: Lovely pub for a quiet one, very nicely furnished and staff are night. pints are good too. Security fri & sat, not sure where smoking is.[Back to top]
Swan Dowlings: nice pub nice staff dont drink there though as its too much out of the way and has a different crowd than the likes of graces or haydens tends to attract which is the kind of crowd i like in a pub. [Back to top]
Thats all the pubs done. there are a few hotel bars aswell like the osprey which has one of the nicest bars ive seen in my life and good pints, its just not busy enough for me to go there often and because its a four star hotel dress code is a bit strict. its nice though for a lovely quiet pint with mates.
My recommendations are Graces and Haydens for a bit of craic on thurs to sun night. graces is nice aswell even during the week for a quiet one or two with mates. If your a sporty person then haydens is the place to be and then after that kavanaghs but for everyone else graces tends to be the place to be.
Graces, Monread Lodge, Kavanaghs and the ivy all serve lunch at some stage throughout the day. the ivy has some of the best food in the town ive been told but i havent eaten there. Graces i can say form experience has lovely lunch, limited menu though but its a pub so what do you expect.
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So there you have it people, naas pubs summed up for you.
When I think of the restaurants that have pleased me they all have things in common. Good food is an obvious characteristic, value for money is another, but there are some assets that are less obvious. A warm welcome, for example. Having your pre-booked table ready when you arrive. These may not be major events in themselves, but I really do notice their absence. There's an indefinable quality, too, that I look for, a sense that the people in the restaurant know what they're doing. Whenever you get the sense that your in the hands of professionals, you begin to relax. You don't need to be on your toes pre-empting mistakes - you can relax in the knowledge that there aren't going to be any.
The space in which you are sitting also has its impact. Places that are over-designed can make you uncomfortable simply because the designer has put fashion statements ahead of comfort. Really trendy looking chairs that are hard to sit on, clever tables that are too small to hold the table settings easily, tableware that was chosen for its style, not its functionality. Sometimes in very trendy restaurants there's a palpable sense exuding from the waiting staff that they're actually far too cool to bother with the likes of you. Whenever I get a sniff of this - that the waiting staff feel their own sense of importance acutely - I get the urge to run. Arrogance comes in many forms, but the most common, judging by my post-bag, is the inability to deal effectively with complaints. Often the attitude appears to be 'the customer is wrong, no matter what.' Ghastly stories come to me by email of rudeness, combative arguing and simple inability to negotiate. Maybe if a tiny down-turn comes in our economy that kind of nonsense may become less common.
So, unusually for me it was a Saturday night outing for a review. Normally I hate going to restaurants on a Saturday night because the service tends to be creakier than mid-week when fewer people fill the dining-rooms. My son Rocco and I set off across the Wicklow Gap heading for the plains of Kildare and down-town Naas in particular. We were headed for The Storeroom, the old railway storehouse in the centre of Naas. Built in 1885 when Naas had a railway line, it's a fine stone building with handsome wooden floors and a high ceiling, which has now been converted into a restaurant. It works rather well as a conversion - the tables are well-placed to ensure space for everyone, the high-backed upholstered chairs act like a privacy wall and the high ceiling ensures that no one gets choked on cigarette smoke, although by January that'll be irrelevant.
We got an instant welcome at the door and were shown to our table. In moments we had our bills of fare, a bottle of mineral water and bread rolls on the table. The menu and wine list have a picture of a steam locomotive on the cover, which seems appropriate, while the long tubular lampshades high above mirrored the locomotive's funnel. I started with the wine list which is average in length and above average in mark-up. It's arranged from light-bodied to full-bodied, an arrangement that's about as useful as listing the wines by their Pantone colour shade. As it happened Rocco wanted beer so I chose the only half bottle of red I could find, a Fleurie at €16. From a range of beers Rocco settled on a bottle of Tiger Beer.
The menu is fairly classical European, but it does have a dash of Asian. Most of the starters are in the €8 - €10 range, although the prawns are a bit more expensive. There were mussels, pate, their signature Caesar salad, wontons, French onion soup among the starters, so Rocco had the Caesar salad and I had the onion soup. Both of these were good, so we were looking forward to the main courses. Looking through the main courses before we ordered, Rocco had said 'look, just what I like, meat done in lots of different ways.' He was right, there was beef in a variety of ways, lamb, pork and duck. I convinced him to be a retro-diner and have the steak Diane, which he did, while I had the pork chop. Again, both of us had competently made dishes, plenty of it, and really attentive service.
Neither of us had desserts, just two very good espressos for me - they understand the concept of 'short' espressos here - and an Irish coffee for Rocco. The bill of €97.15 excluding service puts the Storehouse in the upper-middle price bracket, but for an evening out, this restaurant gets all the important things right.
Once indoors it was time to pick a restaurant. 'Where are we going?' asked my wife. 'Give me five minutes and I'll tell you,' I answered, heading for my desktop and my email folders, where kindly readers send me suggestions. Exactly five minutes later was wife was by my side. 'Well?' pause, 'have you decided?' 'Naas,' I said definitively, 'a new Indian restaurant in Naas.'
I'm old enough to remember that whenever you drove south you drove through Naas. Back then, with but a few cars on the road, Naas was a bottle neck in much the way that Enfield is now. Prosperity has come to Naas along with its by-pass, although whether there's a causal link or not, I'm not sure. The main street doesn't seem to have got less busy since the motorway bypassed the town, it seems to have got even busier. Even arriving at eight o'clock on a mid-week night we found tailbacks. For one of those quirks of the eye the restaurant, Maloti, is easy to see when you're on the N7 going towards Dublin, but easily missed in the other direction. It's just a few doors down from where the N7 takes a right-angled turn at the top of the town.
