A Taste of Dublin

I have been having too much fun.

Friday night was bookclub night. It featured strongly of delicious food, great company and Prosecco. I should say literature too, but that wouldn’t be true.

Yes, I managed to squeeze in a three mile run before that. Enough to offset the damage from all those Prosecco bubbles maybe, but maybe not the calorific magnificence of blueberry cheesecake and tiramisu. Sometimes I am more pig than hen.

And the fun rolled on…

Yesterday I rambled off into the Taste of Dublin in the city’s delightful Iveagh Gardens.

Twenty five euro(or 17.50 online) gains you entry into this beautiful tented village. Each tent features tasting menus from restaurants all over the city and the idea is that you can sample food from each in exchange for the village currency, florins.

One florin=one euro. Got it?

And there’s the florin bank where you can exchange your hard-won cash for these, well, vouchers. They’re non-refundable by the way, so you’ll have to spend them all in the village. Hmmmm, I am not a big fan of vouchers but at least there are ample opportunities to rid yourself of them…

…if you like queues…

…or Prosecco

Fortunately, I am more fond of the latter so I soon settled in with a glass or two and a little nibble of, well, I am not sure what…

As this was the last morsel of food it that particular stand, I reluctantly shared it with my pal. Fortunately I managed to resist the urge to eat the bamboo container and, critically, managed to keep the Prosecco all to myself.

It seemed that food was going to be a tad thin on the ground at Taste if we were to take the non-queuing, Prosecco drinking route. We were not alone, however, as lots of other people were laying around enjoying a few drinks and savouring the muggy June heat.

I had expected more of a Bloom type food hall experience. I had a wonderful time at last year’s Bloom festival wandering from stand to stand and getting a real sense of how much Irish food produce there is out there. Silver Hill duck, Rudd’s puddings, Sheridan’s cheese, Danuta chocolates, Clarke’s strawberries, Big Al’s burgers, all featured at Bloom but my experience was nothing like that at Taste. Just queues for the better known restaurants, and teeny tiny morsels of pretty stuff.

Apart from the queues, the whole thing was very well run. And the pretty, girly theme abounded.

Everything was kept pretty and clean by a super efficient team of college students who bustled about as waiters, guides, janitors and general helpers.

Indeed, most of it seemed to be well run, including, from what I could see of it, the business side of things. There were certainly a lot of sponsors represented in this year’s show. With ticket prices on the steep side and not guaranteeing a taste of anything much, someone, somewhere was happily totting up the cash.

We pooled the last of our florins and joined a queue for very decent cappuchino and very very dry cake…