Taste of Dublin

My favourite festival of the year! Set up in the beautiful Iveagh Gardens this is a festival I’ve been returning to for the past 4 years, absolutely love the concept. A concentration of all the best restaurants Dublin has to offer along with wine merchants and more recently, being joined by craft beer stalls and whiskey /​cocktail outlets too. There is entertainment laid on from musicians playing, to food shows and cooking demos so there is a little something for everyone.
I can see the interest in this festival growing year on year, entrance fee is € 20 and also from then, when you arrive (or you can pre-​book) it’s a cashless venue, you exchange euros for Florins and Florins is the only currency accepted at the outlets. It sounds tricky but it’s not, there is Florin Banks dotted around the festival as well as people exchanging in amongst the crowd.
What i love is, that tapas sized portions are laid on at 5 – 7 florins each and allows you to sample the very best of the restaurants which can be quite the eye opener. Some restaurants never on my radar, are now on my radar having tasted the unbelievable food laid on.
This year, Just Eat sponsored some waiter service for ⁵⁄₆ restaurants and man, that was the best news EVER. Whilst I love mingling at some of the stalls, sometime the chaos at the most popular restaurants was a little disheartening but this feature, made my time this year amazing! Loved it! Please come back with Waiter Service again next year.
Entertainment wise, to the organisers of this year… I was nearby the small band stand in the main restaurant zone; the first 3 acts were amazing however, the final act, the garth brooks experience, meh, not so much. I like GB’s music however backing tracks just turned people off and compared to the previous live acts, a buzzing jammed space was halved within 15 mins of him coming on plus a rude interaction with a member of the public made this a low point of the day. Shame cause everything else was 100% AMAZING!

This is much more of a booze event than food. Couldn’t believe the amount of drink stands. It didn’t really feel like a celebration of food to me at all. Rather a booze up with some over — priced but nice food options. I wouldn’t be rushing pack but could see how this would be some people’s idea of a good day out.

ToD is great craíc. This years event was the best yet. They had really good music which I wasn’t expecting (it hasn’t been ‘bad’ before, its just this year they really had some good acts). They had some AMAZING vendors here, I went home with BAGS of stuff and that doesn’t include all the food I sampled/​ate while here. The whole event was well put together and even though there was a queue to get in, it moved very quickly and was orderly. Inside the queues were also quite manageable and the prices were not bad either. Can’t wait to go back next year!

This was my first time at Taste of Dublin and I don’t think I’d want to go there again. At the beginning I was expecting to see a wide range of restaurants not just serving Irish homemade food, but restaurants serving perhaps indian, créolé food and food catering to special diets. There were a few stands representing restaurants such as Gordon Ramsay at Powerscourt and there was also an italian restaurant I can’t remember the name of. The italian stand served a delicious parmesan and leek risotto, but for most bowls/​plates of small portions of food, I paid € 5, which to be honest is a rip-​off and the free samples are very tiny (probably used as a method to encourage visitors to part with their money). I was disappointed with some of the stands I saw. There were kehoe’s crisps, lindt chocolates, gino’s ice-​cream and wine and beverages stands, I thought to myself (why have a gino’s ice-​cream stand in the iveagh gardens, when there’s one on Grafton Street?) You can also buy lindt chocolates, kehoe’s crisps and Dubliner’s cheese in Tesco’s! The point is I was expecting to see more specialities and dishes from Ireland’s best chefs and I didn’t see enough of that, I saw more marketing of brands.

Lots of fun sampling food and drink from Dublin and around Ireland. We enjoyed treats from some familiar names, and took the opportunity to try new places.
Quite a few vendors offered samples with products to buy, so we began with these ‘starters.‘
Each restaurant typically offers three dishes priced in the € 6 — € 8 range. Lots to drink as well, although more non-​alcoholic choices would be welcome.
The food and drinks are reasonably priced, although with the admission it can be a bit of an expensive afternoon.
This is our fourth city for Taste festivals, and Dublin does quite well for itself.

Pricey to get in but foodie heaven once you’re there. As the weather was bad this year, there were loads of free samples to be had-​less people eating them I guess. Theres a number of good restaurants to try and cookery demonstrations, live music and bars.
If I was going again I would bring a backpack, haggle more and not fill up so much on free tasters!
A great day out for friends and families. In true Irish style it kinda turned into a rave at the end with the band playing crowd pleasers like Prodigys ‘Smack my b*tch up’ and Mark Mc Cabe ‘Maniac’.
Nostaligic and strange but great fun!

