Rare creatures such as the Unicorn need protection as part of the soul of our city
The Unicorn restaurant in the heart of Dublin has a charm and a history that should not be swept away, writes
GRADUALLY, the little corners that make any city interesting are beginning to disappear from Dublin, with the quest for greater profits by developers and corporations replacing the old soul of the city.
The latest building to come under threat is the Unicorn restaurant in Merrion Court, a terrace of old buildings which may be of no particular architectural merit, but have a quaint indefinable quality and are a reminder of things past. It is, as author Frank McDonald put it, “part of the landscape and cultural memory of Dublin”.
The Unicorn, although nondescript in many ways and ripe for what one objector has described as “a honky-tonk” development just off St Stephen’s Green, has one thing going for it — the curse of WB Yeats which has lingered over its old timbers for more than a century.
In more recent times, the Unicorn was perhaps best known as the centre of Dublin’s ‘‘cafe society’’ colonised by a raucous gathering of ‘‘movers and shakers’’, particularly for long boozy Saturday lunches.
A motley crew, often at adjoining tables, could include the government press secretary PJ Mara, film producer Noel Pearson, journalists Eamon Dunphy, Olivia O’Leary and Sam Smyth, U2 manager Paul McGuinness, who has a house nearby, Michael Colgan of the Gate Theatre, politicians Michael McDowell and Mary
Harney, and barristers Adrian Hardiman and Gerry Danaher. They gossiped and made mischief into the evening, some bringing guests from abroad to entertain them with Dublin’s small town but tantalising gossip — the stuff that a couple of generations earlier the writer George Moore gathered for his book Hail and Farewell.
Mara described it as
“an exchange and mart for scurrility and calumny”, and afterwards the hardiest repaired to the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne or ‘‘Doheny’s’’ to continue the revelry. It may even have been the place that inspired the ill-received notion of introducing cafe-bars to Ireland. The idea, conceived by McDowell when he was Minister for Justice, was all too readily bludgeoned to oblivion by the publicans lobby.
Sure, it’s not housed in Georgian splendour or blessed with ornate plasterwork or fine fenestration — and, truth be told, the Italian-inspired food in the Unicorn wasn’t always great, even though it was never cheap.
But it had an appealingly louche atmosphere, a feeling that, well anybody from a government minister to a tipsy PR person could come stumbling through the door.
The little side street where people sat at the outside tables on a sunny afternoon was always captivating. Now the site is owned by Aviva Life & Pensions and, as you’d expect from these financial philistines, the profit margins per square foot are far more tantalising than the building’s heart and history.
Merrion Court is a short row of low buildings with balconies upstairs, now converted into two properties, one of which houses the Unicorn. It was originally a coach house and outhouses for No. 3 Ely Place.
Owned by Frederick and Annie Dick, No. 3 was the headquarters of the Dublin Theosophical Society, devoted to the “universal brotherhood” and the occult, which appealed to the poet and founding president of the society, WB Yeats.
In January 1888, Yeats attended a seance in Dublin where, according to the literary historian Professor Terence Brown, he had “a terrifying experience”. The poet and Nobel laureate said later that during this event, his whole body “moved like a suddenly unrolled watch spring” and he was thrown back against the wall.
“For years afterwards, I would not go to a seance or turn a table and would often ask myself what was that violent impulse that had run through my nerves. Was it a part of myself — something always to be a danger perhaps; or had it come from without, as it seemed,” he wrote.
Fast forward 50 years, when two Jewish Austrians, Erwin and Lisl Strunz, escaped from Vienna as Hitler closed his grip on the city and arrived in Dublin with the help of the writer Hubert Butler. According to food historian Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire, they decided to open a restaurant in the centre of Dublin and were able to get a cheap lease on a building in Merrion Court “because people thought it was haunted by WB Yeats who had held seances there”.
They christened their new restaurant, which opened in 1941, the Unicorn. It was financed by Clontarf market gardener and businessman William Griffith and soon its French and Austrian cuisine and “the prettiest and politest” waitresses in Dublin ensured its success. It was patronised by society figures like Lord Longford, a member of the Irish Senate, and his wife Christine, their co-director of the Gate Theatre, Hilton Edwards, the singer Margaret Burke Sheridan, the writer Kate O’Brien and the actress Shelagh Richards.
So PJ and the gang did not invent Dublin’s ‘‘cafe society’’, much as they might like to have believed; it was there before them and may even be there after them.
According to legend, Eduard Hempel, Hitler’s minister in Dublin, and his acolytes came to dine one evening during the Emergency. Strunz, a pacifist, took their orders but sprinkled so much salt over their dinner that they stamped out in disgust, to his great delight.
After 1947, the Unicorn developed the strong Italian flavoured cuisine that exists to this day. This was enhanced when it was taken over the by Sidoli family, who ran it from 1959 to 1994, where the major domo for years was the strong-willed Domenia Fulgoni, known to regulars as Miss Dom.
Taken over by Jeff Stokes and Georgio Casari in 1994, it has had a variety of owners since, while still retaining its charm and unique atmosphere.
I still fondly recall one wonderful afternoon with friends sitting in the sunshine outside the Unicorn, celebrating my ‘‘going away’’ from this newspaper.
Dublin City Council last week put plans by Aviva to demolish the old terrace and replace it with a six-storey development, to include a restaurant and ‘short term’ apartment complex “on hold”. The planners believe that a four-storey complex would be big enough to wedge onto the valuable site.
We say leave the old girl alone. Dublin needs these odd and increasingly rare little enclaves like Merrion Court, which have become part of the history and fabric of a city that has lost too much heritage already.
‘People thought the building was haunted by WB Yeats, as the poet had held seances there...’