A number of readers have asked me for details on the trip to Egypt I’ve been writing about. Here are the places we went and general costs.

Getting there …

We flew Turkish Air to Cairo, connecting in Istanbul. It’s a leave-NYC-at-noon, get-to your-hotel-before-noon-the-next-day trip. Tickets cost about $600. We…

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A couple of years ago, before my 60th birthday, my wife Ann searched for a trip that would be commensurate with the occasion. Ann is an extraordinary scraper of travel info and ideas and deals we can afford. She discovered a company called Nour el Nil, which takes passengers on the Nile from Luxor, one of the oldest cities in Egypt (originally Thebes), 140 miles south to Aswan. Passengers travel on a Dahabiya, a traditional, wooden Egyptian sailing boat, 50 meters long with ten rooms carrying up to 20 passengers. Alas, I was born in the early phase of Leo, which means, of course, that the Nile at the end of July is about 120 degrees F. in the daytime. Not doable.

She squirreled away the idea of Nour el Nil until we had the resources and time in the winter months to fly to Cairo, see the Pyramids of Giza and the newly opened Egyptian museum. We would then head south to Luxor, to see one of the world’s most important temples, Karnac, and the Valley of the Kings, and drive south to Esna for the boat and a six-day journey down the Nile in south central Egypt, 200 miles form the Sudanese border.

Ten days before we were to leave, the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran, throwing the entire region into turmoil and uncertainty.

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As I’ve said before and as I’ve written about, Ann and I always try to line up a food tour the day we arrive in a city where we’ve never been. We hadn’t given a food tour in San Miquel a thought because the town was well familiar to us. I’d been to San Miguel once, Ann several times. We felt we had a good handle on the place, at least where its food and drink were concerned.

But Ann’s duties at the book festival were slim and we had more time on our hands than expected.

“I booked us a Tacos and Tequila tour,” she said.

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It took 21 hours from door to door, the West Village to Bologna, Italy. The trip required, on arrival in Florence, a tram, a bus, and then a two-hour drive to Bologna in a van we needed for ’s writers’ workshop at Spannocchia.

I’d been here exactly 15 years ago with Brian as we researched salumi. It is the birthplace of mortadella, which has been made since the days of ancient Rome.

(There’s actually a terrific recipe for mortadella in our book Charcuterie—it’s not difficult if you have the right kind of casing.)

After checking into our very comfortable, affordable rooms ($140/night) at Hotel Porto San Mamolo, we immediately set out in search of food. What a great city to search for food in!

We began at Mercato di Mezzo, a kind of food hall off the main square selling all manner of local specialties. And then we walked the streets around it; they’re filled with food.

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I had an in for a reservation at Rao’s, the legendary East Harlem restaurant, which are all but impossible to get unless you know someone who owns one of the tables. Well, I met someone. And then I almost fucked it up.

In the spring of 2024, and I did a book event in Rhode Island. We sat side-by-side at the signing table after our presentation (mine for Cocktail Ratios, Ann for Fly Girl), when a gentleman named Scott approached for a signature.

He said, “If you guys ever want to go to Rao’s, I’ve got a table. Just let me know.” He wrote his name and number on a piece of paper. Ann, who has always wanted to go there, would love a December birthday dinner there, I thought.

But sometime between then and the following fall, dear reader, I managed to misplace this valuable slip of paper. I hunted through every drawer, every cranny where I might have stuffed Scott’s number. My final hope was that it would be in the pocket of the sport coat I’d worn to the book event. No dice. And no amount of favors called in to any number of chefs could do a thing to land a birthday rez at Rao’s.

There would be no Rao’s that year. Or maybe ever.

The following summer, as I tried to track how many days we’d spent in NYC for tax reasons, which I do in part through photos … there it was. Knowing I would in all likelihood lose that slip of paper—in other words, predicting my own incompetence—I had taken a picture of it. Scott’s number.

I texted him, he was good on his word, and he arranged for a late October dinner at the storied restaurant for five of us.

Rao’s opened in 1896 as a kind of bar, filling patron’s tin buckets with beer to take home, then morphed into a restaurant in the early years of the 20th century, and in the fifties, focused its menu on the southern Italian dishes it remains famous for today. (In the late 19th century, that part of East Harlem, East 114th and Pleasant St, right up against the East River, was heavily Italian-American.)

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San Sebastian is known as one of Spain’s gastronomic hubs, and the center of its culinary tradition, what makes the town unique, are its pintxos bars.

