This blog is about one of the best parts of travel – food. Studying abroad in Ireland has been an interesting experience as a food lover in more ways than I expected. I had heard mixed reviews about how the eats would be in Ireland. Some people saying not to go if you don’t like plain beef and potatoes, and other’s saying that Ireland treated them to some of the best food they’ve ever had while travelling. Like anywhere else in the world, the quality of your meal here is largely dependent on where you eat out or shop, but opportunities are plentiful for good eats whether you’re out for a night on the town or wandering through the grocery store or market. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from my time here so far:
- Bars and pubs rarely if ever have good food. They are drinking establishments, and there is a reason most of them stop serving food at 7 or 8 pm. They have a kitchen so they can serve sandwiches and chicken fingers during the rugby match, but most anything you’ll eat there for lunch or dinner would be just as easily found in the freezer isle at the grocery store.
- If you’re looking to save money, check for take-away specific menus! Because servers here are paid at least minimum wage, tipping culture is minimal in Ireland. The cost of service is included in the menu price. Take-away doesn’t require serving staff to do anything, so many restaurants will have lower prices for the same food if you order it to go.
- The Irish haven’t really figured Mexican food out yet. The rare place that serves burritos isn’t going to be worth your time. If you tire of traditional Irish food, you’ll have a much easier time finding nice Indian, Mediterranean, or Chinese food.
- Doughnuts! The trendy, creative, and expensive doughnut trend is alive and well in Ireland, especially in Dublin. One of the most interesting things about this is the way they present American influences on doughnuts – one small chain in Dublin literally named “Boston Donuts” with the slogan: “The Real American Donut”.
- Coming to Ireland, the only typical Irish foods I was familiar with were soda bread, bangers and mash, and Shepard’s pie, but some of the other top “traditional” menu staples include:
- Fish and Chips
- Lamb Stew
- Bacon and Cabbage (usually boiled and served with potatoes and mustard sauce)
- Full Irish Breakfast (Consisting of brown or soda bread, 2 eggs, rashers (ham), baked beans, fried tomato or mushroom, two types of sausage added called black and white pudding, and fried potatoes)
- This isn’t specific to Ireland, but through studying abroad I have also experienced a great deal of international food I wouldn’t have been exposed to in the US. For example, a French friend made our house potato au gratin the way his family makes it back home, and my Austrian roommate has made us all Goulash, a type of Hungarian stew on multiple occasions.
- There are lots of classic snacks Irish friends I’ve met through windsurfing have introduced to me. These include Jaffa Cakes – a sweet sponge cake with orange jam and chocolate on top – and custard cremes, which are essentially vanilla custard Oreos. These replace many standard American snacks that can’t be found here, such as Goldfish and Chex Mix. This isn’t to mention naming differences between some things. I still sometimes forget that chips are called crisps here, and fries are called chips. I was also very confused when I found out that they call zucchini “courgettes” and eggplant “aubergine”.
- My diet has also shifted slightly from back home due to different prices in the grocery store. In the US, beef is almost always more expensive than chicken, but here it is cheaper to get not just ground beef, but even steak than chicken breasts. In Boston, I eat red meat maybe once a week, if that. Here, I eat red meat about 3 days a week. There are some things that I would typically buy at home that are just too expensive to be worth it here, such as deli meats, while other things are significantly cheaper, like avocados and steak.
- The options for delivery on and around campus are also plentiful. The website JustEat.ie compiles all delivery menus and prices wherever you are in Ireland, and makes ordering very convenient for all those times your grocery trip gets rained out…
- Ireland has fully transformed me from a bacon person to a ham person. Ireland’s default breakfast meat is ham, sliced in long wide strips called rashers. These are cheap and delicious. While you can find American bacon in the grocery store, it is much more expensive and honestly just not as good. Finding American bacon in a restaurant however is uncommon, most places offering rashers or sausages.
- Grocery stores are also a little different than back home. Here, nobody bags your groceries and there are no disposable bags. Every single shopper is expected to bring their own reusable bags and bag their own groceries. This is better for the environment and brings down the cost of food. I was already a backpack grocery shopper in Boston, so this wasn’t a difficult adjustment for me, but it proves just how silly America’s resistance to ditching the disposable bag is. This whole country does it no problem.
- The most popular dessert I’ve seen here is sticky toffee pudding.
- For candy, the big brand is Cadbury, which has the presence of Hershey’s in the US. Cadbury makes every single type of chocolate bar imaginable, and the average convenience store chocolate selection is much more impressive than back home.
- Americans are apparently the only people who eat Rice Krispies Treats.
- You can’t get family sized snack bags here. Everything is individually wrapped into tiny serving sizes. This practice confounds me not just for its inconvenience but also the way it contradicts their bagless grocery shopping checkout procedure.
All in all, I’m happily well fed here! That said, you’ll be able to find me at Amelia’s with a big fat burrito first thing the day I arrive back in Boston…
