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Food on Ireland tours
I looked at the hotel restaurants where dinner is "at our leisure." It seems to me that these to not offer really Irish foods. The choices seem more like what a fancy chef thinks travelers want to eat with often words I don't know the meaning of or choices that sound way too fancy for local Irish people. It this my imagination? I don't want to eat only Americanized food but the real food for real countryman. Any ideas?
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Yes, most of the hotels Tauck uses in Europe are 4/5 star and tend to have higher end restaurants as compared to more casual pub food. Irelands culinary scene has been growing in recent years and most of these places like to feature the best of the local foods. The seafood is wonderful. I'm not the most adventurous gourmet but I never had trouble finding things I enjoyed. Most menus will have some basics like roast chicken or beef steak.
When on your own you can certainly search out casual alternatives. In Dublin we ate at Gallaghers Boxty house which had wonderful local favorites and beer. Boxty is potato cakes. Here's a link to their menus https://www.boxtyhouse.ie/general-5
Oh my goodness Claudia, I don’t know why I decided to open that menu link, I wasn’t going to eat dinner for about an hour,,but now I’m starving. It looks delicious! When we were kids, the dishes in the From the Pot part of the menu were what we would consider as typically Irish.
Don’t forget to try Irish sausages, bacon and black pudding!
My mother went through a phase of baking Irish Soda bread after she went to stay with relatives on their farm. They had a ‘pet pig’ which she loved. What she didn’t realize was they were fattening the pig up for slaughter. The time came, she had to beg them to wait until she left for home!
I had the BEST seafood chowder at the restaurant of the Fleet Street Hotel, which was across the street and in the next block up toward the Liffey from our hotel, the Westin Dublin. Also good seafood chowder at Lincoln's Inn of the Finn Hotel in Dublin (just southeast of Trinity College Green), which is where James Joyce met Nora Barnacle. In addition to seafood, Ireland has great lamb.
British it isn't on their menu anymore but at Boxty house I had boxty with tender beef in a mushroom cream sauce. The boxty was like a crepe. So good. We also ate seafood at Matt the Thresher. Excellent. My BIL said their fish and chips was the best in Ireland and he ate lots of it over there.