Six Irish Dishes British Visitors Always Get Wrong (And How to Eat Them Properly in Temple Bar)
Let's be honest about something. British visitors to Dublin often arrive with a fairly limited mental menu for Irish food: soda bread, the full Irish, something involving potatoes. It's not entirely unfair — those things exist, they're genuinely good, and you should absolutely have them. But stopping there is like going to Edinburgh and only eating shortbread. You're missing the point, and you're missing a lot of genuinely brilliant food.
Irish cuisine has been quietly, stubbornly excellent for years, built on some of the finest agricultural and coastal produce in Europe and a tradition of comfort cooking that rivals anything the British Isles has to offer. Temple Bar, for all its tourist-friendly surface, contains some of the best places in the city to eat this food properly. Here's where to start.
1. Colcannon: Not Just Mash With Stuff In It
British visitors who encounter colcannon for the first time often make the mistake of treating it as a side dish, a supporting player, something to mop up gravy. This is wrong. Colcannon — mashed potato folded through with kale or cabbage and finished with an almost irresponsible amount of Irish butter — is the main event.
The key is the butter. Not a knob, not a scraping, but a proper pool of it, golden and melting into the centre of the mound so that each forkful carries both the earthy potato and that rich dairy hit. The cabbage or kale provides a slight bitterness that cuts through the fat. It's a genuinely sophisticated dish wearing very simple clothes.
Done badly, colcannon is stodgy and grey. Done properly, it's one of the most satisfying things you can eat on a cold evening, which is most evenings in Dublin. Look for it made to order, not sitting in a bain-marie.
2. Seafood Chowder: Thick, Creamy, and Non-Negotiable
Ireland is an island. It has been surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean for quite some time. The seafood is, accordingly, exceptional — and nowhere is this more apparent than in a properly made Irish seafood chowder.
This is not the thin, pale soup you might have encountered at a service station somewhere. A good Irish chowder is thick enough to stand a spoon in, loaded with smoked fish, fresh haddock, prawns, and occasionally mussels or clams, all swimming in a cream and potato broth that's been built slowly and with intention. Soda bread on the side is not optional.
The smoking of the fish is important. Irish smoked haddock has a gentler, woodier flavour than its heavily-dyed British counterpart, and it anchors the whole bowl in a way that feels deeply coastal. If a Temple Bar pub makes their chowder in-house with Irish seafood, order it without hesitation.
3. The Full Irish: A Morning Ritual, Not a Hangover Cure
The full Irish breakfast gets unfairly categorised by British visitors as a hangover meal, a last resort, something you eat out of necessity rather than desire. This undersells it considerably.
The differences from a full English matter. White pudding alongside black pudding, not instead of it. Soda bread or brown bread rather than white toast. The sausages — properly made Irish pork sausages — are seasoned differently, with a higher meat content and a more pronounced herby quality. And the bacon is back bacon, but often from rare-breed Irish pigs with a flavour that's noticeably richer than supermarket British rashers.
Eat it at breakfast, not at noon after a heavy night. It tastes better when it's doing what it was designed to do.
4. Irish Stew: Lamb, Not Beef
This one causes genuine arguments, and it's worth being clear: traditional Irish stew is made with lamb or mutton. Not beef. The beef version exists, it's fine, but it's not the original, and it doesn't taste the same.
A proper Irish stew is stripped back to the point of austerity — lamb, onions, potatoes, stock, and time. That's more or less it. The restraint is the point. The lamb does the work, and because Irish lamb has been grazing on Atlantic-windswept hillsides eating wild herbs and grasses, it has a flavour that needs no embellishment.
If a pub in Temple Bar is offering Irish stew with lamb, particularly if it's a daily special made that morning, order it. If it's been sitting in a pot since Tuesday, give it a miss.
5. Boxty: The Potato Dish Most British Visitors Have Never Heard Of
Boxty is a traditional Irish potato pancake — part grated raw potato, part mashed potato, combined and fried until the outside is crisp and the inside is yielding and slightly doughy. It comes from the north and west of Ireland originally, but it's found its way onto Temple Bar menus with good reason.
The texture is unlike anything else: simultaneously crispy and dense, with a slight starchiness that makes it deeply satisfying. Served with smoked salmon, sour cream, and chives, it's one of those dishes that looks simple on the plate and tastes far more complex than it has any right to.
Don't confuse it with a potato cake or a hash brown. It's its own thing, and it's worth seeking out.
6. Soda Bread: Eat It Fresh, Eat It With Butter
Soda bread is everywhere in Dublin, which means the quality varies enormously. The good stuff — made that day, with proper buttermilk and a slightly dense, slightly tangy crumb — is one of the simplest pleasures in Irish food. The bad stuff is dry, crumbly, and forgettable.
The rule is simple: if it came out of a packet, ignore it. If the bar or restaurant makes it in-house, eat as much of it as they'll give you, with Irish butter, ideally alongside a bowl of chowder or a plate of smoked salmon.
Soda bread exists because Ireland's soft wheat wasn't suitable for yeast-risen bread — the acidity of buttermilk reacting with the bicarbonate of soda was the practical solution. That history is baked into every loaf. It tastes like somewhere specific, which is exactly what good food should do.
Temple Bar gets a lot of things right that the rest of the world hasn't noticed yet. Irish food is one of them. Come hungry, come curious, and come prepared to be corrected on a few assumptions you didn't know you were carrying.