The Dublin food scene is once again reinventing itself. It’s incredibly exciting and brimming with talent: chefs, producers, managers and more blend and compete for custom in a town that has become very aware of its ability, producing great food stories. One of the most popular of the new food champions is Garrett Fitzgerald, a restaurateur who in the pursuit of flavour and reinvention has seen his two restaurants, Brother Hubbard and Sister Sadie, take centre stage in the capital. The latest chapter in his journey is a new book, The Brother Hubbard Cookbook which seeks to capture the essence of his business on the page.
These flavours are of places he’s visited like Lebanon, Syria and Turkey and they dominate his menus and introduce diners to combinations of flavours that are both surprising and familiar all at once. The restuarant has carved out a very particular niche that suits its location on Capel Street, a north-side strip that makes room for Middle Eastern cuisine in an incredibly familiar way. His neighbours are craft beer shops, pawn shops, bakeries, clothes and hardware shops, each propping up the other in a street that appears to be fiercely independent.
Fitzgerald believes in local suppliers, local produce, Dublin products. He works hard to wrap his menus in Irish inspiration but digs deep into his journeys abroad. You can spot his past in his work – the standards he picked up in Ballymaloe, the casual dining style of Melbourne, the Middle Eastern influences that characterise his style.
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Every journey, every interaction appears to fuel his ambition, allowing him to conjure a welcome to his guests. In the kitchen, greeting guests, meeting suppliers, simply watching life pass by on the street outside, Brother Hubbard has managed to dig its roots deep into the bedrock of Dublin while staying truly international and new.
In every way a celebration of the best of both worlds.
PROFILE – THE AUDI Q7 E-TRON
A plug-in hybrid that delivers performance, power, fuel efficiency and environmental friendliness So, you want to be as eco-friendly as possible in your day-to-day driving but you also do a fair bit of heavy mileage at weekends. What's the solution? One option is two cars. An electric vehicle (EV) for the daily commute, the school run, and quick spins to the shops and sports club. And a heavy duty roadster which can gobble up the miles when heading out and about on all standards of roads and perhaps where there aren't even roads.
That works, but it’s a very expensive option and maybe not that eco-friendly after all when you look at the environmental costs associated with the manufacture and maintenance of two vehicles, only one of which will be on the road at any given time. Thankfully, Audi – the home of Vorsprung Durch Technik – has come up with a solution in the form of the Q7 e-tron 3.0 TDI Quattro which offers both cars in one vehicle. It’s a brand new concept, a plug-in hybrid which delivers a unique combination of performance and power, fuel efficiency and environmental friendliness, comfortable city driving and rugged long distance and off-road capabilities when necessary.
You get all the advantages of an electric vehicle with none of the associated range anxiety thanks to the e-tron’s advanced plug-in hybrid technology. You plug it in at night, or whenever suits, to charge it up and you can get up to 56km driving around town or other shorter distances on the battery. The powerful V6 TDI engine and Quattro drive come into play for longer drives or when a bit more pulling power is required.
For the technically minded, the car generates 373 bhp of system power and 700Nm of system torque. Acceleration is pretty impressive as well – the e-tron can take off from a standing start to 100 km/h in just 6.2 seconds. All this sets the Q7 e-tron apart from other hybrids which do not have an external charging facility. This limits their electric driving range to just a few kilometres and is therefore more of a fuel efficiency technology rather than genuine EV capability. And when it comes to overall fuel efficiency it is hard to imagine any hybrid beating the Q7 e-tron, which delivers a quite amazing 156 miles per gallon over a fairly average mix of town driving and longer distances.
And you get this with no compromise on Audi’s usual high standards of comfort, space and technology. Indeed, the virtual cockpit display gives you all the information you need in terms of the car’s performance along with maps and so on while the dedicated phone app allows you to monitor it remotely and even locate and disable it should it be stolen.
For anyone looking for the best of all worlds when it comes to their driving the Audi Q7 e-tron is certainly an option worth considering. For more see audi.ie