I spent my 20s in Cafe Bar Deli on George’s Street in Dublin city centre. That sounds almost glamorous, like it was the Studio 54 of its time. It was just a restaurant, and Andy Warhol and co were represented by The Girls After Work On A Thursday, and whiskey sours or Manhattans were replaced with bottles of the cheapest white wine on the menu. We weren’t yet sophisticated enough to order the second cheapest or go anywhere near a red.
Cafe Bar Deli did a great line in fancy-ish pizzas, but it was their salads that shone, and it was there I first cultivated my love of the Caesar salad. Extreme pickiness about anything mayonnaise or vinegar-based meant salad dressings and, by extension, salads were not a huge draw, apart from the traditional Irish summer offering of butterhead lettuce, tubes of sweaty ham and eggs hard boiled into bullets.
Ordering a salad as a main felt extremely cosmopolitan. It didn’t come with chips and had lettuce as its base. I was basically Sophia Loren
My 20s were also haunted by a deep fear of sauces and calories, which somewhat ironically pushed me into ordering the Cafe Bar Deli Caesar for the first time, thinking it was maybe the “healthiest” option.
Ordering a salad as a main felt extremely cosmopolitan. It didn’t come with chips and had lettuce as its base. I was basically Sophia Loren. Cafe Bar Deli was a gateway for many young women my age who had previously eschewed salad as scary or pointless. This was in the 2000s, before wellness culture and kale pushed leaf-based dishes to the forefront.
The restaurant’s relaxed yet grown-up vibes and starter offering of pizza breads with exotic dips of tapenade and flavoured hummus and pesto gave the likes of me – a rube from rural Kildare – the confidence to go Full Salad for dinner.
The Cafe Bar Deli Caesar salad set the standard for me. The chicken was juicy, the croutons were large and home-made, the dressing was creamy and any anchovies had been thoughtfully blitzed to within an inch of their lives. The résistance was the copious shaved Parmesan served atop the generously dressed romaine. Any resemblance to a po-faced “healthy” salad was minimal. It was basically meat, sauce and cheese with a side of leaves.
The restaurant closed in 2011, a victim of the recession, and thus started an ongoing quest to chase the salad high. Trips to the US are probably where I’ve come closest, with their generosity of dressing and cheese. The experiences are too transient to hold any meaning though.
I’ve had purist Caesars, where it’s the bare bones of leaves, dressing and whole anchovies – even though the original 1920s recipe didn’t feature fish at all – and call me a peasant but I don’t want to have to acknowledge their existence. Out of sight, out of mind. I’ve had duds with ice-cold chunks of re-formed chicken and eighths of watery tomato.
I’ve had very passable supermarket Caesars: Marks and Spencer, take a bow. Of the production line takeaway salad purveyors, Sprout’s Kale Caesar is the best. I remove the sun-dried tomatoes because I personally feel they have no place in the bowl, but each to their own. I’ve even been known to take sick pleasure in the Tesco meal deal chicken and bacon Caesar wrap. It’s got me out of a hole more than once.
The closest I’ve come to scratching the itch is the Caesar salad at Dublin’s Woollen Mills on the north quays. Maybe it’s because it was the first meal out I had post Covid-19 lockdown. The Woollen Mills salad is served with warm, grilled chicken. The dressing is creamy and the anchovies are incognito. Neither the crispy nuggets of bacon nor the Parmesan portion leave you wanting. The addition of toasted pine nuts is inspired. I have returned twice since to order it again.
Woollen Mills is a lovely restaurant, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a haunt for girls in their 20s after work. As much as I mourn the loss of the Cafe Bar Deli salad, I mourn the loss of those evenings more. The night I admitted that for way too long I thought “Cafe Bar Deli” was just one long fancy Italian word, to be said with a flourish: Caphebardellliiii. The many evenings that spilt over into the Globe Bar next door or downstairs to Rí-Rá before a 6am shift the following morning. The problems of the world solved over those €22 bottles of wine.
I’m actually struggling to remember what the cheapest bottle of white wine on the menu might have cost in 2008. I polled some Cafe Bar Deli veterans and their suggestions ran from €16 to €35. However, €16 seems too low for Celtic Tiger Dublin – although one friend reminds me that “we used to get bottles for a tenner in the car park of McGrattans” – and at €35 we would have been drinking from hip flasks masking-taped to our thighs. I’m guessing the low 20s would have made it worth our while even if we did feel like the enamel was being leached from our teeth.
They were the best of times.
