It’s sad that this is my idea of excitement
IWAS entranced by the huge glitterball pizza oven. I suppose I was a bit overstimulated anyway from everything. The woman who was waiting for her pizzas out of it caught me looking. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” she said. She was grinning ear to ear, practically doing a dance. I was relieved to be able to express my enthusiasm openly. We agreed we were pathetic, but we also agreed this was the best thing that had happened in our tiny lives in a while. I bet she didn’t even want pizzas, did she? “I have a cooked chicken as well”, she said breathlessly.
You’d think the D4 crowd would be too jaded to get excited about the new Avoca, but we were giddy. I met a hospitality and publishing legend who had come over on the pretext of having a coffee, and his eyes were shining like a child at Christmas. “We live just across the road!” he boasted, as if it had been an amazing feat of prescience to buy a house where he did, knowing this day would come. And you could see that for this man, who has dined in the finest restaurants in the world, probably with some of the finest people, this new Avoca was a game changer.
I didn’t need pizza either but I wanted one. And I wanted to try the Asian pop-up. But we had just eaten a very delicious and very late lunch in the restaurant at the back. So my wife wouldn’t eat again. I even wanted to try the porridge bar. And I don’t eat porridge. It was just all so new and shiny and lovely.
It was the first day of it, and it wasn’t yet quite teatime, so the place wasn’t too packed. But I was already getting a slight anxiety about the fact that it would be packed, all the time. You’d never get a table in the restaurant bit. And the pizzas would be gone anytime I’d get there. And the Asian pop-up lads would have gone fishing for the day because they got sold out by noon. Because everyone was going to love this. It’s so new and shiny and lovely and we all have sad lives where this is what counts as excitement. Such simple creatures.
We’d had a glass of wine with the very late lunch, and that coupled with the cheese counter and the salad bar and all the lovely things had me on a bit of a high. And we had no kids for another hour. So I made my wife come to the pub with me. We went to the Bridge Bar, where I never go because I’d be worried it would be heaving with the rugby crowd. But it was early evening and there were just a few couples and regulars. They had these giant shiny tanks next to the bar. The barman explained to me it was unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell. It takes three days to come from the Czech Republic and then it lasts 15 days in the tank, he said. So I had to have that. Such excitement. In fairness it was good. It tasted alive, nearly something of the farmyard about it, a slightly yeasty sourness, like someone’s home-brew.
I was almost thinking that the Urquell and the new Avoca were finally making me feel like I belonged in D4, but when the barman was explaining about the Urquell he asked me had I not seen on Jamie Heaslip’s Instagram the time the tank exploded. But of course I hadn’t. I wasn’t in the loop. I was probably the only one in D4 who hadn’t seen the tank exploding on Jamie Heaslip’s Instagram.
But then again, sitting back drinking that rich sour beer, I decided that it’s time to get over my inverse snobbery and my outsider fetish and my fear of privilege.
Shure isn’t it nice to be able to get beer fresh from the Czech Republic with the clock running down on it before it explodes, and pizzas from Disco-ball ovens, and posh spaghetti bolognaise and mussels for late lunch. Aren’t we lucky to have those stolen moments sometimes?