Guinness for Strength!

July 19, 2023

From Keash, we set off across the country to Dublin.  In the process, we crossed through the rural Midlands through Counties Roscommon, Leitrim, Longford, Westmeath, Meath, Kildare.  Yet again, they offered a vastly different landscape than we had seen before - much more pastoral.  The only notable event from our drive was when we stopped off at a gas station and ran into a big group of twentysomething (and maybe thirtysomething) soccer hooligans gearing up for a Celtic FC match.  One of them had just parked his car in the middle of the drive into the gas station, making it difficult for us to get by.  Otherwise, we reached the Dublin airport in great time, dropped our rental car, and hopped in cabs to the city.

We were staying in Number 31, a hotel with which neither of our taxi drivers was apparently familiar.  Kati and my driver tried to drop us at The Merrion Hotel, which is one of the most expensive hotels in the city.  When we redirected him, he derisively asked, "Is that one of those expensive artsy hotels?  No offense."  In truth, that kind of summed up Number 31 (in a good way).  The hotel sits in the home of Sam Stephenson, who lived there in the 1950s and may be Dublin's most famous modernist architect.  The lobby of the hotel is in Sam's sunken lounge, which is listed as one of the 100 places to see in Dublin and was a draw for many international names, including Henry Kissinger.  The art deco hotel is split between Number 31 Leeson Close and another Georgian mansion across a beautifully manicured secret garden.  The art deco rooms are uniquely themed around various jazz musicians.  Ours door was painted for Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday while the Justices' was painted for Ella Fitzgerald and Bird (Charlie Parker).

Once again, we got to the hotel before our rooms were ready, so we ran down the street Madigans Pub for a quick bite and then walked down to Merrion Square where we poked our head in the National Gallery.  The gallery was very oddly laid out and confused us enough that we lost a lot of the time we had to spend exploring the more interesting Irish collections, but it was particularly neat to see several sculptures from Auguste Rodin.  Of course it was also cool to see works by Picasso, Monet, and Degas, but I was also a little mad at myself after we left because I had forgotten the reason I wanted to go there in the first place.  It's home to Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ.  Alas.  Maybe next time.

We didn't have a ton of time to spend at the National Gallery because we had a 4:30 reservation at the Guinness Storehouse.  I was excited to visit Guinness, but I underestimated just how excited Morgan and Tyler were.  Our 1.5-mile taxi ride there took us more than 20 minutes and the most anxious I've seen Morgan was during that ride when she thought we might be late!  To say that Guinness did a good job with the experience would be an understatement.  They walk you through everything, starting from the individual ingredients and the history of the Guinness family, to the history of advertisements and a tasting room wafting in the scents underlying the beer.  It was filled with unbelievable facts, like that Guinness purchases two-thirds of the malting barley grown on the island of Ireland every year, and hilarious old-school advertisements.  The gravity bar, seven stories up, also offered outstanding views of the city with which we were still trying to acclimate ourselves.

Dinner was what I had been most excited about.  I had woken up at 4:00 am months earlier to book us a table at Chapter One, which has two Michelin stars.  Not just that, we had scored the coveted demi salle table, built into a reclaimed and refurbished cellar space.  The experience did not disappoint!  We started with a series of canapés that blew our minds.  The first was a cherry tomato that they had somehow filled with soup so it exploded when you bit into it.  The second was a sea trout tartlet, and the third was this delicious bignet-style ball stuck into a blackened piece of bog wood.  For our first course, I chose the mackerel tartare with oyster bavarois, kohlrabi, Kaluga hybrid caviar, and spiced elderflower bouillon while the others all went with foie gras royale with apple, walnut, and smoked eel.  Tyler and Morgan weren't too keen on the foie gras, so they passed it on to Kati who was literally giggling and shaking with excitement as she ate it!  After the first course, we also learned that we got different breads between each course.  Kati liked the butter that came with the first bread so much that she stopped the waiter to ask what was in it.  He proudly said, "That's just real butter.  Real Irish butter."  Next we had BBQ Donegal lobster, followed by roast Normandy yellow chicken "Demi-Deuli."  Both were truly phenomenal.  I broke from the group again for dessert and ordered the wild and cultivated strawberries, vanilla, and violet, while everyone else went for the grand cru coffee dessert in three services.  My dessert only came with two, and apparently the waiters didn't want me to feel left out when everyone else had three desserts, so they brought me a third too!  After an amazing 3+ hour dinner, we were all wiped so we opted not to head out for more drinks and went to bed instead.