This is the newsletter of Le Bec Fin , a wine and food club. We spent a week in Dublin this trip, rather than drive around Ireland which I'd done a few times previously. We stayed in a Georgian house in Dun Laoghaire, loaned to us by a Windsor friend. James Joyce lived there for a short time and his grand novel Ulysses begins at the nearby Martello Tower, now a Joyce museum. Dublin is not one of the world's most beautiful cities but it has soul, thanks to Joyce and others who wrote so well about it, and the people who live there.
Eccentricity seems to thrive in the air.
The sound of people spontaneously singing together on the DART and buses is startling to those of us from self-conscious North America. Dubliners have a natural gift for conversation. Theatre is lively and pubs like John M. Keating serve up traditional Irish music as well as great Guiness. And Dublin's restaurant scene is exciting. Here chef Colin O'Daly takes great Irish seafood, meat and greens to new heights.