Dublin in the Rain, Which Is Just Dublin

The weather, and dressing for it

Bring the coat you think is excessive. Not for cold — March was mild — but because you will be rained on several times a day and you want to be able to ignore it rather than duck into a doorway every time. A hood beats an umbrella; the wind off the bay makes umbrellas a comedy prop.

The upside nobody mentions is the light. Between the showers the sky does something genuinely spectacular, and the whole city goes from grey to gold in about ninety seconds. I took more photographs here than on trips to places that are objectively prettier.

The practical consequence is that you should not build a day around being outdoors at a particular hour. Build it around two or three fixed points and let the weather decide the order.

Where the food actually is

The best meals I had were all in bars, ordered standing up, from someone who was also pouring pints. This is the thing to understand about eating here: the distinction between a pub and a restaurant is much softer than it is elsewhere, and some of the best kitchens in the city are behind a bar with no sign outside.

Seafood is the strength and it is not close. The water is cold and shallow and the shellfish are extraordinary — oysters from Carlingford and Galway, mussels, brown crab, and langoustines that get flown to Spain and France because historically nobody here would pay for them. Chowder is the dish to judge a place by: it should be thick enough to hold a spoon up, full of smoked fish, and served with brown soda bread and too much butter.

Soda bread deserves its own sentence. It is leavened with bicarbonate rather than yeast because soft Irish wheat does not have the protein for a long rise, which is why it is dense and slightly sweet and completely different from any other bread. Eat it with everything.

The rule that worked all week: ask what is good today, and then order exactly that, even if it is not what you wanted. Especially if it is not what you wanted.

The pub, properly

Temple Bar is a theme park version of a thing that exists genuinely four streets away, and you will pay roughly double for it. Walk out of it in any direction and you will find the real version within ten minutes.

What you are looking for is small, wood, no music at four in the afternoon, and people reading. Nobody minds you sitting somewhere for three hours over one drink, and it is completely normal to be there alone with a book. This is the single most pleasant thing about the city.

A pint of stout takes a couple of minutes to pour properly — it is filled most of the way, left to settle, then topped up. If it arrives immediately you are in the wrong place. And it genuinely does taste different here, which I assumed was a story until I drank one at the source and had to concede the point.

Getting out to Howth

The DART north from the city takes about thirty minutes and drops you at a working fishing harbour with a cliff path around the head. It is the best day of the trip and it costs the price of a train ticket.

The loop walk is a couple of hours, mostly easy, with gorse and heather and the whole of Dublin Bay laid out behind you. If the weather closes in — and it will — the harbour has a row of seafood places and a couple of very good pubs, and the day works just as well from indoors.

Buy something from the fish shop by the pier before you get the train back, even if you have nowhere to cook it. I did not, and I have thought about it since.