Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud: November 2019.

What’s the difference between God and Bono?

God doesn’t go around telling everyone he’s Bono. 

He was never getting away with this one. 

A week before Christmas 2019, I sat with my two closest friends in the powder-pink vaults of Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud on Dublin’s Merrion Row. Straight outta U2 world tour across the airy Georgian room, the man himself held court with his entourage. In between us lay the rest. Politicians dipping out of the Dáil for a Christmas liquid lunch in the local. Titans of industry, and those who call themselves that. Merry extended families with bored teenagers under-table texting. Parents named things like Mary and Michael packed off on the train for the day by the kids-who-are-actually-adults for their annual festive treat. A room of actual normal people, each decking the halls of another year here. 

At our table of three, each of us marked twelve months of our own version of the lives we’re all trying for. This was the second year of a tradition that will last for as long as we do. Already, a lot had changed. Here sat one with the keys to Dublin’s hottest ticket, a recently opened destination restaurant in the seaside village of Howth, a place thriving under the weight of wall-to-wall pristine reviews and media gush. To her left, one on a brief reprieve from baby, an afternoon away from the neverending story of the demands of one so sweet and so despotic. Us not mothers listened when we asked how she was, recounting the thrills, the spills, the kisses, the near misses. Best friends tell you the side of motherhood not often spoken about. Unconditional love is electrifying to hear about and heartbreaking to understand. Listening, you wonder if you have it in you to do it too. Maybe just try. It’s an impossible question with no answer except a decision. My side of the circle marked a year to the occasion since waking up and saying no more. Hold my wine, I can’t. What had seemed impossible then was now so unfazingly fine. That day, our table held three forging our own path, each fighting our own battles, making it up as we went to varying degrees. The same as everyone else in the room. An invisible cloud rumbled in the distance to the east. We were oblivious. Eat, drink, be merry. NYPD choir boys, sing Galway Bay. 

Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is Ireland’s longest-standing answer to the screech of the Michelin inspector’s tyres. It’s hallowed, famed and vaunted for good reason since opening in 1981. For a while, we didn’t spot one of the most famous people in the world. The lush high-vaulted dining room is subtly engineered for a shades-of-old-school Hollywood mix of open-air privacy and intimacy. To be here is to feel protected. This room is a living testament to the invisibility of considered design, with the interiors just for starters. The service, the menu, the hospitality, the bathrooms. On the lake of luxury life, Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud is a swan. Look under the surface, and legs pedal furiously keeping the serenity afloat. But you can’t swim, so stay in the boat and enjoy the view. 

It’s the type of place that you’re not expecting too much to expect the food to be sublime. It’s clear from the moment you make the booking. Seared blue fin tuna, lobster swimming in a bay of bisque, 36 month comté tortellini that gets better by the month. 40 days and 40 nights in the desert for a forkful of any dessert. Make the petit fours grand fours and I’m never leaving. This is not a place for the carb coma-inducement of hangover food. A visit to Guilbaud’s is an experience. If you’re on the list, you better show up for it. 

In this place, everyone has a place. Queen, thief, mobster, missionary, rock star, mammy. One, and we’re all the same. Mid way through the afternoon, Bono strode through the room with purpose. It’s impossible to imagine him moving without one, even when just returning from the jacks. We three queens tried our best to not be our most basic selves, watching him from under our eyelashes coming deliciously close to returning to his table without interruption. Faraway, so close. As he walked through a room of people pretending not to notice him, without warning a little hand shot up and disarmed him. In this room, there was only one table for the job... Mary and Michael. 

Absolute scenes. 

Almost immediately, Michael completely disembodied himself in the way I’ve only heard of zen masters doing after years of intense meditative practise. Mary rooted through her bag for her phone as we lipread her asking Bono for a selfie. Politely demurring, he nevertheless continued to chat with Mary in a conversation I would have paid the equivalent of a top-tier gig ticket to eavesdrop. The minutes rolled on and on and on. What could they possibly be talking about? For this long? Was she asking him about Ali? Is it The Edge or Edge? To play Jesus to the lepers in her head? Is Michael on mushrooms? Stop. STOP. He’s signing her menu. Ah Jesus, that’s actually so sweet. He is incredibly generous, you know. Well obviously, but really. Ah yeah, sure everyone in Dublin has a Bono story. It’s wild how something he’ll never remember has made that much of an impact on me. Oh my Christ! IT’S HAPPENING! SHE GOT THE SELFIE! MICHAEL WAKE UP! 

Truly great restaurants go far beyond feeding us. At their essence, we’re there to break bread and drink wine with each other. Call me Paddy Catholic you wouldn’t be the first, but if you’re going to call me by another name, I’m more Judas than Jesus. Regardless, no matter who you are and what you believe our last supper was being served up to us back around March - we just didn’t know it. As we sit now washing our own dishes in the endless limbo of purgatory, the art and place of the restaurant becomes clearer and dearer by the day. Yes we miss the dishes our limited personal range can’t recreate but that’s only scratching the surface. Restaurants give us the ability to come together to experience each other in rooms full of strangers. To become one and the same. To build the foundations of conversations we’ll have the next time we do this. They can be wild and raucous, sad and full of hope, real, extraordinary and everything in between, sometimes in the same sentence. They are a city’s society, served up on a digestible scale. They don’t have to have Michelin stars. They just have to have heart. 

I wonder what Mary did with the selfie. And the menu, for that matter. Wherever they are now, I hope that visit to that restaurant that day in December has given her moments she cherishes. A moment to remember, a laugh with Michael, a laugh at Michael. What I love most about restaurants is the days they make your day. Just like that day, in which a group of strangers-who-were-strangers-themselves gave us memories for forever to come. 

By Jaysus, it will come.