Then, a vibrant Jewish hub. Now, a culinary hotbed
On a wet Friday evening on the south side of Dublin, near the Portobello neighbourhood’s busy and unfashionable Leonard’s Corner, eight lanes of traffic criss-crossed near a halal grocer, takeout shops, the fluorescent tube lighting at Washers Laundry, and the yearold modern Irish restaurant Bastible.
Inside the restaurant, three sure-footed chefs led by Barry FitzGerald, who is also an owner, worked in an open kitchen, sending out adventurous dishes that involved behindthe-scenes prep work, including house-pickling, curing and fermenting. Thin slivers of zingy, house-pickled kohlrabi were wrapped around sweet Kilkeel crab.
“Beef dripping toasts” that had the crispness of a wafer and the rich unctuousness of bone marrow accompanied a venison tartare topped with shavings of cured egg yolk.
Portobello, an ever-evolving neighbourhood, has been called Little Jerusalem for its once-vibrant Jewish community.
“In the 1880s up to the 1940s, most of the Jewish population lived in Portobello,” said Yvonne Altman O’Connor, a curator and vice chair of the Irish Jewish Museum, which is situated in a former synagogue in the neighbourhood. The number of Jewish residents in Dublin peaked around 3,500 in 1946 before dwindling to less than half that number today, according to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office.
Over the past couple of years, ambitious chefs and independent entrepreneurs like FitzGerald, who trained under the acclaimed British chef Fergus Henderson before running the kitchen at the Harwood Arms, London’s sole Michelin-starred pub, have flocked to this still-gritty neighbourhood bordering the Grand Canal. The enclave has emerged as the city’s latest culinary hotbed, one marked by experimentation and international flavours.
“The area lends itself to new and innovative projects because it’s not very gentrified,” said Kate Farnon, the project manager of Eatyard, a new outdoor street food market in the neighbourhood. “There are derelict spaces to choose from, and rents are still low.”
Three years ago, a third of the storefronts were boarded up on South Richmond, one of the neighbourhood’s main streets, said Lily Ramirez-Foran, who along with her husband, Alan Foran, opened Picado Mexican, their stylish and colourful Mexican grocer and cooking venue, back then. “It was very rundown, and very few people wanted to give the area a go,” she said. “But it was all we could afford.”
On a recent chilly Saturday evening, six participants of Picado’s enchilada workshop huddled around Ramirez-Foran, taking turns deseeding and toasting dried guajillo chiles as she peppered instructions with lively anecdotes from her childhood in Monterrey, Mexico.
Nearby, open shelves displayed ingredients, including corn tortillas, masa harina and canned tomatillos (fresh ones, grown for her by a farmer about 130 kilometres away in County Wexford, were sold out).
Ramirez-Foran said a domino effect had occurred on the street. She watched as Russell Wilde and David O’Byrne, who had operated restaurants in some of Dublin’s most upscale neighbourhoods, took over the boarded-up diner next door and reopened it as the handsome restaurant Richmond in December 2015.
On a recent visit there, O’Byrne’s ambitious cooking — modern Irish with French and Italian influences — included a tender pressed venison shank served with woodsyflavoured juniper jus.
South Richmond Street’s latest culinary coup is Eatyard, which is open Thursday through Sunday and hosts nine food and drink vendors. On a visit last month, the offerings included pork belly steamed buns, freshly made naan and more, served from a mishmash of set-ups that included large shipping containers and an old postal van in a 7,500-square-foot lot that had been empty for more than a decade beside a funky pub, the Bernard Shaw. Nirvana — old-school rock for the millennial crowd milling about — blasted from the speakers, while a sense of bonhomie and the smell of grilled meat filled the air.
Less than 100 metres away, Bretzel Bakery, a holdover from Portobello’s Jewish heyday, has stood in the same corner building since the late 19th century and still bakes its challah from the original recipe. In 2014, Bretzel’s owner, William Despard, added a café with a handful of blond wooden tables and a small menu offering sandwiches like its pastrami special with Gruyère cheese and sweet onion marmalade on toasted sourdough bread.
“The only restaurants that used to be in Portobello were the kind of places you ended up in to sober up,” said Despard, a longtime resident of the neighbourhood. “Now, these new food businesses are interesting, honest and independently owned. They’ve made Portobello a trendy place to eat.”