The Best Places in Ireland

A halva brownie with a crisp edge and a gooey center is doing a lot of the talking here. Tang is a casual dinner spot leaning into Middle Eastern and North African flavors, the kind of place where smoky mushroom shawarma and lamb kofta in Moroccan tomato sauce land on the table without the bill requiring a quiet moment of grief afterward. The room fills fast, and the menu makes it easy to order more than planned.

Tucked into the basement of The Clarence Hotel, this sprawling cocktail bar unfolds across four interconnected rooms, each with its own décor and personality. The first, with a burlesque circus vibe, is always open; the rest only come alive later in the week. It's a rabbit warren in the best sense, full of hidden snugs and corners, though the bartender's tables flanking the bar in that first room are where seasoned visitors tend to land.

Dark panelling runs floor to ceiling, the shutters stay half-drawn, and the gold lettering on the built-in cabinets is the kind of detail someone spent real money on. This cocktail bar on Dawson Street occupies a building with a wig-making past, and the room leans into it without tipping into costume. Worn floorboards, vintage bar, no natural light to speak of. The sort of place that makes you order a second drink before you've finished deciding on the first.

The orange Formica bar counter looks like it was lifted from a school cafeteria, which sets the tone nicely for what follows. This is a tequila cantina with a serious commitment to 100% blue agave, a margarita list long enough to require a strategy, and a sound system that registers on the Richter scale. The kitchen runs Mexican from guacamole to pigs head carnitas, but the tequila is the reason people show up.

A polished pewter bar curves through a room that reads like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen redecorating Wonderland, all blue velvet stools and purple high chairs. The hotel outside is prim Victorian; the bar inside threw that out immediately. It's a cocktail bar inside the Dylan Hotel, and it commits fully to the glam, in a way that makes restraint seem like someone else's problem.

A long pressed-concrete bar, built to look like granite, stretches the full width of the room and sets the tone the moment you walk in from the Millennium Walkway. This is the cocktail lounge side of a larger Thai restaurant complex, and it earns its own visit: high bar stools, a stylish room, and enough going on that eating here at the bar instead of the dining room feels like the better call.

Rows of boxy leather armchairs face the windows, and those windows face the Liffey, which is a better deal than most hotel bars offer. This is the lobby bar of the Morrison Hotel, a John Rocha-designed property that once described itself as "probably the hippest and coolest luxury hotel in Dublin," which is exactly the kind of confidence you either admire or sidestep. The vibe is calm, the setting is polished, and the river is doing the decorating.

A cocktail bar tucked inside a Georgian townhouse that was built for wealthy merchants and nobility, which is a lot of context to absorb before your first drink. No. 23 takes its name from the house number, so the address and the sign are the same thing. The plasterwork is original, the antiques are serious, and the art on the walls belongs to one of Ireland's significant private collections. Dress accordingly.

Wicker lampshades hang over the long bar, with polished concrete underfoot and an ebony screen separating drinkers from the dining room behind. This is the cocktail bar inside a contemporary Thai-Vietnamese restaurant tucked behind the Westbury Hotel. The name translates as "happy meeting place," which the room seems committed to delivering. The chef's résumé includes cooking for the Thai royal family, which is one way to set expectations at the bar.

Sixteen framed letters from US presidents with Irish heritage line the walls of this basement cocktail bar beneath Shanahan's steakhouse on St Stephen's Green, and yes, Clinton's is addressed to the man himself. An American opened it because Dublin lacked a decent steak house, which tracks. The room is resolutely, cheerfully American, the kind of bar that feels more Boston than Dublin, and nobody down here seems to mind one bit.

The stained glass and towering mahogany back bar with Romanesque arches make The Palace Bar feel less like a pub and more like a church that got its priorities right. One of Fleet Street's old-school institutions, it draws a literary crowd by reputation, the kind of place that was a haunt for intellectuals long before that became a marketing strategy. The snug up front fits five people and has its own quietly dramatic history.

