There’s not a lot to be Lovin in Dublin at the moment, what with the 8pm curfew and the risk of catching omicron if you crack a window.
With our resident L list creator and humour-maker extraordinaire Fiona away, I’ve happily stepped into the breach and have collected my top five things in Dublin this week:
5. The term Twixmas
This has definitely been a term that’s been swirling around marketing BCC emails for some time, but it has only recently been brought to my attention. It’s one of the things I’m hashtag thankful for this week, as it truly encapsulates the vibe, mood, and spiritual experience of the space in between Christmas and New Year. A time of nothingness, where a heavy fog decends, cloaking us in a milieu of forgetfulness, recklessness and devil-may-care-ness. During that time commonplace things like teeth brushing, dressing oneself, and all basic forms of hygiene are forgotten, replaced by endless scrolling, Netflix films, and loose Heroes wrappers.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CT7WrWLsHpg/
4. Winedown’s at-home box
It’s difficult to believe we are back at the at-home box phase of the panny d again, but there you are now. Several Dublin restaurants have restarted their takeaways and started assembling their cardboard boxes once more, including Winedown. The team has taken their best and most loved items from their menu and created a January Winedown home box. Priced at €55 for two, the six-course box is available from Thursday-Saturday across January, for more information visit their Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWTJz5wM-p5/
3. Top Tier Sandwiches
The sandwiches made during in the time in between Christmas and New Year’s have to be some of the best produced all year round. The ingredients available are second to none, turkey, ham, stuffing, every type of cheese available in Dunnes all lashed with cranberry sauce (and bread sauce if you are of that persuasion). There’s also the time aspect that’s available to us during the hinterland between the 25th and the 1st, to dream up, concoct, carve and stack 20+ ingredients between two slices of bread.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CX-9wqYJjpJ/
2. Panettone
Christmas is packed with desserts… Christmas pudding, Christmas cake, mince pies, trifles. All of which are great, but they are heafty endeavors, packed with all manner of dried fruit, icing and over-the-top density. A panettone meanwhile is a lighter alternative, which still gives you all the goods, soft stringy bread interspersed with the odd raisin or candied peel all topped off with a light dusting of some class of sugar. Do yourself a favour and grab one for Christmas 2022, and bask in your new found ability to eat three slices of it after a Christmas dinner.
1 . Imbibe Coffee Roasters
Not only do the sounders in Imbibe produce some of the nicest coffee in town, they are also charitable AF. Their business model operates under “conscious capitalism” which translates as giving back, to charities (1% of their coffee sales go to Women’s Aid), to coffee producers (1% to projects at coffee origins) and to their staff (a further 1% is shared among employees). This year alone they funded a second bridge in Colombia, a wet mill in Peru and donated their highest amount to Women’s Aid since opening in 2018. The team’s wish for 2022 is to raise enough money to fund a third bridge in South America.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CVucwo0sy0a/
READ ON: The top 10 new Dublin food spots that opened in 2021