Pintxos are to Basque country what tapas are to the rest of Spain. Pronounced PEEN-chōs, these are small dishes—often served on skewers, or pintxos—to enjoy with your Rioja, cervesa, or cider (sidra is one of the local specialties, always poured from on high and drunk quickly).

By all means, try the cider. Some of it is so barnyardy it reminded me of scrumpy, that great sour cider from west Sussex, England, that I cherished when I spent a year at the University of Sussex. (One bibulous evening I became convinced I could make a killing if I introduced it to an American market, where hard cider didn’t exist, or at best, was a rarity. My friends said it would never fly.)

When we go to a new city, especially one renowned for its food, we schedule a food tour the day of our arrival. As I’ve noted (and written about), a food tour not only introduces you to choice spots, but helps to acclimate you to a new city. Gorka, a Basque native, was our guide (we use and recommend the company Devour Spain for food tours throughout the country), and he did a great job.

Every now and then we have a tour guide who gives little to no information, simply ordering food for the group and letting people talk amongst themselves. Gorka gave us a Basque history lesson, a history of pintxos, and a geography lesson; he was also warm, friendly and filled with knowledge about his region and its food.

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If one street embodies pintxos culure it is Fermín Calberton Kalea in Old Town. The street is packed with people in the early evening eating and drinking at side-by-side pintxos bars. Establish your real estate as fast as you can, Gorka explained, heading into a packed Goiz-Argi to fetch plates and skewers. We would eat and drink at tables on the street outside the bars.

What follows is a guide to the pintxos bars we loved and one absolute MUST GO restaurant just outside the city. We relied on multiple sources. Gorka, of course, but also a Spanish-American novelist and friend of a friend, Julian Zabalbeascoa, author of What We Tried To Bury Grows Here, a novel about the Spanish Civil War. And Marti Buckley, an Alabama chef/writer who lives in San Sebastian and is the author of The Book of Pintxos and Basque Country.

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One of the great travel maxims we know is this: the places that are hardest to get to are often the very best because of it.

A perfect example in the US is Martha’s Vineyard. It was such and idyllic island when I lived there, I never wanted to leave—gorgeous empty winters, paradise summers, surrounded by gorgeous coasts and beaches.

But build a bridge there allowing easy access for cars, and the place would be transformed for the worst.

So to it is with western Ireland, a part of the world we’ve come to love and will return to again next year.

We began in Donegal, which Ann has always wanted to see—but whether to stay in Donegal Town, its center, and use that as a base for day trips, or chose a more beautiful, if out of the way, location. Ann opted for the latter and found a lovely spot on the western coast called The Bee Pods, which bills itself as luxury glamping. But it’s more luxury and comfort than glamping.

A series of pods the size of trailers have been fitted out with all the amenities. Each pod has a fire pit and a komodo-style grill. This was our base and acclimating spot for three nights.

Getting around …

Taxis are too expensive to rely on. You’ll either need to rent a car or hire a driver. I won’t attempt driving on the left (too many potential dangers and I hear the roundabouts are treacherous) but, happily, one of The Bee Pod owners offered to be our driver.

William picked us up from Donegal airport (we’d connected in Dublin) and drove us straight away to the Croithli Distillery, which gave us a splendid tour and tasting, and allowed us to pick up a bottle to take back to our digs.

There we grilled, and ate overlooking Rossnowlagh beach, and had a whiskey after, roasting homemade marshmallows over the fire pit.

Each morning, a breakfast by Siobhan was delivered to our deck for the perfect beginning to the day, especially in weather so fine.

William joined us on our first full day for a 1.5 hour boat trip to see the extraordinary Sliabh Liag Cliffs. Awesome, the original, all-but-lost, meaning of the word. Awe-inspiring. That we’d arrived during an uncommon stretch of blue skies and sun and warmth made it particularly grand.

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We arrived Islay, Scotland, a small island in the Inner Hebrides, at 6 pm after a twenty-two hour journey (JFK—>Amsterdam—>Glasgow—>Islay), in time for our 7 pm dinner reservation. Islay time. I snapped a pic of Ann on the tarmac with the ocean, beach, and surf behind her, then we tugged our roller bags across a two lane road, up a long gravel driveway to our accommodations, the lovely BnB, Glenegedale.

Our mission was to explore the land and water where our favorite spirit, the peated, single-malt whiskey’s are made.

