Dublin By Pub

Once upon a hungover Sunday two mates and I found ourselves in search of the cure. Tired of the local haunt we strived to push the boat out a bit further and try somewhere different. Unfortunately not all the requisite synapses were firing in the appropriate manner and we ended up in The Beaumont House; a respectable distance from our usual Sunday sanctuary but not exactly the change of pace we had envisaged.

As the desired effect of the hair of the dog began to take root, our normal recourse of conversation resumed. This conversation soon turned to comment on our surroundings and in the midst of arguing the pros and cons of carvery bars in pubs (me being vehemently against) the nature of the chat turned to more of an exploratory nature as we began to question each other on pubs each of us had visited individually.

This in turn led us in an effort to try to quantify the amount of the city’s pubs we had drank in between ourselves, and in realising that we had amassed a decent amount between the three of us, we vowed to make a go of it. To drink in every pub in Dublin.

All of the above is very good and well, but this idea of actually getting to all the pubs in the city didn’t really take any structure amongst ourselves for a good while after its inception. For years the idea of “the list” as we called it was no more than a topic of conversation between friends.

Eventually, we managed to get the finger out and put in a bit more of a driven effort. Around this time last year we decided that we needed to keep a record of our efforts, we agreed that an image of the exterior of each pub accompanied by a few words on our experience there would suffice as a record. Instagram became a natural home for these records and the page grew from there.

Currently our boundaries are set on the north and the south by the canals – The Royal and The Grand. Our western boundaries have been loosely set around The Phoenix Park, Kilmainham and the circular roads – The North and The South. We have a loose, ever-evolving, hypocritical set of guidelines (which we will get around to posting) on what we do and what we don’t consider to be a pub, but that said we don’t discriminate. There’s no pub too rough or too affluent, we’re looking to tick them all. Check out the image below for our current defining boundaries of Dublin City, we’re currently in talks to expand east to include all of East Wall and Ringsend.

Overall we estimate we are somewhere between 80% – 90% complete within our catchment area. We’re in the process of trying to quantify this more accurately.

The real task ahead of us is revisiting places we’ve been to and snapping them and trying to recall them for the written review. See below for a map of the pubs that we’ve posted on Instagram so far.