a knees-up for a local women’s rugby team). Instead, we could get some fairly obscure technical questions answered, and go deep on the merits of the brewhouse and the sustainability efforts of the brewery. And then it was on to the tasting, at one of the smaller, private bars that overlooks the brewing floor – your fair scribe was thrilled to see Locavore 2025, a fresh-hopped ESB still on tap (it appeared in cans around town just before the holidays, and as one of a very few bitters available in Ireland, it’s always most welcome to see), but trying the core range of Wicklow Wolf beers was more instructive than expected. We must confess that in general, we don’t gravitate toward Wicklow Wolf’s core range when we see it around town, but the massive difference in quality on-site more than suggested that we’re often not getting it in the best shape elsewhere. Now, to be clear, it’s never been off, but it does make one wish that more pubs looked after their independent lines as lovingly as they do their Diageo and Heineken ones – the beer here was all top-notch.
And beyond a great day out, with some really lovely beers, what was our biggest takeaway?
Another unusual feature of this pub is that 
In any event, the food, drink selection (minus the absent Full Sail, on this occasion) and service are all on point; we’re still disappointed with recent visits to 
This week, we remain on the south side of Dublin with a visit to 
And it was a very pleasant discovery indeed – the Dark Arts was as fresh as promised, but there were other independent offerings as well, notably Sullivan’s Black Marble Stout from Kilkenny. There were several Changing Times beers, and while we 
It’s a very ‘pubby’ pub, with the usual dark woods and a lovely decorative ceiling. The atmosphere was very calming, certainly a change from the post-holiday shopping and pizza lines outside. It wasn’t quite full 
Rather like