Eating, Reading & Travelling | February 2024

Another edition of our free monthly digest, jam-packed with deliciously satisfying suggestions for all subscribers

31 long days of January done, and thank F for St Brigid giving us a long weekend to welcome in the season of spring –– yes, traditionally in Ireland spring starts on 1st February!

In celebration of warmer climes and longer days to come (and before we dash off to Kraków for the bank holiday) here’s another edition of our free monthly digest shining a light on some of the best things we’ve eaten, cooked, listened to, watched/streamed or read recently that we hope will inspire you. Think of it as a massive monthly highlights reel, packed full of suggestions…

Travel Inspiration: I Know The Perfect Place

For the last three months Patrick has been compiling, curating, interviewing and editing a travel column called ‘I Know The Perfect Place’ in the Sunday Times Ireland (in print and online weekly). All about hidden travel expertise, it offers killer in-the-know recommendations delivered by someone of note who you never knew had such a keen travel slant. One week it might be a sports star, the next a chef, a hotelier the following, a politician the week after that. Each week the subject (both destination and person) changes. It’s a brilliant little one-pager full of tips and insights and has been received so well! Click on the images above and below for any you’ve missed!

Peter Sztal from Cloud Picker’s guide to Kraków influenced us to book a trip immediately and is now our cherished blueprint to the city this weekend!

Writing about Restaurants… But With A Twist

We know we bang on about being food critics in a national newspaper (the novelty hasn’t been lost on us yet, fifteen months in) but in a new series on Chip Paper we’re delving deeper into the past and sharing those formative restaurant experiences that altered our brain chemistry and left a massive impression on us, long before this job. Some will be Ireland, some will be further afield, the first of which is a tale of how we pushed through hate to unlock true love after an almost fatal first start…

Eating: Everywhere

In our reviews, we’ve gone from east to west, from Dosa Dosa (South Indian street food) in Dublin to OTTO, a new pizza place and wine bar in Sligo. Plus we’ve checked out the new opening The Coach House, a fabulously refurbed pub with food in Roundwood that decrees ‘destination!’. This coming weekend - 🚨EXCLUSIVE ALERT 🚨 - we’re at allta, in its new permanent home in the Dublin Docklands. Don’t miss it!

For Russell’s Dublin Delish escapades on 98FM (ICYMI –– he’s just announced he’s moving from TodayFM to take up a producer job with 98FM) he’s delved into semlor buns around Dublin, showcased the iconic bacon, pear and cheddar sandwich at The Pepper Pot Cafe, savoured Osaka-style okonomiyaki at Okky and gone back to breakfast roll duty at Bolton Street stalwart Declan & Donal.

Take a Look: Cookbook Corner

Spring cleaning must be making us nostalgic as, similar to the new series mentioned above about going back to the past and recounting restaurant memories, we’ve just recently re-organised our cookbook collection and held and flicked through so many books we’d forgotten we have in arm’s reach. See in the image below, this is only 1/3 of our library and, yes, of course HRH Nigella has her own entire shelf.

Of course, best laid plans, we planned to colour-coordinate but that went by the wayside in certain areas due to space. We have more cookbooks with white, green and black covers than any other colour –– though yellow, pink and orange also seem to feature prominently.

Yes, we know there’s two copies of Mezze and two of Cook Eat Repeat. Inching out of shot is an entire shelf dedicated to Blasta Books (cc our published

Well Read & Well Fed

here on Substack) at one end and zines like

Guzzle

, Scoop, Noble Rot, Toast, Jarry and FEAST from

Donal Skehan

which we still mourn.

We considered curating by cuisine and region, like in a bookshop, but felt it would be too mish-mash. This IKEA Billy bookcase (3x attached together) lives in our quite large dining room so it needs to be aesthetically pleasing as well as practical. We considered organising A-Z by author but our brains don’t have the patience or the grey matter to actually figure that out in the first place, let alone trace the line across the shelves later down the line when we need to find one in a hurry.

Cookbooks are precious to us. Look, you’re the same as us we’re sure –– some of these we haven’t opened in years, some of the older ones that we’ve had for over a decade may have only been leafed through once, a couple of cherished relics we’ve nabbed from charity shops we’ve maybe never even touched.

But however often you use your cookbooks there’s comfort in having them to-hand. Sure you can Google a recipe and get 100,000 variations, but having a cookbook in hand, the recipe definitively typed and printed as a seal of approval staring back at you is unbeatable. Every so often, usually in planning a Saturday night dinner or Sunday afternoon feast, this is our place to come and drink up inspiration.

These are as much for research and reference as anything else. Utterances of “Ooh, that’s a nice layout”; “who did the phototography on that one?”; “ah, yes, you can spot her food styling a mile off”. Some of these books we don’t particularly like for one reason or another or maybe the style of food wouldn’t be our go-to. However, as with literature, music, even art, it’s good to surround yourself and be challenged by others in and amongst the authors, musicians and artists you cherish.

Do any of the cookbooks stand out to you? Which do you own too and - what we really want to know - which of these do you cook from the most? We’re off to make a pot of Dishoom Chai….

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