An update on my month-long trip to Ireland and London in 2026.
My friend Sally’s flight to Dublin was delayed, so our first full day in the city was Thursday, April 2nd. We began by reinventing leftovers from the two-person breakfast room service in which I barely made a dent in by myself. At our Airbnb, I matched up the scrambled eggs with ham, bacon, sausage and potatoes blended with some Cooleeny local cheese purchased at a nearby shop, along with the smoked Irish salmon, fresh fruit and Irish yogurt.
(Tip: You can get takeaway boxes for room service in most good hotels. I loathe wasting food, and we were staying at an Airbnb with a kitchen for the next five days, so I packed up what would travel and I took it with me.)
The back wall of our Airbnb abutted the James Joyce Centre, which meant our first official stop was practically inevitable. The main attraction is a shadow box series that articulates Ulysses in a straightforward way, I finally understood the basic story of it.
As luck would have it, the director, Darina Gallagher, was there launching an art installation: glorious, inventive yarn monsters that seemed to have leapt straight from Joyce’s fever dreams. I ended up interviewing her for my podcast, which I’ll be relaunching this summer. It was one of those interviews where the magic just arrives. At one point she was describing the Lestrygonians chapter as “all about cannibals and eating.”
I said, “Wait, did you just use those two words in the same sentence?”
She lit up. “Yes! Isn’t that fun?” My adoration was instant and total.
She handed us an official brochure mapping the route of the two main characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, through Dublin, pointing out that the path looks exactly like an intestine. “See?” she said. “It’s really is all about food.” The journey begins on the north side of the Liffey River, sweeps down O’Connell Street past Trinity College, curves, and ends, as all intestines must, in a most precise location: the very heart of Irish civic and cultural life, Leinster House, seat of the Irish parliament, flanked by the National Museum on one side and the National Library on the other, with the National Gallery just steps away. Power, memory, and art, all in one square. Joyce didn’t end the story there by accident.
Over pints of Guinness at Murray’s, a nearby pub, Sally and I made a plan: we would walk “the intestine” of Dublin. “I think we have to,” she said, a phrase that has now become a theme for trip. This, my friends, is why you don’t over-plan a trip when you’re a writer.
That evening we met Sally’s great-niece, a classics student at a Dublin college, accompanied by her very sweet Irish boyfriend Jake. We ended up at a place recommended by our Airbnb host for possibly the most tender chicken wings of my life.
As we were leaving, our server leaned over and asked, “So you’re a food writer, are you interested in cheese?” That’s how I met Luca Furno, third-generation member of the family behind Cashel Blue, Ireland’s first native blue cheese. By the next day, I’d arranged to interview him for my podcast, too.
Blue cheese, it seemed, became another theme. Our primary destination the next day was Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, where Leopold Bloom stops for his now-iconic lunch: a gorgonzola sandwich on brown bread with mustard, washed down with a glass of burgundy. Simple, perfect.
Ulysses is a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. In Homer, the Lestrygonians are savage cannibal giants who destroy nearly all of Odysseus’s fleet and devour his men. Joyce mirrors this with Bloom’s experience of hunger and human appetite, but with a crucial twist. He first wanders into another pub where he is repelled by the sight of men feeding like animals — wolfing food in ravenous fits, chewing with their mouths open, carnivorous and grotesque. He’s essentially watching the Lestrygonians at lunch. He retreats to Davy Byrne’s, where his modest, thoughtful sandwich becomes a kind of civilized counterpoint to all that savage consumption.
But the deepest layer is emotional. While eating, Bloom drifts into a tender memory of his wife, Molly, passing a bite of seedcake from her mouth to his in a kind of kiss. The sandwich becomes a meditation on love and sensuality. Against a chapter full of predatory hunger, Bloom’s gorgonzola moment is almost achingly gentle.
There are places you visit because a guidebook tells you to, and there are places you visit because a genius spent forty years writing a book that made a pub into a shrine for literary pilgrims and food writers alike.
The gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrne’s did not disappoint, even with our lofty expectations. Brown bread, thick and faintly sweet, almost cake-like. The cheese melting, creamy, bracingly tart, a perfect foil. The red wine didn’t just pair with it, but danced with the flavors, drawing out every layer before adding its own. Sensuous is the word. Joyce knew exactly what he was doing when he sent Bloom there.
We went back the next day, because of course we did. I think we had to.
This is part of a series of culinary travel tales from Ireland and London in April 2026. Go to the main page for more installments and travel along.
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