Georgina Campbell

Just off Grafton Street, Davy Byrnes is one of Dublin's most famous pubs - references in Joyce's Ulysses mean it is very much on the tourist circuit. Despite all this fame it remains a genuine, well-run place and equally popular with Dubliners, who find it a handy meeting place and also enjoy the bar food.

The style is quite traditional, providing 'a good feed' at reasonable prices
(most meals, with hearty vegetables, are under EUR15). Oysters with brown bread & butter, Irish stew, beef & Guinness pie and deep-fried plaice with tartare sauce are typical and there's always a list of daily specials like sautéed lambs liver with bacon & mushroom sauce, pheasant in season - and, in deference to the Joycean connections, there’s also a Bloomsday Special (gorgonzola and burgundy).

Pub Scene - Jayne Peyton - www.pub-scene.com

Never judge a book by its cover warns the proverb, and this is especially true of a discreet façade just off Dublin’s Grafton Street that conceals the divine Art Deco Davy Byrnes pub. It’s a walloping surprise to walk in off the street and see the exquisite hand painted floral wooden and stained glass ceiling, black wall hugging bench seats and booths, lily-like brass light fixtures and undulating bar servery faced with dozens of black dots that on close examination turn out to be the bottoms of champagne bottles. Gorgeous does not describe it.

And that’s not all. Walk further into the pub - it stretches back and back – onto a red carpet heralding another section with curvilinear bar servery and mirrored curved walls. Wooden panels and frames are trimmed with black plastic swirling shapes and; a polished wood column is crowned with a modern brass sculpture of flying doves and above it, a stained glass cupola filters multi coloured light into the room. There is no clue that this back area of the pub was added to the original 1942 art deco front 45 years later. It melds seamlessly and enhances the glamour of this singular spot. Utterly va va voom!

Casual visitors on 16 June each year may wonder why hundreds of people squeeze into the premises and order a gorgonzola and mustard sandwich and a glass of burgundy. They are on the Bloomsday Trail, doing exactly what Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses did on that day. Joyce was a regular at Davy Byrnes and wrote of his character Bloom: ‘He entered Davy Byrnes. Moral pub.
He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in a leap year once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.’ Bloom’s thoughts about the pub – ‘Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves’ – referred to the pre – Art Deco interior when it was an unremarkable Irish boozer.

Literature is not the only art at Davy Byrnes: notable murals, paintings and sculptures are also on display. But it is through writing that the pub is most celebrated because it was the haunt of a number of great Irish authors. It is also the final stop on Dublin’s celebrated Literary Pub Crawl, which is led by two actors who introduce the writers and act out scenes from their work. And with an eye to future Irish giants of letters, the Doran family, owners of the pub since 1942, sponsor the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award.
Dublin has some unforgettable pubs, but none looks like Davy Byrnes and that makes it even more special.

"Davy Byrnes Dublin's most famous pub, certainly in a literary sense, with it's Joycean associations. Always characterful, classy and fashionable.
It's the original Dublin gastropub and it's over 100 years old. From oysters to pheasant."
Lucinda O'Sullivan Sunday Independant