24 July 2025

Littlest Italy

I don't have a proper entry for The Session this month. David Jesudason is hosting, with the perfectly legitimate topic of pub food. Unfortunately, it's not something I have much interest in or knowledge of. I suspect that it's because pubs and food have much less of a connection in Ireland. We have the gastropubs and the carveries, of course: ideas which were imported from the neighbouring island but don't have any organic history here. Authentic Irish pub food is the toastie and the bag of crisps, and I'm not much of a consumer of either. So I'm flipping the topic. Instead of pubs and food, I'm doing a restaurant with beer. I would say that restaurants with good beer are probably more common than pubs with good food.

And my favourite place to eat in Dublin? That's Zero Zero pizza on Sundrive Road. The menu is short and to the point -- pizza done in an unfussy, high-quality way -- and the space is bijou, making very efficient and comfortable use of the room at the back of what is essentially a takeaway. What gives it the edge is that it's very close to my house, in an area that is short of catering options for an inner southside neighbourhood. The name, in case you're wondering, comes from the amount of effort required of me to go out and eat there.

And there's beer! A much better selection than you might expect from such an establishment. Hopfully featured for as long as it existed, but at time of writing there's still Whiplash's Body Riddle and two types of Brugse Zot in the fridge, plus Brooklyn's Special Effects as the non-alcoholic option (hello Four Corners!). Three well-known Italian industrial beers are also stocked, including one I had never tried before.

I didn't think to check where my bottle of Menabrea La 150° Bionda came from. The inexplicable fashion for retro-styled Mediterranean lagers has meant that its distributor, C&C, recently moved production for the UK to its brewery in Glasgow. I don't know if the beer I drank came from the heritage brewery in Piedmont, or Scotland, or if we get an Irish version from C&C's local brewery in Clonmel.

Anyway: it's rather good. OK, I wasn't expecting much, but there's a weighty quality to this, which put me in mind of good Czech lager. While those tend to have a golden syrup malt effect, this is more like honey: a thicker sweetness overlaid with a floral complexity. The hops are an afterthought, but they're real and present, adding a lightly green Germanic note of fresh spinach and raw celery. I'm impressed by how much is going on in a 4.8% ABV pale lager, and the heft of it does make it a good match for pizza. The only gripe I have is the 33cl bottle. All of its competitors have a larger serving option, and this one should too.

Anyway, that was an extra nice surprise, on top of the original one that there's somewhere decent in Kimmage to eat dinner these days. No toasties required.

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