The Pub Lunch Award is a meritorious initiative, for standards are frequently low, indeed frequently dismal, in many places, and those who produce interesting food deserve to be recognised.
My own most recent experience of pub food, in a famous and long-established pub on the main Dublin-Cork road, offered the sort of fare which makes one want to weep: dismal soup, mortified meat, tortured vegetables, a truly dyspeptic concoction.
But, clearly things are different in many other places, and in its second year, the awards went to 10 winners. Those who got the gongs were: Sean Tierney in Clonmel; Baily's in Tralee; Grogan's in Glasson; The Tankard in Fenit; The Ballymore Inn in Ballymore Eustace; The Stag's Head in Dublin; Blair's Inn in Blarney; The Bohemian Girl in Wexford and Roddy's Leopardstown Inn in Dublin, and all now sport a specially commissioned copper wall-mounted plate by Derek McGarry.
