Una Mullally: Another bit of 'Dublinness' has been chipped away

The Kylemore Cafe on O’Connell Street was 30 years old this year. It’s also gone, replaced with a cafe-restaurant called SoMa, a generic name, with generic black-and-white signage, that looks like every other generic attempt to homogenise another plot of Dublin.

There has been little chatter about the Kylemore on O’Connell Street disappearing. Maybe no one cares.

It made me sad, though. The Kylemore is where I used to go with my granny, Una, and when I lived for over half a decade on D’Olier Street, I’d stroll up with the newspaper on a Saturday morning for breakfast.

In recent years, it was one of those touchstones – half-guilty pleasure, half-comfort – where I’d retreat to every month or so, for hash browns, a fried egg, white toast and black tea.

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We all have places that play a small role in the background of our lives, and when they close, it signifies something bigger than a business changing tack. It feels as though something is being taken from you, denying you the niceness of being able to continue your own personal, private tradition, halting your desire to keep the memories of what the place meant to you in a broader sense alive.

Kylemore’s bakery side of things ceased 15 years ago, and the company is now primarily a contract catering business.

In 1965, when my mother moved to Dublin from Galway, she would visit her brother, who was in boarding school, and bring him a Kylemore cake.

“It had pink icing and coconut,” she told me at the weekend, “I remember it exactly.”

Isn’t it funny the things we can recall from so long ago? It’s because they mean something in their own odd ways.

Belonging and meaning

Kylemore’s cafe on O’Connell Street wasn’t some kind of culinary Mecca. It wasn’t pretty. It was noisy and basic with no frills. We love certain places because they are beautiful. We love other places because they mean something.

In terms of environmental psychology, place attachment is the bond between a person and a place. Place identity is about how we incorporate place into the concept of the self. We build memories related to a place, grow attached to it, and that gives us a sense of belonging and meaning.

So when we feel hurt by a place we were attached to closing, it’s not just because we won’t be able to go there any more. It’s because of what it means to us beyond being a physical space, but actually as part of our identities due to the length of time it has been part of our own landscape, and the memories that stem from it.

While that Kylemore Cafe “outlet” closed, Bewley’s on Grafton Street reopened, with queues outside its doors all week. One of the things I feel about Bewley’s finally reopening is relief.

It often feels as though cities are wrestling with themselves, with two competing forces at play

It had been closed for so long, I expected that ultimately it may never re-emerge, and instead have its lease taken over by another meaningless international clothes brand, the same shops that repeat themselves on every “high street” around the world, the repetitive, anonymous, predictable layout of Zara and H&M and Foot Locker and Topshop and Gap and all the other shops that repeat themselves from Grafton Street to Oxford Street to Fifth Avenue.

That’s what we do now, and there is no contest about it, nothing challenging it, no discussions about planning or maintaining a city’s unique character. For every Stella Cinema reopening, there was the Screen Cinema closing, its beautiful neon removed and replaced by a criminally ugly sign before it finally shut.

Profit and pastiche

It often feels as though cities are wrestling with themselves, with two competing forces at play. On one side, there is the mindset of business owners hustling and pursuing passion, leading with a strong idea, however small, valuing design and making something worthwhile. On the other side, there’s the pursuit of fast profit with pastiche favoured over concept, basicness over heart. You know these places.

They’re the ones that make you shake your head and roll your eyes when you happen across them (especially if they’ve replaced something nice). When you go to a different city, you’re looking for the city’s character. I’m not saying that places such as Kylemore’s O’Connell Street cafe added much to Dublin’s character, but they meant something and they felt of the city. When they are replaced by pastiche, the authenticity of the city loses something, another bit of Dublinness chipped away.

With Kylemore Cafe you were most definitely at the Spire. With places such as SoMa, you could be anywhere

There has been a massive upswing in new shops, cafes, and bars in Dublin city centre. Many of them have plenty of heart, and you know the ones that don't really mean it, the ones that are just looking for cheap shorthand and copying everyone else. Those ones fit into what has been described as AirSpace ("the realm of coffee shops, bars, start-up offices, and co-live/work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that travelling between them is frictionless," wrote Kyle Chayka in The Verge last year.)

With Kylemore Cafe you were most definitely at the Spire. With places such as SoMa, you could be anywhere. Homogenisation isn’t just boring, it flattens the sense of exploration and discovery in a city. I called in to it at the weekend, and the redesigned interior is predictable almost to the point of satire; fake exposed brick, a neon sign, modish light fittings. At the counter, I asked one of the employees. “What does SoMa mean?” They didn’t seem to really know, but took a stab at it, “I think it means soul.”