IT’S 4am on a deserted southside street. Slowly and with a heavy groan of effort, a young man extricates himself from the heap of stuffed bin bags into which he had fallen a half an hour before. He wobbles to his feet and lurches forward to lean against a bus stop pole. The guy is so drunk he is unable to stand. The ability to walk has become an impossibly esoteric and alien skill.
His eyelids hang at half-mast, his tongue is stuck to his teeth. The orange traffic cone which he had wittily perched on his head some time ago has since slid down and is cleaving a thick red welt into his forehead. Every few minutes he tries to speak, to nobody in particular, but can’t. His lips simply curl open and then close with a loud smack.
What this man needs right now is a bed, a couple of days sleep and maybe even a consultation with a liver specialist. What this man wants right now, however, is a plate of rashers, sausages, eggs, beans and chips.
In the wee small hours . . .
For most Irish carousers, the mixed grill is a sort of Holy Grail. Oh sure, most nights we might make do with a kebab, a pizza, a curry, a family bucket of chicken – and some nights maybe even the lot in one sitting – but we’ll still feel somehow short changed and disappointed. Call it the Galtee Complex or the Denny Syndrome but a session of boozing, clubbing and shite-talking just doesn’t seem complete if it doesn’t climax in the calorific orgasm of a good, old-fashioned fry-up.
In response to this national characteristic, over the years there has sprouted up in all our major cities a clutch of late night diners and grill rooms. These establishments should not be confused with ordinary restaurants which merely stay open late into the night. What I’m referring to are those unique emporia that were specially conceived and designed for the hungry nighthawk, whether it be the lateshift worker, the taxi driver, the trucker, the prostitute, the cop or, most commonly of all, the rat-arsed drunk with his or her tongue hanging out for a good nosebag.
Dublin used to have dozens of these small hours hostelries. Unfortunately, many of them were unmitigated dumps with standards of hygiene and cooking that can only be adequately described with recurrent recourse to that section of the English vocabulary utilising the prefix dis. I know someone who worked briefly in one of the most notorious of these greasy spoons during the Seventies and, twenty years on, she still has nightmares about the experience.
Every night, her first task was to manoeuvre a large pat of margarine onto an old and rancid butter wrapper (the same one was used for months on end) and to place this in a conspicuous position so that the hapless clientele would be fooled into thinking that their bread ’n’ butter actually came with butter. Meanwhile, the “meat” in the meat pies and rissoles served in the place was, in reality, a concoction of bread crumbs and Bisto.
And then there was the owner, a woman so bent on keeping undesirable elements (i.e. prostitutes) out of her premises that unaccompanied females were refused entry. She also patrolled her domain with a police baton wrapped inside a tea towel, on the lookout for reprobates who might try to secretly spike their own tea or coffee with a splash of hooch.
Not surprisingly, this particular cook house and many others like it have long ago passed on to the catering equivalent of the elephant’s graveyard. Unfortunately, most of the half decent night stops have also hung out their closed sign for the last time. You’d now be hard pushed to find more than a handful of locations in the capital where you could get a little something to harden the arteries at 5am.
I’m lucky. I live smack bang in the middle of the only remaining area where there is any degree of choice in this regard. In the tiny Dublin 2 bailiwick that stretches roughly from Harcourt Terrace to Portobello Bridge, there are two (count them) late night/early morning eateries which have been kept alive by famished punters coming from the various south city clubs, including now of course The POD. They are The Manhattan on Harcourt Road and The Gigs Place on South Richmond Street.
If the belt of Leeson Street clubs is known as The Strip then this district could be dubbed The Rasher – a sort of twilight zone where the aroma of home cooking mingles freely with the whiff of the speakeasy and nothing is quite what it appears to be.
First We’ll Take Manhattans
For four generations, The Manhattan’s licence to grill has been operated by the Woods family who originally hail from Meath but are now domiciled in Dun Laoghaire. Like all true institutions, it is better known by its unofficial name. Locals and regulars all refer to the place as Auntie Mae’s, after its chief cook and matriarch, Mae Woods, who can still be found hovering about most nights and who along with her late husband first opened The Manhattan back in the mid-fifties.
In the early days, Mae’s mother helped out in the kitchen and pretty soon her son and then, in turn, her son’s children took up their spatulas and assumed oven ringside positions. These days, the younger members of the Woods dynasty regard working in The Manhattan as a sort of vocation. Twenty-something Tara Woods even describes the job as “a calling’.
“I worked in an accountant’s office as trainee accountant for a while and I hated it,” she recalls. “I just didn’t like doing the nine to five and I started to feel that I was getting a calling to come and work here. It must be in the blood.”
The Manhattan opens seven nights a week, from 1.30am to 6am. They have a wine licence but choose not to use it (“You’d make more on serving meals than wine. Wine just causes aggravation and most of our customers have had enough when they get here,” insists Tara). The menu basically runs from beans on toast to steak, with endless variations on the fry up and chips concept in between. Their best seller is what they call “the full breakfast” – bacon, sausage, egg, chips, beans, tea and toast – and this will set you back £4.50.
