Kaylynn Bryan, Summer Nursing at Trinity College Dublin Summer 2023
Eating food is one of my favorite pastimes. I like almost everything and am willing to try anything. Because Dublin is such a huge city in Ireland, there are hundreds of different places to try and eat at. There are the traditional Irish places, Mexican, American, Chinese, Japanese, and lots of Italian places. It felt impossible to pick a place for each meal! If I am being honest, however, it was hard to find high quality places that were not extremely expensive. In Ireland, they use euros, and it is also quite pricy to live there and buy from there. Especially because it is a popular vacation destination, they know that they can up the prices. Being in a tourist area, this also meant that if you wanted to go to those nicer places, you must make a reservation. For the weekends, the nice restaurants will be completely booked until Monday if you called on a Thursday. Unfortunately, we did not know that and did not make it to some of the places we wanted to go to. It is also harder to find places that accommodate for large groups unless you have a reservation.
Despite these troubles we had, we still found smaller local spots that we absolutely loved. I recommend using Yelp to find these locations. For breakfast, I loved trying a different coffee shop every day. Something that was interesting was that these places rarely had plain coffee, as they would only have espresso drinks. Their espresso and coffee taste different, even at Starbucks. Also, a professor told us that she thought it was funny that we all sipped our coffees during lecture. They did not mind if we did it, but in Ireland people usually ate breakfast and drank coffee at home. In terms of foods, a must try is the traditional Irish breakfast which is served at almost all sit down breakfast restaurants. This breakfast includes eggs, sausage, hash browns, beans, and roasted tomatoes. We did a lot of the grab and go breakfasts that they serve in the convenience shops. For lunch, there were not many options for places to sit down at. A lot of the lunch foods would come prepackaged, and they would heat them up for you. I absolutely loved their paninis, which seemed to be everywhere. It was interesting to try their chips that we also have at home, especially their version of Pringles. For dinners, traditional Irish food includes lots of gravy with meats. My favorite meals were beef and Guinness, traditional Irish stew, and chicken and mushrooms. I would really recommend trying to get to The Hairy Lemon and the Celtic Nights. Both places had the best Irish food I had on the trip. For dessert, they have gelato everywhere! One of our favorite things to do was get gelato and walk around to explore the city. There were also countless dessert and candy shops that are so fun to go into. One thing I definitely recommend doing is trying all the different candies and chocolates that are in the convenience shops. They all taste so different compared to those in America, which was something I did not totally expect. Overall, I was not thoroughly impressed by all the food we ate, but there are definitely smaller spots worth trying and bigger spots worth making a reservation for.
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