Maloti has very clearly been designed as a restaurant. The entire building has been renovated internally while the exterior now boasts a double-height glass frontage. Inside that high glass window sheds lots of light, while the ground floor has seating for twenty or so on decent sized wooden tables with comfortable seats around them. At the back of the ground floor is the open plan kitchen, where you can watch the chefs going about their busy business. Wide, gently raked stairs take you upstairs from about halfway down the length of the room, where you find another bar counter and then more dining rooms running the length of the building on the first floor. The colour co-ordination, the themed patterns on the menus, take-away cards and business cards all match pleasingly. The style doesn't evoke anything specifically Indian in the traditional way, but rather clean, crisp modern décor that would be at home in any European city.
What is undeniably Indian is the staff. 'Aren't they handsome?' asked my wife - god knows what kind of answer she expected from me. Still, what our waiter was able to do was steer us through an immensely long menu. But before I tell you about that, I'll tell you about the wine list, which is short. Roughly ten reds and ten whites - I think all from the same supplier - are reasonably priced and cover a good selection of popular wines. What attracted both Susie and I more than this though, were the big bottles of Cobra Beer, 66cls, which gives you a bit more than a pint. We had one each. So to the menu, which has a page of appetisers, then four pages of main courses. All the dishes are colour-coded, ranging from mild to very, very hot. On the appetisers page, mostly priced between €5 and €7, you can find chicken tikka, lamb kebab, tandoori dishes, beef on skewers and of course, lots of prawns. Then comes a page of house specialities, then a page of lamb dishes, then tandoori, then biriani dishes. As well as those there are vegetarian dishes and seafood to further complicate your choices.
After much deliberation we finally settled on a paneer pakora for Susie and an onion bhajee for me. Susie's dish translates as cottage cheese fritters, which were pleasant enough but not overly exciting. My onion bhajee was excellent, well-flavoured and crisply cooked. Both of these starters were served with Irish-style garnish on the plate - some undressed iceberg lettuce, a slice of tomato and so on. I did what I always do with this stuff, I left it on the plate.
For main courses, the cause of all our deliberations, we had chosen a Jhinga Hara Pyaz for Susie, which was butterfly prawns in a mild chilli sauce, and a Patia Gosht, which was lamb in a traditional Persian sauce for me. These were placed in the middle of the table so that we could share them, which is what we did. Egg-fried rice for me and special fried rice for Susie were our carbohydrate. What made Susie's rice special seemed to be peas. Apart from the main courses we'd also ordered some Naan bread, which is really out on its own when it comes to mopping up sauces from the plate. Both our main courses were bursting with flavour, although mine was a little hot for Susie's palate.
What sets Maloti apart from many Indian restaurants is that it goes lightly on the Indian theming, confining it to the food. It's a formula that works very well, used to great effect in Dublin by Jaipur in Camden Street. Here in Naas it has to be a welcome addition to the increasing range of ethnic cuisines that can now be found there. A very modest bill of €74.30 ended our evening.
Naas has a great array of events from horse racing in Punchestown and Naas to world renowned concerts such as Oxegen and OzFest as well as intimate theatre and drama.
was formed in the early 1950's, its object to provide Naas with suitable facilities for drama and table tennis. In 1960 they bought the recently vacated Christian Brothers School.
The building which began life as the first post Penal Days Church in Naas derives its name from an ancient Moat - reputed to have connections with the Kings of Leinster-which is nearby. Using the upper portion as a Table Tennis hall, members began their plans to convert the lower classrooms into a theatre. With a great deal of hard work, a well equipped 125 seat theatre was opened in 1963.
This theatre was the home of The Moat Club and served its purpose well for over 40 years. However, as the new millenium approached the Club decided to move with the times. A brand new theatre was planned on the existing site, incorporating the old building at a cost of €3.2m.
From the hottest new bands to the legends that inspired them OXEGEN - Ireland's biggest and best music event - never fails to come up with the goods.
This year the festival played host to a spectacular line-up of bands and artists - and OXEGEN 2007 promises to be no different. You'll have to wait until February to find out exactly who will be gracing the stage at Punchestown Racecourse, Naas, Co Kildare on Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th July but with the OXEGEN back catalogue featuring bands such as The Who, The Strokes, Franz Ferdinand and The Arctic Monkeys this is one you won't want to miss.
Punchestown Racecourse, the home of Irish National Hunt Racing for more than 150 years is very different to any other racecourse for the simple fact that it is the only racecourse in Ireland to continue to host cross country racing, the very founder of modern era steeplechasing.
To say that Punchestown has grown considerably from its days of only double banks and stone walls would be a huge understatement when one considers the eloquent and imposing structures that were developed to bring Punchestown into the 21st century. Punchestown has successfully managed to expand in order to cope with the 80,000 strong crowds which visit throughout the Irish National Hunt Festival but at the same time generate that special countryside feeling at all it’s race meetings.
Today, Punchestown is not only the home of the most valuable National Hunt Festival in Ireland but also the home of a host of very competitive and exciting race days where the needs of senior citizens right down to toddlers are catered for over a broad range of price structures.
Contact me on:
e: brian.sherry@dit.ie
ph: 0863371192
Brian Sherry Tourism Marketing
Student at Dit Cathal Brugha Street
Paula Kelleher Tourism marketing
Student at Dit Cathal Brugha Street