The cobbled courtyard and castle-like facade are your first hint that this pub has been around forever, and it genuinely has, with a tavern on the site since the medieval period. Inside, three low-ceilinged rooms are plastered with historical curiosities, which suits the atmosphere well enough that it never feels like a theme park. A classic old Dublin pub, full stop, and one that's earned the patina.

The Victorian snugs up front still have their carved woodwork and whiskey-branded mirrors, exactly as they should. This is an old-school Dublin pub on Lower Baggot Street, the kind that looks modest from the pavement but extends surprisingly far back once you're in. Locals and politicians from nearby Leinster House have long made it a second office, which keeps the conversation loud and the pretension low.

Tucked off the lobby of the Shelbourne, this cocktail bar claims to have invented the Black Velvet, Guinness tipped into champagne in a tall glass, sometime in the early 1870s. London's Brooks's Club disputes that. The bar doesn't seem bothered. It's quieter and more intimate than the hotel's larger bar up front, the kind of place where you order the house claim, because obviously you do, and settle in.

Look for the carved wooden snail above the door on Fade Street, or you'll walk right past. Inside, this upstairs bar spreads across several first-floor rooms with bare floorboards, exposed brick, and original cast iron fireplaces sitting alongside bold modern artwork in a way that probably shouldn't work but does. A tent-covered terrace handles the smokers. The crowd skews young and the whole thing stays cheerfully unpolished.

The Dubliners launched their career in the cramped spot by the front window, and that corner still fills with live traditional music seven nights a week. O'Donoghues is an old-school Dublin pub on Merrion Row, the stretch locals call the Royal Mile of traditional bars, near St. Stephen's Green. Pints, fiddles, and a room that has barely changed since the O'Donoghue family converted it from a grocery shop.

The carved mahogany goes floor to ceiling, the chandeliers are cut glass, and the cornices are ornate enough to make you wonder how it stays upright. The Long Hall is an old-school Dublin pub that looks like someone commissioned a Victorian cathedral for drinking purposes. Women were served through hatches until 1951, which puts the velvet-rope arguments of modern bars in useful perspective. Order a pint and look up.

The bar itself is eight-sided, sitting beneath a domed octagonal window that frames it from above like a skylight built specifically for the occasion. It's a hotel bar inside a quay-side property co-owned by Bono and The Edge, which sounds louder than it is: on most nights the room runs to oak panelling, quiet pints, and someone folding a newspaper. The rock-and-roll provenance is there if you want it, mostly in the telling.

Twenty taps of house-brewed stout will calibrate your expectations fast: this is a beer pub, full stop. The Porterhouse started here off Dame Street before expanding into a chain, but the original still runs its own brewery and sends unpasteurised beer to the bar. Around 180 bottles round out the draught list for anyone who treats a beer menu the way others treat a wine list.

Khaki walls and utilitarian furniture across three floors on South William Street, a bar the regulars have long since shortened to "Swilly." The owners describe it as Dublin's friendliest and funkiest urban lounge, which is the kind of thing that usually invites skepticism, but the easygoing staff and the quality of the DJs make it hard to argue. A style-conscious, music-loving crowd fills it out most nights.

Carved mahogany climbs every surface, including the ceiling, and the stained glass and mosaic floors have been there long enough that the Victorians would still feel at home. The Stag's Head is an old-school Dublin pub on a tucked-away court off Dame Street, the kind of place where the craftsmanship does the decorating and nobody felt the need to update anything. Order a pint and let the room do the talking.

The address arrives by email after you book, and even then it takes some finding. That's the point: The Blind Pig is a proper speakeasy cocktail bar tucked somewhere off Wicklow Street, named for the cops who looked the other way during Prohibition. The team behind it are among Dublin's most serious bartenders, and the whole production, the secrecy, the hidden entrance, lands as atmosphere rather than gimmick.