Ireland day 0612. Friday 02 June 2023- Assassination Custard *

Ireland day 0612. Friday 02 June 2023- Assassination Custard

Today’s summary	Val had a day off work so we went into Dublin and had lunch at “Assassination Custard” in Kevin St Lower. then went to the “Urban Plantlife” Garden Centre in Cork Street. Train back from Pearse Station
Today’s weather	Dry, bright and sunny again. Cool north easterly wind again. Appx 15C again. There’s a bit of a pattern here. Most likely a “blocking high” over the North Atlantic

Today’s overview location (The grey mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where we walked) (No GPX today)

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

Val had a day off work and we decided to make the most of the free time and the good weather to take a trip into Dublin. We wanted to check out a few key destinations that we had heard about but not yet visited.

The first was a tiny and well hidden café enigmatically called “Assassination Custard” (I think you have to know about James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s culinary skills to figure out the derivation of the name), tucked away in an anonymous tenement block on the corner of Kevin Street Lower. It has been catapulted to fame recently following press articles and a visit by the comic Joe Lycett in the UK Channel 4 TV series “Travel Man” (Travel Man on YouTube).

We hadn’t really expected to get in as the café only has 9 seats – but as luck would have it, two people had just left so we were squeezed in (sharing a table with three strangers – actually a fun experience). We managed to get through eight courses (each for sharing, I should add, and about the size of a Spanish tapas dish). The food was excellent and the atmosphere was very friendly while being totally unpretentious – and unspoiled by the recent publicity. It wasn’t cheap at €90 for two, but totally worth it. A really great bit of serendipity.

Once we’d finished chatting to the owners and digesting our lunch, we headed a bit further west to Cork Street, where we wanted to have a look at the Urban Plant Life garden centre – one of the only garden centres in central Dublin. Again. it was a pretty interesting experience, with a much larger area through the gates than you would expect to see just from the modest entrance on the street. As well as outdoor plants, there were some pretty spectacular – if expensive – indoor plants for sale. The beautiful red climbing bougainvillea particularly caught my eye, but at over €100 it wasn’t really a serious consideration. Especially after the expensive lunch.

Exhausted from our day of exploration, we wandered back to St Patrick’s Park to sit in the sun for a bit and enjoy refreshment from the trusty Thermos that I had brought along with us (of course). Finally, suitably refreshed, we ambled back to Pearse station via the Powerscourt centre, and caught a Drogheda train which conveniently pulled in just as we arrived. We were back in the flat less than 30 minutes later. A great day all round!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Official graffiti in progress at Tara Street station. It certainly brightens up what must surely be one of the dullest stations in ireland	Outbound from the café to the garden centre – passing through the mezzanine area at St Patrick’s Park

Val at the entrance to the the Urban Plant Life garden centre. It’s much bigger on the inside than it appears from the entrance on Cork Street	Inside the garden centre. The chimney is clearly some sort of urban relic (now doubling up as a mobile phone mast) but I don’t know what it was

Beautiful Bougainvillea – one of my favourite plants – in the Urban Plant Life garden centre. Never seen one with this particular clustered flowering habit before	OK its June and it’s bright sunshine – but not quite warm enough yet to shed the down jackets. Here we are back in St Patrick’s Park on the way to the station and then on to Malahide

The menu at Assassination Custard – delivered handwritten on a paper bag. I didn’t have the tripe