Every night the rush at The Manhattan begins at 2.30am when the first wave of nightclubbers emerge blinking from their sweaty lairs, and continues at full pelt right up to twenty to six. For some reason, 5.40am seems to mark a sort of cut-off point.
Obviously, those of us who’ve been out all night decide to call it a day and exit stage left at this juncture while those of us who are only getting up to hit the early houses are still at home making our preparations (writing a will, saying goodbye to loved ones, that kind of thing). Anyway, this final twenty minutes is the only bit of peace staff at The Manhattan get all night.
In terms of layout, the restaurant is partitioned into two distinct areas. There’s the front section with its wooden stools and Formica-topped counter, and then behind the dividing twin-doors there’s the dining room with its more conventional cafe arrangement of tables and chairs. Traditionally, and going right back to Auntie Mae’s heyday, the front lounge was a favourite late night haunt for gays, lesbians, transvestites and camp folk in general (Mr. Pussy was a regular) who would’ve felt uncomfortable, not to mention under threat, congregating elsewhere.
For years, the centrepiece of this ad hoc alternative club was a great big Wurtlitzer juke box which doubled as a music machine and a sort of makeshift chaise longue. When it eventually buckled beneath the weight of time and a thousand backsides, the Woods’ searched high and low for an adequate replacement but to no avail. Much discussion between management and clientele followed about what could be brought in to fill the gap left by the Wurlitzer and they finally came to the conclusion that what was needed was, of all things, a weighing scales. Now, one of those old-fashioned long-case Avery scales is the first sight that greets you when you enter The Manhattan.
“It’s for before and after weigh-ins,” explains Tara Woods. “A lot of the gays and others who come in here love hanging around the place but they’re afraid they might get fat on the food. People have great craic with the scales, slagging each other and calling each other names.
“One night at about four or five, this fella, a kind of middle-aged spinster type, pulled up outside in a stretch limo. He was real flash, expensive overcoat, cane, hat, everything. He had a meal and got talking to some of the people here. They started laughing and daring him to do something and then, all of a sudden, he started to strip off completely.
“He was wearing an unbelievable number of clothes and he took them all off and then got up on the scales, stark naked. When he’d proved his point, he got dressed again, went back to his stretch limo and was driven off. We haven’t seen him since.”
The Gigs Place is the place to be
During the daytime, you could quite easily walk straight past The Manhattan without sensing any clue to the full and exciting life it leads after the witching hour. Its edifice is completely unedifying, especially now that the first A has disappeared from the sign above the door (if anything, M NHATTAN sounds like the proprietor of some sort of Indian chop-house). At no hour, light or dark, however, could you miss The Gigs Place.
With its white stucco-effect exterior and its panelled window of tinted and bubbled glass, it looks more like an ornate Spanish villa than an after-hours nosheteria. On weeknights, The Gigs (as we devoted habitués affectionately call it) opens from 11pm to 5am, and on Fridays and Saturdays from 11.30pm to 6am. Enter the premises during these hours and you’ll be left in no doubt that this establishment is precisely what it claims to be on its brightly-coloured name-plate. It’s a “nite spot”. Not, you should note, a night spot, but a nite spot.
Inside, it’s dark, very dark. This is an extremely important feature and The Gigs Place’s commitment to maintaining such a service has in no small way contributed to its popularity. Generally speaking, you see, sozzled people prefer to eat in the shade rather than the glare. Hand and mouth coordination isn’t always our strong point at times like this and if by chance we happen to mistarget our fork-aim and smear our cheeks with tartar sauce or ketchup we’d prefer, on the whole, if others didn’t notice and start to laugh. As a rule then, the lighting in restaurants should be directly proportionate to the level of consciousness of their patrons. The Gigs Place gets it just right, exceptionally dim.
The decor is also perfect. Scarlet and puce, very relaxing shades, are the prevailing tones. Seating is provided by the kind of secluded booths and alcoves that allow you to pretend that you’re a gangster in Chicago during prohibition, and the creeping foliage entwined in the trestle partitions affords perfect herbaceous cover for everything from cigarette butts to unwanted chops.
Furthermore, the soundtrack is, by and large, discreet and quite inoffensive. Usually, the music in eateries is on a par with the food in record shops but at least the people in The Gigs have the taste to play a lot of Johnny Cash and somehow this seems very appropriate. Of course, the fact that they serve wine may also have something to do with why I always appear to find myself singing along with their selection of sounds.
The Gigs Place has been plying its trade for twenty-three years now. Its owner is Brian Carr, a former musician and ex-member of The Royal Blues showband (a picture of whom adorns the wall near the doorway to the toilets). That he chose the name ‘The Gigs Place’ when he first opened in 1970 was indicative of the fact that most of his customers in the early days were fellow musicians and showbanders.
