Adam Sheridan and Hilary O’Hagan Brennan met while working at Dublin coffe shop 3FE, as manager and head chef respectively. With the support of their former boss Colin Harmon, they pair launched Five Points Coffee just before St Patrick’s Day.
Five Points Coffee is settled into the cluster of businesses across the road from the Harold’s Cross petrol station, just before the perilous five-pronged crossroads (the bane of a learner driver’s life) that is the infrastructural meeting point between Kimmage, Terenure, Rathgar, Rathmines and Harold’s Cross in Dublin 6w. The café’s logo and identity was designed by WorkGroup, the Irish design company behind the 3FE logo.
Not all great coffee shops have great food. Which is fine. You don’t all have to be all things to all people. At Five Points, O’Hagan Brennan has developed a menu which reflects the residential nature of their location while tantalisingly pushing the boat out with clever flavours, pickled vegetables and straight-up great produce.
For lunch, I fall in love with the smoked bacon rarebit (€9). A slice of Firehouse Bakery sourdough is topped with a creamy béchamel sauce laced with wild garlic and smoked bacon. It’s topped with a fried egg sprinkled with sumac.
On the side is a citrus salad with toasted buckwheat, lightly pickled baby carrots, slivers of pickled pink beetroots and crunchy purple chicory. It’s an inspiring reflection of the change of season from winter to spring, the comforting rarebit paired with the sunny zing of citrus fruits. I love it.
On the shelves at Five Points are bags of coffee beans, and Aeropress and Chemex kits for sale. There are jars of sauerkraut, alongside those pickled beets and carrots. There are a bunch of large Kilner jars on the shelves, empty and waiting, hinting at the possibility of a fermented future in the Five Points kitchen.
Myself and Sheridan talk about the curse of the flat white. Like 3FE, at Five Points Coffee they serve coffee black or white, to avoid the confusing grey area of what makes a flat white a flat white. This approach has changed the way I feel about how coffee is served. Rather than getting caught up in the strict idea of what a flat white should be like, which I admit I have done in the past, perhaps a better approach is to trust your barista and ask them why they’re making that particular coffee in that specific way?
Five Points white coffee comes in a 6oz cup as a double shot, topped with steamed milk. Sheridan brings the best out of the Fazenda Passeio, a pulped natural processed Brazilian bean.
“This is the best way to serve this coffee in our opinion,” says Sheridan. “It’s like a recipe for a cake, and this is our recipe.” Seems to me that Sheridan and O’Hagan Brennan have hit upon a recipe for success at Five Points Coffee.
