Irish Seafood: What To Order, The Month To Order It, And Where

The Species Worth Ordering, And The Month

Dublin Bay prawns first. They are langoustines, not prawns, landed at Howth, Clogherhead and Kilmore Quay, and they are the finest thing in Irish water. Best from April to October, grilled with butter and served shell on. Most of the catch leaves the country, so when you see them on a board, order them and do not deliberate. Brown crab is the everyday one: claws in garlic butter on the coast, picked meat on brown bread in the towns, at their fullest in autumn and cheaper than the lobster sitting beside them on the same menu.

Mussels come rope grown from Killary Harbour and Bantry Bay, and the season runs September to April. A pot in cider and cream is the cheapest good dinner in Ireland. Lobster runs May to October and is worth having once, at a pier, in the month it landed. Whitefish worth ordering are hake, turbot and John Dory, and the test is whether the board names the boat or the port. If it only says catch of the day, it is not.

Two things we order that visitors rarely do. Smoked mackerel pate on soda bread, which is a national dish nobody calls one and costs almost nothing. And oak smoked organic salmon, which is a different food from the wet, sugary product sold at home. Wild Atlantic salmon is tightly quota controlled and mostly unavailable, so anything advertising it cheaply is not what it claims.

Scallops deserve their own line. Hand dived scallops off Donegal and the Antrim coast, seared hard and served with almost nothing, are the one luxury item here that is priced fairly. Ask whether they are dived or dredged, because the difference in texture is the whole point and any kitchen worth eating in will know the answer without checking.

The Rooms We Drive For

Linnane's Lobster Bar at New Quay in County Clare is our first choice on the island. It sits at the end of a stone pier on the edge of the Burren, the crab claws arrive in a puddle of garlic butter, and you eat looking at Galway Bay. Moran's Oyster Cottage at Kilcolgan is the other side of the same bay and has been run by the same family for seven generations. Both are twenty minutes off the main road and both are worth the detour every single time.

Further round the coast: Out of the Blue in Dingle, which closes when the boats do not go out and posts the fact on the door, Fishy Fishy in Kinsale, Mourne Seafood Bar in Belfast for the best value of any of them, and Klaw in Dublin when you want prawns without ceremony. In Howth, thirty minutes from the city on the DART, you can eat crab at the harbour and walk the cliff loop afterwards, which is the single best half day we give visitors who are short on time.

None of these rooms is formal and none needs a jacket. Several need a phone call in July and August, and the ones on the west coast keep hours that follow the weather rather than the calendar.

What these rooms share is a short menu written that morning and a total absence of interest in impressing you. We have eaten in hotel dining rooms on this coast that charged three times as much for fish that travelled twice as far, and we have stopped doing it. If you take one booking from this section, make it Linnane's on a weekday in October, at about two in the afternoon, when the light on the bay is at its best and the room is half empty.

Buying At The Counter

Fishmongers here are still real shops and the good ones will tell you the boat. Kish Fish and Nick's in Dublin, Gannet Fishmongers in Galway, Ballycotton Seafood in Cork, Sawers in Belfast for the smoked counter. Ask two questions: what landed today, and what would you cook tonight. You will get a straight answer, and often a better one than the menu you were considering.

This matters more than it sounds, because a great deal of American visitors here stay in houses and cottages with kitchens and never use them. A kilo of mussels costs about four euro. Crab claws cost a fraction of restaurant prices. A dinner of shellfish, soda bread and a bottle of Muscadet, cooked in a rented kitchen in Connemara with rain on the window, is a better memory than most restaurant meals and takes fifteen minutes.

For the smokehouses, go to the source. The Burren Smokehouse in Lisdoonvarna and Ummera in west Cork both sell direct, both vacuum pack for travel, and both cost a fraction of what the same fish costs in an American food hall.

Two practical notes. Most counters close by five and many shut entirely on Sunday and Monday, so buy on the way out of a town rather than on the way back into it. And ask them to open the crab or debeard the mussels while you wait: it takes them two minutes, saves you twenty, and costs nothing.

Oysters Have Their Own Rules

Native Irish oysters, the flat ostrea edulis from Galway Bay, are in season in the months with an r and effectively means September to April. They taste of metal and cream and are nothing like the Pacific rock oysters sold year round. Rock oysters are farmed, available all twelve months, and perfectly good, but they are not the thing people come here for.

Galway Bay and Carlingford Lough are the two bays we send people to, and the September oyster festivals in Galway and Clarenbridge are the busiest and least pleasant week to attempt it. Go in October instead, when the oysters are better and the rooms are half empty. We keep a separate hub for all of this because the season, the bays and the rooms deserve more space than a section.

One practical note for American palates. Irish oysters are served with lemon, brown bread and butter, and a glass of stout rather than mignonette. Try it once before you ask for hot sauce, because the pairing is not folklore, it works.

Seasons, Weather And The Days Nothing Lands

The single biggest cause of a disappointing seafood meal here is not a bad kitchen. It is a week of Atlantic weather that kept the day boats in harbour. When the wind is up on the west coast for three days, the good rooms shorten their menus and the poor ones serve frozen fish without mentioning it. Learn to read the board: fewer options is a good sign, not a bad one.

Season by season, our short version. Late spring into early summer is prawns and the first lobster. High summer is crab, mackerel and full restaurants. Autumn is the best of the lot: native oysters return, crab is at its fullest, mussels start, and the crowds are gone. Winter is mussels, chowder and smoked fish, with a lot of coastal kitchens closed from November to March.

If you are building a trip specifically around seafood, come in the first three weeks of October. You get the whole species list at once, the west coast still has settled days, and you will be able to walk into rooms that need a month of notice in July.

There is also a rhythm to the week that nobody tells visitors. Monday is the thinnest day on any coastal menu, because most day boats do not go out on Sunday. If you have one seafood dinner to spend on this trip, spend it on a Thursday or Friday, when the week's landings are at their fullest and the kitchens have their full staff in.

Safety, Allergies And Taking It Home

Irish shellfish waters are monitored and classified, and closures for biotoxins are published and enforced, which is why you will occasionally see a bay's product off a menu for a fortnight. That is the system working. Restaurants here take shellfish allergy seriously and by law must be able to tell you the allergens in every dish, so ask directly and you will get an accurate answer rather than a shrug.

For carrying food home, the rules are simple and worth respecting. Commercially packaged, vacuum sealed smoked salmon is generally admitted to the United States and is far cheaper here. Fresh, live or chilled shellfish is not admitted, so the crab claws stay in Ireland. Declare everything you carry: declaring an admissible item costs you nothing, and failing to declare one costs a fine at preclearance in Dublin.

If you want the taste at home rather than the fish, buy the ingredients instead. Ummera smoked salmon, a jar of Ballymaloe relish, and a bag of Irish seaweed for a chowder will get you closer than you expect.

How We Would Shape A Seafood Week

Start in Howth for a day, because it is thirty minutes from Dublin and puts crab and a cliff walk into the same afternoon. Move west to Galway for three nights, which gives you Moran's, Linnane's, the Saturday market and a Burren coast day where lunch is the point. Finish in Kinsale or Dingle for two nights, depending on whether you want a harbour town with restaurants or a peninsula with weather.

That route follows the boats rather than the postcards, and it keeps you within twenty minutes of a working pier for most of the week. Base yourself in three places, not six. The driving between them is the price of the trip, not the trip.

Order what landed that morning, in the month it belongs to, at a room within sight of the water. Every other rule about eating seafood in Ireland is a footnote to that one.