I can't quite remember the first time I ate at Marks Bros Cafe on South Great Georges Street. Once something is done regularly over a long period, the very first time becomes misted over and jumbled up until all that remains are odd fragments and an over-arching sense of time and place.
It must have been about 1986 when a friend from school got a work placement there as part of a transition year programme. The rest of us had been shepherded into worthwhile posts in graphic design studios, banks and even agricultural firms and were wildly jealous of Siobhan, who spent her days up to her elbows in suds meeting men with nose rings and guitars and pasts.
Of course the best thing of all was that she was offered a Saturday job when the week's placement was up. I was solidly suburban at that stage and thought that heading into town for a day mooching around secondhand clothes shops and gazing at good looking buskers was the height of glamour. It soon became a bit of a ritual to spend a good two hours at lunchtime in Marks Bros flicking nonchalantly through a Dublin Event Guide, waiting for Siobhan to stop for a few minutes chat, and nursing a big mug of milky coffee.
At this stage money was not a thing I had a lot of, and the fact that you could get a big portion of salad for 60 pence was very important. They were exotic ones too - raw mushrooms soaked in a magical combination of soy sauce, shallots and olive oil or pasta slippery with mayonnaise and garlic - with no hint of the beetroot or rubbery slice of hardboiled egg about them at all.
I'd like to say that I got friendly with all the staff and describe scenarios where they would swing by for a chat and offer me words of advice, but sadly it wouldn't be true. To me they were the epitome of cool; all dyed hair, combat trousers and "problems with the kid's father", and I immediately failed to possess any social cunning when in the presence of any of them.
I would smile for a start, which definitely seemed the wrong thing to do and the carefully chosen outfit (old silk pyjama bottoms, Doc Marten shoes, suede jacket) was suddenly dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. Still, being in the presence of cool was absolutely enough in those days and I was happy.
When I went to Trinity, the whole feeling of Marks Bros changed for me. Hardly a week went by that I didn't troop over with a large group of friends, loud and self-conscious, to commandeer a table for eight downstairs.
It was never really student politics or union issues that we discussed; this seemed to pass me by completely. Eavesdroppers would be much more likely to hear raging arguments as to whether the thick, orange, vegetable soup was superior to the tangy tomato and basil, or whether the cauliflower salad was made with yoghurt or mayonnaise (both I think). It was not that we were all raging gourmets in the making, I think it was more that any Marks Bros regular felt they somehow owned the place as much as Simon, the actual owner, did.
There was certainly a very communal air to the place - people were always trekking in with posters and flyers to tack on top of the spongy layer of other posters with masking tape.
It was before coffee houses and cafes broke out like a rash all over the city and just about everybody and anybody would end up wandering in through the double glass doors. Third secretaries came down from the Department of Foreign Affairs; wannabe barristers tired of the Four Courts hothouse would wander up for a soft prawn sandwich; hippies grown short in the hair, washed up punks trying to dry out and of course the endless flood of shiny, happy students would all mix quite happily as in a Utopian ideal society.
It was comfortable, battered and warm and after four years I was ridiculously at home in the place. Of course the food helped; no matter how many times I went there I never tired of food that never changed. Even now, I can spend an impossibly long time discussing the chicken sandwiches made with soft brown bread with a thick, chewy crust, the chunky, whole new potato salad, the snaillike cinnamon buns with their sugary, spicy crust.
To me they have the same cultural and personal resonance that nursery food has for others. Even the thought of those buns reminds me of loitering round the stairs waiting for a glimpse of whoever was currently breaking my heart, long after I've forgotten Mr Heartbreak's name.
So it is hardly surprising that I had an immense feeling of loss when, on returning from a long trip in the summer of 1996, I found Marks Bros closed and dark, its drooping posters advertising gigs long over.
In time, the doors opened again, but though the name stayed the same it did not even pretend to offer the same formula and eventually became a vegetarian restaurant. I've heard the food is fine but it would just be too tortuous to eat there. I was not alone in mourning its disappearance and this was probably when the reminiscing about the food began in earnest.
It's not often that you get a second chance with something so special in your past - usually such things are destined to become increasingly encrusted with sentiment until they become completely unrecognisable. So when the grape vine started rustling recently with the news that Simon was back, and he had brought his sandwiches with him, it just seemed too good to be true.
By a lucky stroke, an old friend and ex-Marks Bros habitue was over from England, and three of us planned to meet up in "Simon's Place", which sounded optimistic. Sure enough, in the place where Ronan and Valerie Gallagher used to run one of their Joy of Coffee cafes on South Great Georges Street, Simon had indeed decided to come back.
He doesn't have salads on the menu yet, there's only one layer of posters on the wall and it will take some time to build up that snuff brown skin of cigarette smoke on the light yellow walls, but some of the old magic is definitely back.
Just when the invasion of baguette and ciabatta sandwiches seems to have conclusively taken over the city, Simon's soft sandwiches filled with ham, chicken, salmon, egg, lettuce and a ring of tomato have arrived to offer us the salvation of choice. A few of the old faces, people I haven't seen since my last sandwich, were there once more, still poring over copies of the Dublin Event Guide or planning their next novel or exhibition or coup d'etat.
I fell on the neck of Simon McWilliams, being far too effusive than was really necessary and certainly more than was really "cool". It seems that after 11 years with Marks Bros, a cafe he took over from Eoin and Sheila Ryan in 1985 (Eoin Ryan is now a Fianna Fail TD), he just felt it was time for a change.
Completely exhausted, he sold the business, got on a motorbike and headed off to Greece. "In retrospect, it was not the wisest of decisions but it seemed right at the time." Now, he feels it's time he got back to the buzz of the city, and, well, he missed serving people coffee on Georges Street.
He never really got round to deciding on a name and when people started saying "Meet you at Simon's place" he decided to go with it.
"There's lots of coffee shops now and they're all fairly similar - fashionable, smart and expensively done-up. Marks Bros was always a bit more `sawdust on the floor', and so is this place which was done up on a shoestring. Like Marks Bros, it's somewhere you can walk in, sit down and have a coffee and feel comfortable straight away. But it is different. While a lot of the old faces have come in again, there are also regulars who never went to Marks Bros at all."
When I mention the feeling we all had that we in some way owned a bit of Marks Bros and how special it was, he smiles.
"I know, and in a way that's why I had to go. Can you imagine what a pressure it was? Somewhere underneath it all there was a business to run, and I don't think anyone realised what a lot of work it was. I don't know why, but it just seems different now and I'm glad about that."
In a way, I have to agree. The sandwiches are back, the salads are on the horizon and what is more important, my memories of Marks Bros are intact, golden and getting more precious by the day.
In a town where so many old and beloved pubs, clubs and cafes have changed their decor, their staff, their clientele and inevitably their whole ambience, I will always feel like I owned a bit of Marks Bros. It seems one can have one's cinnamon bun and eat it too.
Simon's Place, South Great George's Street, Dublin.