Having sent the punters home sweatin’, they would cool down with some house white and a nice feed. Even today, regulars from that era, among them Dickie Rock, Brendan Grace and assorted members of The Indians, occasionally drop by for a nostalgic supper.
The most popular dish on the Gigs menu is, and has always been, the mixed grill but you can have either a “short mixed grill” or a “large mixed grill.” Now, the distinction between short and large has always confused me. Little and Large I understand, and I can just about get my head around short and long, but short and large?
“It’s straightforward enough,” avers chef, Sheila Fitzpatrick. “A short mixed grill is bacon, egg, sausage, beans or peas and chips. And a large mixed grill has a chop and liver as well. Put it this way, the real difference is about £2.”
That’s why the ladies are the champs
You see and hear all sorts of things in these late night joints that you would never hear or see anywhere else. Funny things, sad things, violent things, stupid things.
The most common sight of all is probably that of the solitary, sloshed man (and it is always a man) who has fallen fast asleep face down in his food. Policy in both The Manhattan and The Gigs Place appears to be to let snoozing dogs lie, on the grounds presumably that these guys might be even more trouble awake. Anyway, they’ve paid for the grub, and if they want to wear some of it home, then the best of luck to them.
Drink being drink and the human stomach being only human after all, visceral traumas are never far from these premises. One night in The Gigs, I watched as a young man assiduously seasoned his mixed grill with salt, vinegar and a variety of sauces and then before even touching a single bite, he tossed his cookies in a multi-directional eruption that would’ve rivalled Vesuvius at its fiercest. The response time of the staff was in microseconds. From nowhere, a man materialised with a mop and a bucket of warm water while a waitress appeared with a box of tissues and a glass of milk, and another took the queasy gent’s fry away to the kitchen for a reheating so that he could have it in a few minutes when he felt a little better. It was an operation of almost military precision.
“There are certain people that you keep an eye on all the time and you know by the look of them if they’re going to get sick,” says The Gig Place’s Sheila Fitzpatrick. “The sleepers are the most dangerous of all though. A while ago, there was a fella who was asleep in one of the booths for a while and when he woke up he must’ve thought he was at home. He walked halfway up the aisle and started going to the toilet in front of everybody, as if he were at home in his own bathroom. The damage was done before anyone got to him.”
Outbreaks of violence, of course, are a persistent threat in places like The Manhattan and The Gigs. Both managements insist, however, that the proximity of Harcourt Terrace Garda Station and the high percentage of off-duty Gardaí among their regular clientele act as deterrents to would-be trouble makers, but quite what would happen if a group of drunken cops were to start causing hassle isn’t clear.
Security is tightest at The Manhattan. There, the front door is kept locked at all times and is opened only to familiar faces or to people who appear relatively “sober and peaceable.”
The Gigs Place operates no such vetting procedure but they say that there is “always a man on the premises” to intervene in potential flare-ups. Surprisingly, both Tara Woods and Sheila Fitzpatrick argue that it is belligerent females rather than aggressive males who cause the most agitation.
“Women are definitely the worst customers,” insists Tara. “They’re very territorial. A group of girls together will come in and start giving you hassle just for the sake of it. They can be very nasty when they’re drunk, very antagonistic.”
Sheila goes even further. “A drunk, angry woman would do you far more damage than a drunk, angry man,” she says. “If a man is fighting, he’ll shout and roar and he might throw a box at another man, but a woman will pick up the nearest thing and she won’t care what it is. She’d take off her high heel and hit you in the eye with it. Or she’d pick up a glass and smash your face. Personally, I think women are more vicious when they’re fighting. That’s my experience.”
The stars are out tonight
Despite the risks and the messiness, however, a trip down The Rasher is still probably the safest and sanest way to spend the wee hours of a drunken morning. If you don’t believe me, just ask the millionaire superstars and celebs who are among its biggest fans.
All four members of U2, for instance, are Manhattan regulars and have been for years. In more recent times, it hasn’t even been unknown for them to be joined in Auntie Mae’s by Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. And yes, the two supermodels did wrap their laughing gear around a couple of “full breakfasts.” “They had the bacon, beans, the lot,” says Tara Woods.
Always keen to experiment with new forms and variations on themes, Bono and The Edge have also sampled The Gigs Place’s fare on a couple of occasions. More consistent commitment to The Gigs, however, has been shown by Liam O Maonlaí. “He comes in a lot and always has the same thing,” reveals Sheila Fitzpatrick. “Liver, beans and chips.”
But if you want a really impressive Rasher endorsement then look no further than the Irish football squad. Individually and in groups, the Boys in Green never miss an opportunity to visit The Manhattan. Niall Quinn even spent the final hours of his stag night there. And get this: the instant their place touched down in Dublin on its return from their encounter with Latvia in Riga earlier this year, Roy Keane, Denis Irwin, Tony Cascarino and Paul McGrath all headed straight for Harcourt Road and a dawn encounter with the Woods meal machine.
Now, that’s class.