In the mid-1980s, my father gave me a taste of Laphroiag. I’d never had anything like it. Nor had he. I don’t know how he found it, but he loved it so much, he wrote to the distillery. They wrote back saying, “Thanks, most American’s hate the stuff!” Single malt whiskies had been available in the US since the 1960s when Glenfiddich began marketing the stuff here. But the best single-malts didn’t become popular in The States until the 1990s, so I applaud my father for this extraordinary find, and the palate, to know how absolutely unique it was. From then on I sought out the smokiest whiskies I could find, the whiskies of Islay.

Forty years later, my beloved said, “Well, let’s just go there.”

There’s a kind of genius in that simple command. Go there.

Ann, a couple decades earlier, had been in Scotland, found a pub to shelter from the rain. Cold and damp she asked for a whisky; the barkeep slid her a glass and said, “You’ll be wantin’ a Talisker.” One sip and she was hooked on peat—that was her intro to this particular smoke. See this post on Talisker’s home, Isle of Skye.)

So that was our quest. To find the source of this extraordinary spirit.

Travel, of course, is not simply to indulge in our gluttonous pleasures (though there was plenty of that). Travel is to meet people, see places and cultures, broaden our perspective to better understand our small place in this big world.

What follows are some of the places we visited on the island, what we ate, people we met, the vistas. Scroll to the bottom for a full list of all, with addresses, links, and a Google map, including advice on traveling here and getting around.

Sidenote: I’m excited to announce that I’ll be doing a 2-hour class called Five Things I’ve Learned About Writing By Writing About Food. My video on the My Five Things site outlines the class. If you’re a writer, I hope you’ll join us!

Arrival Islay …

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I was delighted that Ann was asked to teach at The San Miguel Writers’ Conference because I’d never been to this lovely colonial city. I’d been hearing about it since my parents’ friends began vacationing there and then buying houses, some moving there permanently.

Much of what I’d heard about San Miguel, of course, was about just this: it had become a haven for ex-pats to such an extent that people had come to refer to it as Mexico lite. And while I did find this not to be untrue, there weren’t so many Americans that it made the place lesser in any way. Plus I got to see a couple of dear friends from Cleveland who remain among them.

Here I want to share with paid subscribers some of the places to eat and to stay and to see if you visit San Miguel or hope to.

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Laughter and joy—that to me is Spain.

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Hello, wonderful correspondents!

You may have noticed from IG/FB posts that Ann and I are in Spain on a journey through Andalusia, research for a project I’m working on, retracing a journey my father and I made in 1987. I think it may be the first time I’m taking Ann to places I’ve been but she hasn’t. And few things excite her more than new destinations.

I’m writing to you from Seville. We began in the tiny hill town of Toledo (toe-LAY-doe, not tuh-LEE-doe, as in Ohio), once Spain’s capital. Ann found us a lovely boutique hotel, once the home of famed Flamenco guitarist, Paco de Lucía. We stayed in his old bedroom.

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Ann and I returned from an exciting trip that began in Tbilisi, Georgia, carried on to Rome where we met up with her son and daughter, Sam and Annabelle—a one-night stay but some fabulous classic pastas. From Rome, we took a train to Florence, where we caught a bus to an outlying suburb, Colle di Val d'Elsa, where we could pick up a van for the writers’ workshop. From there we drove two hours to the small gem of a city, Spello, in Umbria, smack in the middle of Italy, for two nights, after which we headed to our ultimate destination, Tenuta di Spannocchia.

Spannocchia is a 13th-century farm villa, currently a working organic farm and ecotourism destination. In 2007, Ann traveled there on assignment for Bon Appetit, loved it so much she returned again, and ultimately created the Spannocchia Writers’ Workshop: every 18 months, 20 or so student writers commune with some of our finest novelists. (I’m a freeloader, and love every minute of it.)

Following these travels (and two Saturday Newsletters describing them), I want to set down all the details of where we stayed and ate and drank for any readers who may want to travel to these wonderful places. I’ll include Google maps for Georgia and Italy at the bottom.

This is a paid subscriber post. Please consider becoming one if you want access to all my newsletters, recipes, travel notes, maps. You’ll also have access to me for cooking questions, leaning on my massive culinary genius (think Nicholas Cage), chats and other goods from the culinary and culture worlds. But the Saturday Newsletter will remain free, so become a free subscriber for those!

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I had planned to hang alone in NYC last week for several days while Ann cut a literary swath across the eastern seaboard promoting her novel Stolen Child (which many of her fans and bookstore owners say is her best, I’m eager to report). My son, James, 24, recently moved to Charlotte, NC, and he too had last week free.

