Traditional Irish Dishes to Try, and Where to Find Them

Irish food has a reputation for being plain, and it is not deserved. The best of it is simple in the way good cooking often is: a few excellent ingredients — lamb, potatoes, butter, fish, dairy — treated with care.

Here are the traditional dishes worth ordering, what each one actually is, and how to find a version worth eating.

Irish stew

The dish most people name first. Lamb or mutton, potatoes and onions, cooked slowly until the meat falls apart and the potatoes thicken the broth. Carrots are a matter of fierce regional and family opinion.

A good one tastes of the lamb. A poor one tastes of salt and gravy browning. Look for a menu that says where the lamb comes from.

Seafood chowder

A fixture of pub and coastal menus: a creamy soup of mixed fish and shellfish, usually with smoked fish for depth, served with brown bread and butter. It varies enormously, from thin and floury to thick with mussels, salmon and hake.

The best chowders tend to be near the sea, in places that change the fish with what came in.

Boxty

A potato pancake made from grated raw potato and mashed potato, fried on a griddle. Boxty is most associated with the north-west midlands and Connacht, and there is an old rhyme about it that anybody from Leitrim will recite for you.

It is served as a side, as a wrap for a filling, or on its own with butter. A good boxty is crisp outside and soft inside, never greasy.

Coddle

A Dublin dish of sausages, rashers, potatoes and onions, simmered together in a pot. It is humble, comforting and deeply local, and you will find it more often in homes and pubs than on restaurant menus.

The full Irish

The full Irish breakfast is usually rashers, sausages, black and white pudding, eggs, grilled tomato, and often mushrooms and beans, with brown bread or toast. The puddings are the part worth paying attention to: a good black pudding is one of the best things you can eat in Ireland.

Many places serve it all day. It is the standard against which a café's kitchen can be judged — the eggs, the rashers and the pudding tell you most of what you need to know.

Soda bread

Bread raised with bread soda and buttermilk instead of yeast. Brown soda bread, with plenty of butter, arrives beside soups and chowders across the country, and a restaurant that bakes its own usually takes the rest of the menu seriously too.

Colcannon and champ

Two potato dishes worth knowing. Colcannon is mashed potato with cabbage or kale. Champ is mashed potato with scallions (spring onions) and butter. Both appear as sides, and both are better than they sound.

Oysters and smoked salmon

Ireland's coastline produces excellent oysters, especially in the west, and Irish smoked salmon is some of the best there is. Both are often simply served — oysters with lemon and brown bread, salmon with bread and butter — which is the right way.

The modern classics

Irish food did not stop in the past. A few newer dishes are as Irish now as any of the above:

• The spice bag — chips, crispy chicken, peppers and onions in a spiced seasoning, which began in Dublin Chinese takeaways and spread everywhere
• The chicken fillet roll — a deli counter staple, eaten by most of the country at some point in any week
• The breakfast roll — much of a full Irish, in a roll, on the way to work

Irish desserts and baking

The sweet side of Irish food deserves more attention than it gets:

• Apple tart — in Ireland often a plate pie rather than an open tart, with cream or custard
• Bread and butter pudding — a thrifty classic done well in good kitchens
• Barmbrack — a fruit loaf, traditionally baked with a ring inside at Halloween
• Scones — with butter and jam, and the standard by which many cafés are quietly judged

Irish cheese

Irish farmhouse cheese has grown into one of the country's great food stories over the last few decades, with cheesemakers across the country producing washed-rind, blue, hard and soft cheeses. A cheese course in a good restaurant is often the best introduction, and the staff usually know the makers by name.

How to find a good version near you

The trick is to search for the dish, not the restaurant. A place that makes an excellent chowder may not rank for "restaurant near me", but it will show up when you look for chowder.

On Mosey, dishes are searchable on their own, with photographs taken by people who actually ordered them, so you can see what the chowder or the boxty looks like before you choose where to go.

A few more tips:

• Look for places that name their suppliers — a butcher, a fishmonger, a dairy
• Trust photographs taken by customers over styled ones
• Ask where locals get it. Everybody has an opinion about who does the best chowder or the best full Irish, and most are happy to share it

Where to go next

• Finding a place by the dish, not the cuisine
• Ranked lists of the best places to eat
• How to find where locals actually eat
• Eating your way around Dingle