The Spice Bag | September 2024

Our monthly newsletter (free for all subscribers) chock full of delicious recommendations and updates

First of the month, and Autumn just walked in the door… welcome to another edition of our FREE monthly digest, exclusively for our entire Substack readership. A monthly highlights reel, packed full of suggestions of where to eat and drink, places we’ve explored, what we’ve been reading, watching and streaming, which we hope will inspire you in your own exploits!

We’re not ready to let go of summer, are you? We didn’t eat enough tomato salads and there’s so much chilled rosé left unsipped. We weren’t blessed with endless sun-soaked weeks or long holidays in the Greek Isles. We spent much of the summer sweating through a stressful house move and suffering from exhaustion afterwards. But September still does offer a wink of summer as it fades so we’re going to grab onto it. In In the meantime, here’s everything we’ve been loving lately, but first —

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Eating: Great Tastes Lingering This Past Month

• Savoury (cheese ‘n’ chive) waffles ‘round ours, topped with egg and bacon

• An Fear Marbh, Bean In Dingle’s house blend (Brazil, Ethiopia, Guatemala) — we picked up a bag o’beans from Fallon & Byrne for the smell alone, supremely fresh and the perfect medium roast, balancing berry, nutty and sweet notes.

• The Tandoori cauliflower in coconut broth with peanut rāyu from O’Mahonys of Watergrasshill (below, middle) in Cork

• Have been craving club sandwiches and made a couple of mammoth ones in August

Eating: Places We Really Want To Eat In Right This Second…

• Craft in Harold’s Cross (specifically from the sharing of this menu)

• Medlock Canteen in Manchester, we’ve harboured a LONG term crush

• Dreaming about being back in Tartarun in Malta

• Skaus in Liverpool, mostly because of these hash browns

• Lotties in Rathmines (which we reviewed last year) for this stunning steak

• In other steak news, this steak royale for *breakfast* at the super-hyped Fallow in London (which we have heard so-so experiences of but still want to try)

Eating: Sunday Times Ireland Restaurant Reviews + Dublin Delish

For our Sunday Times Ireland reviews over the last three weeks we’ve covered:

• Cool wine bar with food Esther’s in Mount Merrion

• The Cove, Fota Island Resort’s newly-refreshed fine dining effort in East Cork

• and this week’s review is Carved in Ballsbridge, a relative newcomer to the scene slinging properly cheffy sandwiches with big flavours (but provenance needs work)

Travelling: Southampton + Everywhere We Ate in Boston 🇺🇸

Last weekend we ventured to Southampton for the first time; part press-trip, part visiting our friends who live locally. We FINALLY got to go to The Pig in The New Forest, which we have heard stunning things about for literal years. It was worth the wait, a phenomenal space, see our reel here.

At the time of writing we’ve just returned back east from a weekend out west in the stunning surrounds of Ballynahinch Castle in Connemara. Tell you more about that in a future piece, but for now check out our latest travel guide: a snappy overview of a recent trip to Boston and quite literally every place we ate and drank in, from diners for breakfast to dinners centered around tinned fish.

Reading

It feels a bit conceited to say, we’ve been re-reading a lot of our own Substack archive… We’re into our third year writing here and relishing the body of work we’ve put forward. We’ve eked out a space we longed our blog to be for so many years, full of essays and long-reads.

So while we’ve been looking over our own work we have also been sharing ‘From The Archive’ posts on Notes every few days this past month.

We’re going to compile our top ten performing posts in a standalone feature soon, but first we’re going to shed some light in an upcoming long read about what our plan was with Substack for years one, two and three and how they differed (or didn’t, or did we even have a plan at all?) –– which follows this post we published the other day about why we chose Chip Paper as a name…

More Reading

• “Six Signs You’re in a Great Local Restaurant” [Good Food Guide]

• “[The breakfast buffet] is the real reason people book trips” [The Times]

• We just got our hands on Kung Pao & Beyond (AF), a cookbook all about fried chicken around South and Southeast Asia, by Susan Jung. Can you imagine a more perfect cookbook to land in our hands? €20 well spent!

Thanks for reading! Chip Paper is brought to you by Patrick Hanlon and Russell Alford, also known collectively under our brand name: GastroGays. Irish food and travel writers, Sunday Times Ireland restaurant critics, broadcasters and content creators, this is our home of food long-reads, deep-dives and guides. You can find us elsewhere on Instagram, TikTok and our website GastroGays.com