I suggested we meet in a city I’ve always, always wanted to go to, ever since my days at Duke 40 years ago: Asheville, North Carolina. James was game.

Asheville is a two-hour drive west from Charlotte, and James arrived at the airport exactly as I exited baggage. We carried on to Asheville where our room at the Hotel Arras, directly across the street from a central Confederate monument in mid-deconstruction. (This is a Kimpton hotel, a group whose hotels I’m always happy to stay at—unfailingly friendly service at this one). Happily our room was ready early. After dropping our bags in the room, we headed immediately on foot to one of the most noted and notable breweries in town: Burial.

We quickly learned that beer is served virtually everywhere here, from coffee shops to record stores. I’ve honestly never seen so many beers and so many places selling them in a single city. We mainly stuck to the area’s seeming specialty, the hazy IPA (not like the clear West Coast IPA style, our friendly Burial tap-master explained). They were all fascinating and delicious, especially the double dry hopped ones made around the corner from our hotel at DSSLVR, whose brew tanks are right next to the bar selling them. About as fresh as beer gets.

Asheville is true to its reputation as an artsy, hippie mecca but pleasantly so. It’s an easy-going place, southern friendly, and the city is packed with restaurants, 123 sit-down establishments in a city of 94,000, according to (about whom more below). And every establishment, from the excellent art galleries to the bars and coffee houses and restaurants, invariably had gorgeous weathered, tongue-and-groove floors. Everything felt homey and natural and handmade.

To go along with the Burial beer, James had a bbq sandwich and I had the terrific burger below.

The following are a few highlights if you want to travel there …

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We tend to be fairly cavalier about travel. While I have no desire to visit North Korea, Afghanistan, or Syria, and our dream of visiting St. Petersburg will never come to pass so long as a murderous dictator runs the country, I also know that the world is vast and we are eager to see more and more of it. It gives your own life additional context as you learn about other cultures and meet new people.

Ann knows this well. Which is why, when Ann says, “I want to go to Georgia,” you can be pretty sure that you are going to Georgia within the year (we depart June 4th, look forward to writing about it).

Like Patzcuaro. Ann got it in her head to explore this small town (pop. 60,000, the size of Cleveland Heights) because her friend described it as what San Miguel de Allende was before the Americans flooded in. And when she gets it in her head, as I’ve said, there’s really no stopping her.

We visited this town, a three-hour drive northwest of Mexico City, just before Christmas in 2019, loved it, and returned two years later to fulfill one of Ann’s great longings, to join the Dia de Muertos celebrations.

But here’s the rub. Our government tells us not to travel to lovely little Patzcuaro. The U.S. State Department says Michoacán is under a level 4 travel advisory: Do Not Travel, reads the red label on its site. Crime and kidnapping, the site says. And we’re so glad we did not heed this warning.

This is not to say we ignore warnings. We take precautions. First, we make sure we’ve arranged a ride for us on our arrival in the nearby city of Morelia (arranged through our hotel). You don’t want to navigate transportation in a new city where you don’t speak the language after a multi-hour, multi-flight journey. Patzcuaro and the surrounding towns are very safe—it’s the back roads where things can get dicey. So really the biggest safety precaution we took was to rely on a local guide. Through our first hotel there, we found Alejandro Vilchis. How he enriched our trips is immeasurable.

If you’re traveling to Morelia (lovely city!) or Patzcuaro, we highly recommend you contact Alejandro. His email is alvilchis@hotmail.com, and you can What’s App him at 52-44-31-69-62-03.

It was Alejandro who drove us into the mountains to watch the Monarch butterflies awaken, who introduced us to the Olivo brothers and their (arguably best in the land) carnitas. It was Alejandro who asked should he see if his friend, the late doyenne of Mexican cuisine, British ex-pat Diana Kennedy, would see us (she would; a feisty, opinionated woman, we discovered, as we talked about her career in her kitchen over glasses of mezcal).

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Ann invited her NYU young adult literature class to our apartment the week before last, where she hosted special guest Francesco Sedita, head of Penguin Workshop, which publishes everything from picture books to YA lit (such as this forthcoming “vivacious debut”). Ann had secured a 9:30 reservation at Little Owl for a perfect late dinner. This is one of the cosiest little rooms in the West Village in the very coolest part of the West Village, streets that feel like a neighborhood within a neighborhood.

