Looking for Dublin’s Best Smithwick’s Experience, Totally Dublin has come to one of the most central bars in Dublin City, Cassidy’s of Westmoreland Street. This busy thoroughfare is a stone’s throw from the Liffey, Trinity College and Temple Bar making it an excellent location for a bar to try something different.
Stepping in between the smokers lounging in armchairs in the half-inside-half-outside smoking porch, I sidle into Cassidy’s, and an assault on the senses. The all-permeating aroma of pizza is a testament to the enduring popularity of the pint-and-pizza-for-€10 deal that Cassidy’s runs. We’re not talking your gourmet, hand-made, goat’s-cheese-and-rocket affairs, but that hasn’t put a dent in the demand, as customers are three deep at the bar.
Cassidy’s is packed on the Thursday I visit — it mostly seems to be filling with tourists making the weekend a long one and starting it early, but the crowd is as eclectic and higgledy-piggledy as the bananas decor. The walls are plastered with comic strips, film posters and are liberally graffitied. Squeezing through to the bar, making polite but firm use of my thankfully pointy elbows and charming apologies to the befuddled Spanish people, I manage to order a pint and pizza. The smiling barman pours the Smithwick’s with a practiced finesse, leaving a dainty head sitting delicately atop the rapidly clearing ale.
A table, or even a seat, seemed to be completely out of the question, as almost all flat surfaces were colonised by drinks or increasingly ineffectually played games of Connect-4 and Jenga—games of this nature rapidly becoming de rigeur in Dublin bars serving craft beers. Leaning against a free bit of wall, I tuck into my pizza. It is, sadly, utilitarian, sating my hunger but nothing to write home about, so I am glad of the refreshing crispness of my Smithwick’s to make up for the culinary shortcomings. I hear strange rumours of a Street Fighter arcade machine, in the mystical realm of “towards the back of the pub”, but haven’t got the courage to brave the gauntlet necessary to find out if the legends are true. My Smithwick’s finished, I decide that a second sortie to the bar is too daunting a task, and make my way back out through the smokers.
Cassidy’s feels like it’s trying to bring a Bernard Shaw vibe to the Temple Bar crowd, and ticks many of the boxes — craft and premium beers are always a welcome sight, and even if the pizza isn’t amazing it’s a nice addition. Its central location makes it an attractive staging area from which to launch the rest of your evening, but you may want to look elsewhere if you’re after a quiet one, even on a Thursday.
Cassidy’s
27 Westmoreland Street, Dublin 2
w: Facebook
t: 085-8016804