A good day out once the sun is shining — to be avoided in the pissings of rain. Unfortunately this year there was a lot of rain, fortunately I went at the one time there wasn’t constant rain.
You have to be pretty determined to get anything other than entrance out of your ticket price (around 20 euro)… I think I consumed about 90 free sausages and as many tiny glasses of free wine as I could get my mits on! If you’re willing to do it spending 30 or 40 euro inside will enable you to taste lots of nice things from different restaurants — if you’re looking for some sort of value for money on food consumed you’re in the wrong place.
Aspiring chefs can view cooking demonstrations and bbqing master classes and the like. I found it better value for the boozing though and that’s where most of our florins went this year.
Its worth knowing that if you’re signed up to the website you can get tickets on special offer prices well in advance — so if you’re determined to go sign up there.

Taste of Dublin in the rain. Seems like a bit of a pattern in the last couple of years!!!
I attended this event on the Sunday this year at the 5.30pm slot. It was raining cats and dogs and a lot of WATER. I thought it would dampen my spirits but it was actually not so bad. It lightly rained for an hour or so and then kinda stopped. I was far too busy finding free food to stick in my gob due to the hangover hungers that I barely noticed it. That is saying something too as I am pretty high maintenance! ^_​^
I always find Taste a good fun time and had a great experience doing this with some fellow Unilocalers this time around. So was good to meet some new people and enjoy the food and atmosphere.
What I find with Taste is you get an unmerciful amount of a-​holes. «D4» Tarquin and Penelope’s and the likes. Turned up collars on polo shirts and plenty of loafers knocking about. «ya ya ya» etc. But once you avoid this type of person you will be fine.
This time however I did encounter some drunken oul wans. There was 3 of them but one in particular was rudeness personified.
«Oh excuse me…» says the drunken aul wan as she elbows me out of the way and then subsequently blocks me from the Pitchet counter with her arm. This was after I had ordered and was waiting for the food.
«Oh sorry us women do things like that» she says to me with a glazed intoxicated look in her eye.
«That’s what put me off women sweetheart»… I said jokingly…
It seemed to take her a while to get what I said, she looked pretty confused. I haven’t been confused since I was about 14 I felt like saying to her.
Apart from that and a few other drunken lads banging into you the crowd was grand.
I had a deep friend hens egg in bread crumbs with black pudding and peas from the Pitchet stand. Orgasmic…
Then I had a fish cake and noodle in something similar to a massaman curry from the Malaysian stand. Super super hot. Very authentic. Sweat was pouring down my face. The sign of a good curry dish.
I also had a mojito from the Gecko stand, that was pretty good too.
What I find with Taste is the alcohol is very reasonable in price and for the most part the food is a tad overpriced at times for what you get but if you get something which makes your toes curl in excitement then it is sooo worth it. Be careful with your choices and maybe ask someone about the dish they have just eaten etc. before you spend!
Buying the «Florins» can catch you out though as you can only buy them in books of 5. I had to buy 5 more just so I could get 1 florin to make up the 7 florins for my Malay dish.
All in all a good evening out for a Sunday despite the rain. The free food you get is usually cubes of cheese or little cracker type things with cream cheese etc. So you do need to be spending whilst there otherwise it would be pointless! Worth it to get a bottle of vino for you and some friends and taste some different dishes spread out of the couple of hours.
Savour the evening/​afternoon, never rush it! ^_^

Great day out, although can be on the expensive side with the Entrance Fee and the purchase of Florins afterwards. Lots of different tastes of food and drink for foodie lovers. Lovely experience… lots to see and do!

Great festival. You’ll get a decent introduction to food of Dublin here.

This is a great day/​evening out– with sittings in the day and again in the evening — though don’t expect to do much sitting. Along with some of the city’s best restaurants, there are local and international food and drink producers offering you a few free samples of their wares.
We attended a wine tasting and there are also cookery demos running with some well known faces taking to the kitchen stage.
The Ballymaloe cookery schools also has a large stand where you can take part in a cookery class (this costs extra) sadly I didn’t have enough time to get a cookery lesson.
The restaurants though are the main stars of the show — offering small tasters of their signature dishes. All the food I sampled was top notch and I went away feeling pleasantly full. Though it is a pricy day — with a ticket charge and then food — but once you’re prepared for that I think it’s well worth it.
I went on a sunny Sunday afternoon — and m one major complaint was that it was possibly a little too crowded.

One of the highlights of my culinary and (perhaps sadly) social year is the annual outing to the lovely Iveagh gardens (
) for the Taste of Dublin event.
It is a gathering of the great and the good of the local restaurant trade in a nicely ordered ‘village’ where each offers 3 signature dishes — usually a starter, main and dessert. They are of course not life-​sized portions but tasters, something to give you a flavour of what the eatery can offer.
Be warned, this is not a particularly cheap day /​eve out. There is a charge at the door and each dish you sample will cost you between 4 and 8ish florins (each florin costs you a euro!). So, you have to buy into the experience and go in knowing it is going to cost a bit, it is however well worth it and lots of fun.
If you can try to arrive early so you can bag a table — it is much easier if you can set up a base camp from which to go, explore and return. We have 4 friends we regularly go to Taste with and a group is definitely the way to go!