It comprises a diamond-shaped cluster of blocks, essentially three-by-three blocks if it were a regular shape (there are few regular shapes down here, in terms of blocks, or people for that matter, and happily). It’s bordered by Christopher Street to the north; 7th Avenue to the east; Morton Street to the south; and Hudson Street to the west. I walked this neighborhood within a neighborhood with my old college pal, John Lambert, last fall and he couldn’t believe how picturesque these blocks were; indeed, he was amazed, he said, that he was still in New York City.

If you don’t venture below 14th Street, where Manhattan’s relentless grid ends, you cannot know the pleasing confusion of these West Village streets. (West 12th Street, for instance, is parallel to West 11th Street—they run east-west—but they are perpendicular to West 4th Street, which runs north-south in this part of the Village.)

I’m so glad to have returned to Little Owl (chef-owner is Joey Campanaro) for a perfect sautéed chicken breast, just like we were taught in culinary school, along with eggplant parmesan and sautéed halibut.

But what I realized the next day, looking at Google Maps, was what an oasis this little diamond of streets is, and they hold an uncommon concentration of restaurants. (See Google map for paid subscribers at the bottom of this post.)

On the south side of Christopher Street, a block between Hudson and Bleecker: North Fork, Red Paper Clip, two beer joints—the Beer Garage and Talea Beer Co.—Fiaschetteria Pistoia, and L’Industrie Pizzaria, an outpost of one of the biggest names in NYC pizza that opened here in October.

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As I noted in last week’s newsletter, a week ago Ann and I traveled to the Hebrides, the Scottish archipelago, a journey we stretched out to 48 hours. And what a journey it was: NYC to London, London train to Inverness, a train to Kyle of Lochalsh, a taxi to the Isle of Skye with all kinds of fun in between—a pint and a meal in London, an overnight train in a double bed sleeper car, new single malts, stunning vistas.

What follows are my travel notes and our full itinerary (PDFs and a Google map at the end).

There are almost too many highlights to mention. The extraordinary natural beauty of these islands, the luxury of our room at The Three Chimneys & Over-by, the distillery on the tiny island of Raasay (pop. 190). The most awesome, in the true sense of the word, vistas on the ScotRail train from Mallaig to Glasgow.

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We try to avoid restaurants on Valentine’s Day because they tend to offer expensive prix fixes and crowds. But what are we to do if we also don’t want to cook?

Dante

Well, first we wrap up work early and head to Dante on MacDougal Street to say hello to our friend who has been holding court at the bar on Wednesdays this past month. Alas, the bar was so packed we couldn’t even get to Brad. So instead, we took a chilly seat outside and ordered a Manhattan, the Dante Manhattan, which I think is Manhattan’s best Manhattan.

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A question we get a lot: Is it safe? The US State Dept. has long advised not traveling here. And while we’ve heard Guatemala City itself is a little sketchy, many of the travelers we spoke with on arrival had plans to stay there.

We found the country to be completely safe—and more, the people couldn’t have been more friendly and welcoming.

A 70th birthday celebration brought us to this Central American country, which has beaches on both the Carribean and Pacific sides. Ann’s dear friend, the writer Joyce Maynard, lives part of her year in a complex of buildings on Lake Atitlán which she has turned into an inn where she hosts regular writers’ retreats. It’s extraordinary.

We flew American from NYC to Miami, Miami to Guatemala City where Ann had arranged for a taxi to Antigua Guatemala, a city in the highlands of the country with a population of about 40,000. It’s a lovely city known for its Spanish colonial architecture, with a bustling central square and cobblestone streets.

We arrived at our lovely boutique hotel Posada del Angel (10 rooms or so) after dark (candlelit, sweetly). The hotel is in a quiet part of town but it was a 10 to 15 minute walk to Frida’s, a Mexican restaurant with terrific tacos. Ann had a good margarita and I opted for a tequila-based sour that used tamarind for the sour—so good I want to experiment with tamarind now.

The following day we did what we often do in a new city—find a food tour (Antigua Foodie Tours). There’s no better, faster way to get know a place (see my NYTimes travel piece on just this.) It was billed as a street food tour but was in fact a visit to various restaurants accessible from the street but not selling what we’d call street food. Our guide was a lovely woman who was born in Oakland and had been living in the city for the past seven years, and it was just me and Ann on the tour.

Highlights included a visit to the restaurant Aqua for its view, Cactus for fantastic tacos, and Glacy for an ice cream cone that got the lovely and novel treatment of a coating of marshmallow, torched till golden brown.

