1 July 2026

South Dublin: where even the prawns have a superiority complex

Grey skies and great seafood at Ireland’s best fish restaurant

Photo by Herbert Lehmann/ Anzenberger / Eyevine

To describe the vast colour gradation of an average day in coastal Dublin, you must contact the Farrow & Ball department within your head: pewter, slate, elephant hide, giraffe tongue, sedative, cinder block, pigeon, dust, moth, puddle. The Emerald Isle? That is a kitsch half-truth only ever heard in an American accent. I, meanwhile, have never seen the concept of poetic licence stretched so thin as when Patrick Kavanagh called this city “Parnassian.”

No. An adolescence in South County Dublin is an education in that drab, dismal, Hibernian shade – to fully immerse oneself in the grey bricks, veils of rain, mist over the Wicklow hills, the grey stone and the grey waters of Louis MacNeice’s imagination. Or how about the looming overcast skies of Colm Tóibín’s walk along the Grand Canal? Tread softly, Yeats meant to say, for you tread on my greys. (No – my greys!). Even the four family pets – two cocker spaniels, a labradoodle, a blind cat rescued from a Tesco bag – did not deviate from greyscale.

It might be the dampest place in the world. But there are reasons to be thankful for this. First, when the sun does come along it feels like an emissary from God. One really comes to appreciate blue and yellow when they are so rare – much like how Oliver Twist was so moved by the Maylie family’s fruit and butter after all that gruel; or how a dog might be tempted by chocolate after a lifetime of kibble. Second, that temperate maritime climate indicates a proximity to fish, which indicates a proximity to Ireland’s best fish restaurant.

It is a tremendous banality to say the best fish restaurants are all in view of the sea, yet that won’t stop me. Fish, legless and parochial, don’t much like land travel. At Cavistons in Glasthule village they might have had to traverse about four metres. So good are Ireland’s coastal waters that even the langoustine here have a case of Hiberno-exceptionalism, and call themselves Dublin Bay prawns. That crustaceans might have their own sense of metropolitan territoriality struck me as rather outré as well, but I am not minded to complain.

I am in town to speak at a literary festival (brag) but first, lunch. Even in Dublin, it cannot rain forever. And so I am sitting in a window seat in Cavistons on a clear, hot day. I can see the entire bay (where the big prawns live!) and the world’s most famous Martello tower – you know, where Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan stare wistfully into the Irish Sea at the outset of Ulysses? And before you ask whether I have finished this approachable and, frankly, amateur text yet – the answer is yes, just not personally. So back off.

This is Joyce’s Dublin. Positively frothing with erudition… Land of Saints and Scholars, and all those other ghastly clichés. Whatever. I order black sole – “boat price” (one demanding boat, I’ll say) – with a beurre blanc, steamed broccoli, a wedge of lemon, and a polite but not obtrusive scattering of chives. My parents both order poached cod, with three spears of asparagus. We drink cold Chablis and I clean the sole off the bone like a cat might in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Cavistons is unstressed by the aesthetic demands of modernity, granting it a mode of timelessness that cannot be said of all those au courant pan-European small-plates restaurants colonising the nation’s capital.

At the beginning of this year, Dublin experienced 50 consecutive days of rain. Being Irish is a constant state of opening the weather app and recoiling in horror. The fish, I suspect, do not mind. But this is no Eden nor demi-paradise. Ireland: the sodden isle. Right – having explored that literary cul-de-sac for all its worth, I will tell you one more thing.

The restaurant is owned and run by Peter Caviston, who still wears a pin of the Irish and Ukrainian flags on his white linen lapel. He is often found in a straw Panama hat too. And here on a rocky crag perched on the Irish Sea is a restaurant quietly getting along with it, treating fish with the same reverence Joyce and Yeats treated the sentence. Dublin, yes, in all those shades of grey but in blanched green and cobalt blue, off-white and buttery yellow too.

[Further reading: Everyone wants to be Eve Babitz]