Dublin Pub Restaurant

Arguably the best patio bar in Morristown, the Dublin Pub is a low-key place to enjoy a cold beer and pub food, and during the good weather months, to do all of that al fresco.  Nothing gourmet here, the menu is all Irish favorites like shepard's pie, corned beef and fish & chips, plus American Irish :) favorites like hamburgers.

On our most recent visit everything went right.  Plenty of open tables on the patio, check.  A cool and friendly server, check.  Kitchen cranking out orders in record short time, check.  Hot, tasty and reasonably priced food, check.  Solid Guiness pour, check check!  Definitely worth four stars.

Bangers and mash was five medium-small sausages on a generous portion of home-made smashed potatoes, with a bonus of a few onion rings on top and all slathered in a mild brown gravy.  I loved it, reasonable at $12.

An open-face hot roast beef sandwich brought thickly sliced, very likely house-roasted roast beast on bread, covered in brown gravy, with a side of perfect french fries.  Hard to beat that, especially for $11!

A Caesar salad with grilled chicken was adequate, the dressing straight from a bottle, just average at $12. Guess that salads are not Irish LOL!

Why is this patio so great?  Because unlike all the other bars in town, here you're not sitting on a sidewalk with a truck tailpipe 5 feet from your beer!  The pub is on a quiet side street, and the outdoor space is well set back and enclosed by a stone wall.  It's like an oasis with good beer :)

Oh it's not all perfect here.  They simply refuse to serve a pitcher of beer, what kind of Irish bar is this!?  A pint of the good black stuff is up to $6 now, that kinda hurts. Last but not least, absolutely no craft beer on tap at all, just the huge Irish and American names.

A burger is served here, inexplicably, without fries.  The menu says make any burger deluxe (add tomato, lettuce and fries) for just $1.50 more.  Silly policy, who wants a burger without all that?

Avoid this place when the community theater has a show!  You can just forget it.  

I first tried the Dublin at least a decade ago, this review is long overdue.

So we had a very bad experience today. The place was kind of dead and there was no reason for the mistakes.

First off our apps and salads came at the same time as our entrees and everything was ice cold.

Hot open Turkey with gravy and fries. Fries were ice cold and turkey was cold. Unacceptable. It was sitting out a while because the gravy was congealed.

Turkey club with fries and gravy. Ice cold fries and gravy was flat and congealed.

Bangers and mash. The mash potatoes were ice cold and the onion rings were cold as well. The bangers were ok. Nothing to write home to Ireland about. Or Morristown.

The blue cheese wedge was excellent but it was brought out two minutes before our main course.

The beer was good but this place was a total disappointment. Would skip and try a different place. They have five Irish bars in the area and to serve three cold dishes and miss on each one is not acceptable.

One of the managers Lee came over and took the drinks (two sodas and a beer). What a nasty manager. A real shame. Potato famine to Lea and her business !

Originally planned to go to Brick Oven up the street, but it was packed so we figured 'we like Blackthorne and Thatchers, let's give this place a shot.'.  And that's the last time I'll mention them all in the same sentence again.

So it's a slow Monday night and the place us fairly empty...not sure if it was the night or the place, but the place was nice enough. The hostess seemed to have trouble figuring out where to seat us (why I can't imagine since only two tables were being used), and then once we were seated it took about five minutes for the waiter to come ask us for our drinks. He was nice enough, but not overly enthused.  Not awful, but there were 3 tables being used and another waitress was working one of them...it's not like he was overworked.

Anyway, once our drinks came the guy took our orders-I ordered a cup of onion au gratin soup and the Dublin burger (1/2 pound burger with Irish Cheddar and mushrooms and for another $1.50 I got lettuce, a tomato slice and maybe 15 fries) and my two kids order penne with vodka sauce and grilled chicken.

Let me start by saying that my burger was pretty good...it needed a little salt, which is fine, but it was good. The extra I paid for fries was ridiculous as almost every decent place includes fries with the price...which now shot to $11.  I can't believe it started at 1/2 a pound, but for arguments sake we'll say it did. This was in no way an $11 meal. Nope, no way. Again, tasted pretty good, but for $11 I don't want pretty good, I want to be wow'd.

My cup of soup was very tasty, but, and I say this with scary hesitation, there was actually too much cheese (gasp! Jaws drop, babies cry...did he really say that?!?).

Here's my other problem with this meal. Both my kids ordered the penne vodka, one if their favorite meals-probably had it at 10 different places-always a nice pink creamy sauce with nice slices of grilled chicken.  Now, if you read that again you'll notice that I don't mention peas. Maybe I'm taking my kids out to the odd places in NJ and NY but I've never, ever, seen penne vodka with peas (little disgusting green balls of ick).  I don't want to be an ass, but if you're a waiter and two kids order penne vodka, you HAVE to know that A) most places don't serve it with peas and B) most kids hate peas.  Why the hell wouldn't you mention the friggin' peas?!?!  You should have seen their faces when their food came.  All this pea talk aside, the vodka sauce wasn't what I've come to expect from a vodka sauce, and the kids didn't like it.  The chicken was a chopped up mess-no tender, tasty slices just chopped up chunks with little flavor of their own. Overall their meals weren't good.  

I started this review with a three star rating in mind, then thought a two. I mean I have had better-better soup, better burgers (especially for the price), better penne vodka, and better service, but I don't like ot hammer a place over one meal unless it is truly awful...and this wasn't awful so I'll grudgingly give them three stars...this is clearly a case of needed a half-star system as it really deserves 2.5 rather than three...