Glass Ceiling
Unless you’re passionate about bread, you may not appreciate the joy of this place. Owen Doorly’s bakery and café has a strangely plastic look and feel – generic ‘continental bakery’ tag for a place that’s obviously deeply Italian, over-orange décor, 98FM’s Morning Crew on the radio – for something that’s remarkably authentic beneath the surface.
We like the fact that Doorly can often be spotted chatting in Italian to a portly baker, but what seals the deal is the fresh pizza at lunch, coffee your spoon can stand up in, and natural, flavour-packed ingredients.
Of course, said ingredients seem to make the shelf life of Il Valentino bread a little shorter than manufactured gunk – which probably says more about the latter – so stocking up for a few days rather than a whole week is recommended.
Lunchtime queues have built up recently, but this place seems to open at some ungodly hour of the morning – well, before 8am, anyway. Grab a pastry and expresso while picking up the day’s loaf.
Il Valentino, Grand Canal Square, Dublin 2
Comments