Price Watch/Conor Pope: Anne Harrington from Blackrock stopped off for a restorative hot port, a salad and a coffee in the Schoolhouse Bar on Haddington Road on a cold evening at the end of January.
She had no difficulty with the price of the salad and the coffee which were "as advertised". "It was the hot port that made me smile," she writes. "€4 for the port and €0.85 for the hot water". Paying the guts of a euro for a splash of hot water, a slice of lemon, a few cloves and a spoonful of sugar seems a little excessive.
When contacted, Justin Spain, a manager at the Schoolhouse, pointed out that making a hot port does take extra time and the charge was "fairly standard" in the industry. He is right. A quick survey of pubs in the Ballsbridge area revealed that the 85 cent charge imposed by the Schoolhouse is actually comparatively cheap.
The 51 on Haddington Road, for instance, adds a euro on to the price for a hot one, while the Jurys Doyle Hotel on Pembroke Road charges an even more severe €1.10 for serving your port hot.
Despite charging less than its neighbours, however, the Schoolhouse spokesman accepted that the 85 cent charge was "too much" and said that following the PriceWatch reader's complaint, the pub would be lowering the charge of the drink.
"To be honest, it is not something I have ever thought about as we don't sell a lot of them, but we are very price conscious," he said. "We don't have a policy of trying to rip people off. For instance we charge €3.90 for a pint of Guinness and we haven't raised our prices for that for two years."
Given the weekend that's in it, he also points out that, unlike some pubs in the Lansdowne Road area, the Schoolhouse "doesn't ramp up the prices on International days," something which may be worth bearing in mind if you're the lucky holder of a ticket for tomorrow's rugby game against the French.
It should perhaps be added that not all pubs charge a premium for making your port hot. For instance, Busker Browne's pub on Cross Street in Galway told PriceWatch that the price for its port, hot or otherwise, stood at €3.70.
What's more . . .
Emma Kee from Dublin writes to alert readers to a pretty substantial price difference for the same product in two retail outlets sitting cheek-by-jowl in the capital.
The item in question on this occasion is gourmet chocolate bars from Valrhona. While the bars are sold for €3.80 in the excellent French patisserie Maison de Gourmet on Castle Lane in Dublin 2, the also excellent LaraLu stall less than 50 metres away in the George's Street market retails them for €2.90.
Value4Money Gourmet Crisps
Marks & Spencer Roquefort and Smokey Bacon
€2.40 for 175g, €13.71 per kg
Highs: These look the most appealing, both before and after the bag is opened. They are enormous and enormously crunchy. They're not remotely greasy and while the first bite doesn't taste of blue cheese, the Roquefort flavour builds up.
Lows: While this may be stating the obvious, these crisps are very salty. They are not widely available and these are a limited edition, so may well disappear just as you grow to really like them.
Verdict: A great tasting crisp.
Star rating:****
Tesco Mature Cheddar & Shallot
€1.59 for 150g, €10.60 per kg
Highs: These look similar to the Walker's Sensations, yet they are a quite a bit cheaper. They're good value and have an excellent - if entirely synthetic - cheesy flavour.
Lows: How hard it must be to come up with novel variations of the cheese and onion crisp. Here the onion is replaced with what marketing folk presumably believe to be a classier-sounding shallot. There is no discernible shallot flavour and the enduring memory is of synthesised cheese with a hint of grease.
Verdict: Good value, good taste.
Star rating:****
Walker's Sensations Four Cheese and Red Onion
€1.94 for 150g, €12.93 per kg
Highs: These smell wonderful and have a good crunch to them. They're also widely available and have a light taste - insofar as crisps could ever be described thus - while still maintaining a solid cheese flavour.
Lows: Whether or not there is actually a flavour of the four cheeses is open to debate. Despite the promise of the aroma, they taste unremarkable and are not cheap either. The crisps in the bag tried were of a strangely uniform size.
Verdict: Wholly average, really.
Star rating:***
Aldi "Sprinters" Mature Cheddar and Red Onion
€1.29 for 150g, €8.60 per kg
Highs: These are much cheaper than the competition but the best thing is the "serving suggestion" which goes to great lengths advising you to put the crisps in a bowl. Fans of crinkle crisps may be well served here and they're not overly salty.
Lows: They taste pretty unpleasant and are incredibly greasy. They have little aroma and while the synthetic taste may not be a million miles from the mature cheddar promised, it is not within hollering distance.
Verdict: Veering close to dreadful.
Star rating:**
*****Excellent ****Great ***Fine **Below par *Awful
