"Make sure you have the Irish breakfast," said more than one person who found out I was headed to Ireland. Well they were all wrong. This blog is about greasy food in the Dublin, Ohio area. But given that I was able to sample greasy food in Dublin, Ireland, I thought it important and relevant to our readership.
The breakfast buffet at my hotel was not a continental breakfast. It was in an actual restaurant and was fairly high-end, costing about $16. It just wasn't any good. Apparently the Irish don't do waffles, pancakes, or French toast, which is fine as I'm a bacon-and-eggs guy myself. They also don't do much in the way of fruit. I can't recall ever complaining about every item in a buffet, so this will likely sound whiney, but it's well-deserved. We might as well go by section:
Bread
Scones, soda-bread, and sliced white and wheat breads were available. I enjoyed the scones with a bit of strawberry jam, and the soda bread wasn't bad. The white bread was big and fairly tasteless (probably not as sugary as ours) and not particularly edible for me without jam or an egg on top (more on eggs later). Bread was the best part of the menu.
Meat and Potatoes
The meat and potato station contained bacon, sausage, eggs, and strange stuff like whole mushrooms. I tried the scrambled eggs despite the fact that they were sitting in water. They'd have been edible were they not incredibly salty. The bacon and sausage were what I was looking forward to, but the bacon was quite unlike ours. Looked more like Canadian bacon and very fatty. Not terribly tasty either. The sausage looked like regular links, but were a bit lighter in color than what we typically get. Now, I know that we don't want to know what goes into sausage. I recognize that a lot of nasty stuff goes in there. But there's a pact between us and the sausage-makers. We don't ask how they make it, and they make it taste good. The Irish have no such agreement, however. I think I got a sausage filled with butt. I know some use natural casings. I don't think mine was ever cleaned out in the first place. It tasted like the original filling.
Fortunately, they did offer fried eggs, cooked to order, which proved to be my salvation. Fried egg, on toast, with a shot of fresh-squeezed orange juice (not bad) and some awful coffee became my repertoire. Each day I added something else to try. Something never included the next day.
Fruit
I'm not really sure what some of this stuff was. There was a bowl of apricots in syrup, and another bowl of fruit salad, again in heavy syrup. Finally, there was a bowl of a completely unidentifiable red fruit (in heavy syrup). I tried only the fruit salad, which was too syrupy to eat much of.
Cereal
This should have been safe. The cereal table held half a dozen large open bowls of cereal, including corn flakes, rice krispies, and various other healthy-looking varieties. However, the milk sat out in pitchers, and was just about room temperature by the time it hit my bowl.
Overall, breakfast was an exasperating experience: food, food all around, but nary a bite to eat. I should note that while I didn't particularly enjoy "traditional Irish" fare while I was there... nobody actually eats that stuff anyway. There is good food in Dublin, but you've got to look for it.
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