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By Ann Hood

I just got back from an unforgettable trip to Istanbul and Sarajevo with my son Sam, a thirtieth birthday present for him. Sam and I share a passion for WWI and wanted to stand in the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the twenty-year-old student who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophia in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which sent the world into WWI. Getting to Sarajevo was harder than I expected, so Sam and I ended up having to fly through Istanbul, and if you’re flying through Istanbul, you must stop and spend a few days there.

I’d been to Istanbul just once, for an afternoon, during a ten-hour layover on my way to Turkmenistan from Uzbekistan. So, I was as excited as Sam to really see this beautiful city. Our hotel, the Neorion, was in the Old City and we were able to walk to just about everything: the Blue Mosque, the Haggia Sophia, the Spice Market, the Hippodrome, and just about everything else.

For places farther afield, such as the boats on the Bosporus River or restaurants in the hip Karakoy neighborhood, we hopped the tram on the corner. Our hotel had, hands down, the best customer service I’ve maybe ever had. In fact, Sam and I both agreed we’d stay there again rather than in Karakoy just to be taken such good care of.

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We arrived last week in Dingle, Ireland, a tiny town on one of the country’s southwestern peninsulas. Ann has been coming here for nearly a decade to teach at a writer’s conference and this year is running the conference. I’ve joined her since 2016 and can’t get enough of the rolling, psychedelic-green landscape, the abundant wildflowers, the pubs, the pristine seafood, the Kerry County lamb.

I’m writing to share some of our favorite places here.

Our journey, by plane, train and bus, took 19 hours, and after so much malnourished time, we craved something simple but satisfying. Finding our favorite fish and chips restaurant, The Fish Box, closed, and not sure of our plan, I headed down Green Street to find Ann who was replacing her ten-year-old Dingle rain hat. But on my way, I spotted a sign and a truck.

Sandwiches, with a pint of Guinness from Dick Mack’s, I thought, this will be perfect.

The truck offered a classic grilled cheese, ham and cheese, a vegetarian special and a meat special. It also advertised a “Gubeen chorizo”—Gubeen is a (delicious) soft cow’s milk cheese made on the Gubeen farm in nearby County Cork which was new to us (you can find it at The Little Cheese Shop on this same street). 

I bought a couple pints at Dick Mack’s and took them to a picnic table out back where Ann met me with a basic grilled cheese for her, and for me a grilled cheese with spring onion. The sandwiches hit all the marks: Perfectly brown, uniformly toasted sourdough, still hot, with exactly the right amount of savory Irish cheddar that you pulled away in long luscious strands of melty goodness.

I had never thought to add scallions to a grilled cheese but that’s what I got here and it was the perfect subtle addition to the sandwich, oniony but not overbearing, a lovely combination that I’m sure I’ll replicate at home.

Cais food truck—excellent!

About that Guinness …

The above pints of Guinness have rested properly. The half-pint of Guinness at the top has not rested enough—notice the haze of bubbles still slowly rising through the thick stout. I was actually scolded by the man next to me at Curran’s pub for even touching the glass before it had rested properly. True Guinness is about patience and anticipation. One must wait for those bubbles to ascend.

The reward is a silky smooth, almost sweet head, one of the great pleasures of Guinness here, as the savory bitter brew mixes with frothy sweetness on the palate. But what makes Guinness so wonderful here, and why is it so different from a Guinness drawn at an American bar? Why is the Guinness in America pallid compared with its Irish counterpart even though it has all come from the same brewery in Dublin?

The answer makes obvious sense. Beer is bread, as the saying goes, and as bread is fresh or not, so is Guinness. According to Slate, the beer is markedly different in Ireland because it is fresher; the kegs haven’t spent weeks in transport. That’s the fundamental difference. Guinness is like bread.

Also, the pubs here know at what temperature to serve the stout. Too cold and the flavor is muted. And because this is the main drink in town, the kegs are alway fresh.

The Dingle pubs and restaurants we love, and why …

Dingle is so small that most everything can be found on three streets, none much longer than a football field: Main Street (also called Goat Street), Green Street, and Strand Street. Strand Street, along the harbor, always feels a little touristy and crowded to me, but one very good fish restaurant, Out of the Blue, is here, and you can get good pub food at John Benny’s and Murphy’s pubs.

The pubs that sell no food, however, are the ones I love best, the pubs that double as hardware stores and belt making shops.

I have to start with my hands down favorite, Curran’s (no address, just Main St.; here’s its FB page). The pub exists pretty much now as it did 200 years ago when it opened.

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