Food on the hoof

IT DOESN’T TAKE much to lure me off the streets into the warmth of a venue. But when a blackboard promises venison stew followed by the magic number €5, it’s a culinary cartoon hook round the neck. The board sat outside the Grand Social on Liffey Street in Dublin, the revamped Pravda, and I promised myself a return visit when I had more time.

The opportunity came on a Saturday afternoon with the eldest and a trip to the toyshop to spend some pocket money. These are the days when shopping trips turn to endurance tests. We wander through stuffy shops in outdoor layers, snow-blinded by choice, bags getting heavier until it feels like we are schlepping around blocks of lead. The chance to sit down and eat is a blessed relief.

First to the Grand Social. It’s a short trot from Henry Street and worth the diversion. We head upstairs where it’s coddle today at €5 a pop. The coddle is ladled out of a soup cauldron on the bar into cardboard cartons that you can take away or eat on a high stool with a plastic spoon. The compensation for all this austerity is in the cooking. The stuff comes from the kitchen of The Winding Stair on the nearby quays, down a passageway linking the two. It’s a bit like getting your Ballymaloe-trained sister to cater your student bedsit dinner party.

The coddle is a steaming soup of potato slices, shards of rosemary, thumb-sized chunks of sausages, stringy onion and sodden rags of rasher. It’s soup-slurping wonderful. I’m a bit of a coddle wimp, finding the prospect of boiled “unborn” sausages in this Dublin dish a bit off-putting. But here the sausages were browned first and the whole thing is delicious. “You should say it’s a dinner for winter,” my boy says with a serious look, and we invent a new dish – the coddle dog. Sausages dripping with juices dropped into soft, warm, poppy-seeded Bretzel bread rolls that come on the side. Heaven in a bun.

In front of us, the Saturday Ha’penny Flea is happening under a disco ball with 1970s disco playing one minute, 1920s jazz the next. It reminds me of those warm, friendly café and market spaces you find in Brooklyn neighbourhoods. They serve a stew or coddle here every day and most days there is a vegetarian option. Today a man is eating his coddle one-handed with a baby girl on his knee as they look adoringly at each other. Two people arrive and order “two yokes of stew please”. And I spend another fiver on a top the colour of the purple hazelnut and caramel sweet in the Quality Street tin. There are luscious-looking slices of carrot cake and poppy seed cake for €1.60 on the bar but we resist as we’re going elsewhere for dessert.

Over the Ha’penny bridge gets us to Meeting House Square, where the Temple Bar food market is on. The place is full of food smells and sizzles but we’re heading to the Temple Oyster Bar for a first-taste of oysters. You can buy them for €2 a pop here, cheaper than a pick-me-up coffee and a bit more special.

We sit at the long bench alongside a group slurping the €12 platter of six that comes with brown bread and a plastic cup of wine. I order two singles (€4) and they arrive on a small wooden platter. The boy manfully tries his, a tentative nibble on the end. “A bit too sea-ish,” he says. “Well, it’s a brave man who ate the very first oyster,” the man behind the bar says encouragingly. A squeeze of lemon and they’re both mine. Brackish and tooth-achingly freezing, they’re almost oyster popsicles in this weather but are tasty and different as a snack.

Then it’s on to South Great George’s Street for dessert. We arrive at Urban Picnic in the Market Arcade (which I always knew as the George’s Street Arcade), a small restaurant run by Vinny Donohoe, a Cavan man who worked as a pastry chef on the QE2, according to his menu. I’ve heard that lunch here is great and the menu looks good, with soup and home-made bread starting at €3.95. There’s a serving of house breads with cheese and dips for €6.50 that sounds very appealing, and a bruschetta with marinated plum tomatoes for €5.

We order two hot chocolates (€3 each) and a slice of lemon tart (€4). The hot chocolates come with an inch of brown froth on top in those tall glasses with long spoons to stir up the chocolate at the bottom.

The lemon tart is served with fancy chocolate curlicues on the plate, a ball of strawberry ice cream, and a tiny piece of shortbread baked in the shape of the number one and dusted with icing sugar. Donohoe Vinny has obviously brought some of his tricks on to dry land. The lemon tart is more flan than tart (less citrus bite and more egg) but good nonetheless, and the presentation is pretty special for a breakfast and lunch bar.

We’ve eaten some great Irish cooking on the hoof and avoided having to queue with a sticky tray for uninspiring fodder. It has been a lovely afternoon, and I don’t often say that about shopping trips.

Coddle, oysters and hot chocolate with dessert for two came to €24.