Rounded off with dinners in Dublin, March and October 2026
The eating problem around Portmarnock is not the peninsula. There is nothing worth driving to in the villages north of the airport, and the clubhouse is a members' room that runs a good club sandwich and no dinner. The eating happens in Dublin, and Dublin is where we ask our guests to hold their attention. Inside a fifteen-minute walk of St Stephen's Green you have Chapter One, Bastible, Etto, the Merrion drawing rooms, the Shelbourne dining room, and three pubs that pour a stout worth the round-trip. What follows is the order we book them in, and why we send certain groups to certain rooms.
The Problem This Essay Solves
You are staying in Dublin for three nights around a Portmarnock round, and you are trying to work out where to eat on each of them. We would tell you the answer changes with which of the three nights is the round night. The round night is the anchor. The other two nights are the arrival night and the pre-flight night, and each of them has a different job.
The arrival night is a hotel-room dinner or a hotel dining-room dinner, because you are jet-lagged and you do not want to be walking home from a serious table at ten in the evening on the wrong body clock. The round night is the reservation the whole trip has been arranged around, and it should be Chapter One or Bastible or Etto, in that order. The pre-flight night is somewhere quieter and closer, and we send our guests to Delahunt or Locks or Peruke and Periwig on the Merrion Row. If you take one thing from this essay, take the ordering. It is where every American group we plan for gets the trip wrong.
The Shelbourne Dining Room, And Why Guests Get It Wrong
The Shelbourne on St Stephen's Green is the hotel we put most of our Portmarnock guests in, and the dining room inside it is the room we tell them to eat in on the arrival night. It is not a room with a Michelin star. It is a proper hotel restaurant with a menu that knows how to feed a golfer who has flown overnight and does not yet want to eat a serious meal. You take the fish, the pommes puree, and a single glass of white. You do not order the wine pairing. You do not order the cheese. You go to bed by ten.
The mistake we watch guests make with the Shelbourne is booking the dining room for the round night rather than the arrival night. On the round night you want to be inside a smaller room with a chef who has been cooking for you specifically, and you want the walk home to be six minutes rather than the six-minute walk from the Shelbourne to No 27 Bar. The Shelbourne is your arrival dinner and your pre-flight breakfast. That is the job it does, and it does it perfectly.
Chapter One, Bastible, And The Round-Night Reservation
Chapter One is the round-night reservation for eight out of ten of the groups we plan for. It is a two-star Michelin room in a Georgian basement on Parnell Square, and the tasting menu is the one meal on this trip that will still be inside your head on the flight home. Book six months out. Take the wine pairing. Take the taxi both ways. If you have not booked Chapter One and you want the equivalent evening for two-thirds of the price, book Bastible on Leonard's Corner. Barry FitzGerald has been running that room for a decade, and it does the best cooking-by-fire meal in Ireland at a price that leaves you room for another good bottle.
The room we send our guests to when they want a serious dinner without the full three hours of a tasting menu is Etto on Merrion Row, which is a wine bar with a kitchen that cooks Italian food better than any Italian room in the city. Take the pasta, the second glass of a Ligurian white, and be out inside ninety minutes. Etto is the correct answer for a group of four that has been on a golf course all day and does not want to be pinned to a chair for the length of a full tasting. You will remember the meal, and you will not resent the chair.
The Merrion, And The Two Rooms Inside It
The Merrion is our other hotel choice on this trip, and it holds two rooms worth eating in. The first is the drawing-room afternoon tea, which is the correct arrival-day lunch for a group that includes non-golfers. Take the sandwiches, the pot of Assam, and one glass of champagne if it is a birthday. The room is quiet, the fires are lit from October through April, and you can spend two hours in it without anyone asking you to move.
The second is Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, which shares the building. It is the two-star Michelin room that sits directly opposite Chapter One on our recommendation list, and we would send you to Guilbaud rather than Chapter One only if your party wants classical French cooking over Irish modernism. Both are three-hour dinners. Both take the wine pairing. Neither is the room you should book if you are flying out the following morning.
The Pub For The First Pint
The first pint of the trip should be at Toner's on Baggot Street, five minutes from either hotel. Toner's has kept its snug rooms and its wooden partitions and the slow pace of a bar that does not run food. Take one pint of stout, sit at the small table under the front window, and give the room half an hour. You will be able to hear the person across from you, and the bartender will not rush you. That is the first pint, and Toner's is the room we walk our guests to on the evening they land.
The second pub, for the second night, is Kehoe's on South Anne Street, which is louder and more crowded and does the second pint of the evening rather than the first. The pub we would avoid on any of these three nights is Temple Bar. It is the pub tourists were told to go to twenty years ago, and it is now a room that has no idea who it is cooking or pouring for. There is no Guinness in Dublin better than the one at Toner's, and there is no reason to walk fifteen minutes further west to try to find one.
The Clubhouse Lunch, And Why It Is Not Dinner
Portmarnock's clubhouse serves a proper post-round lunch, and we would take it every time. Order the club sandwich, the bowl of soup, and a pint of stout or a glass of Sancerre. Sit for an hour. The room is a members' room and behaves like one, which is the correct atmosphere after four hours on a links you have not played before. Your caddie will not be joining you. You are on your own or with your group.
The mistake we watch American groups make is trying to convert that lunch into a dinner by lingering into the afternoon and then driving back into the city too full to eat. Take the sandwich, drive back into Dublin by half past one, and give your evening reservation the appetite it deserves. Chapter One and Bastible have both cooked a menu the size of a small book for you. The clubhouse lunch is the buffer between the round and the walk, and nothing else. It is not the meal, and it is not the story you will tell on the plane home.
The Sequence, Booked In Order
Book the round-night dinner the same day you book the room. Chapter One at seven, or Bastible at seven-fifteen, or Etto at seven-thirty. Book the arrival-night dinner at the hotel restaurant a week before you fly, because either the Shelbourne or the Merrion will hold the table for a resident with no drama. Book the pre-flight-night dinner at Delahunt or Locks two weeks out, because those two rooms fill for the crowd that reads restaurant reviews and books on a Wednesday.
If you are travelling with a party of six or more, tell every room the true headcount when you book. We have watched groups shave two heads off the reservation because they thought a smaller table would be easier to hold, and we have watched those same groups turned away at the door. Chapter One and Bastible run their evenings on the covers they have booked, not the covers they wish they had. Give them the real number, and let them place you in a room that fits it. That is how the meal reads on the night, and it is how the sommelier knows how many glasses to pour before you are seated.
One more note on timing. Do not book the round-night dinner earlier than seven. Portmarnock will not release you from the clubhouse before four in the afternoon on a morning tee time, and you will want the hour in the room and the shower and the walk down Kildare Street before you sit. A six o'clock table on the round night is the reservation that turns a good meal into a rushed one. Take the seven, take the seven-fifteen, take the seven-thirty. Let the room be the room.
The essays that turn this into a trip are our three days around Portmarnock itinerary, which sequences the days the meals sit on, and our how to book Portmarnock essay, which handles the tee time and the caddie and the green fee. Read the three together on the flight over, and hand the eating list to your concierge before you land. The Dublin dining rooms fill early. Your reservations should have been placed before the wheels went up.
Further reading from the Notebook