Megabites

Classic book: PLATS DU JOUR by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd Penguin Books, 1957 It’s funny – in both senses of the word – how many people think that awareness of foreign foo...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2015/04/classic-cookbooks-revisited-part-1.html

When I created Aodhghán Feeley NT, the veteran defender of “Irish family values” in The Sunday Tribune, I gave this ghastly man what I considered to be an appropriate car: a Morris Mari...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2014/05/skoda-opposite-of-vulgar.html

I think I can pinpoint the time when my fascination with the internal combustion engine started. I was about six and I had been invited to a friend’s birthday party at Dublin Zoo, which wa...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-la-recherche-des-citroens-perdus.html

Volvo V40 T2 R-Design I once had a pretty heavy Volvo habit. It started in a small way, when I fell in love at the age of 12 with the old 145. I knew enough Latin by then to know that Volvo ...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/11/volvo-v40-lets-roll.html

When I was a teenager a lot of my schoolfriends were ferried about in the car that was the epitome of middle-class family transport in the leafy suburbs: the vast and rugged Peugeot 504 estate w...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-peugeot-3008-and-its-genes.html

My collection of neckwear is sparse. I suppose I wear a tie, at most, once or twice a month but, perhaps due to having a paucity of things to worry about, I have strong views about them. Many ...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/09/being-man-involves-shaving-and.html

I ended up – quite by accident - driving, as my daily car, a SEAT Leon. I was plagued with an intermittent and utterly myserious fuel feed problem in my Land Rover TD5 and had decided, wisely,...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/09/my-week-with-seat-leon-fr-20-tdi-150bhp.html

A.A. Gill quotes a chef who dreads getting a Michelin star because his restaurant would fill up with “people with faces liked smacked bottoms” who complain about everything. I’m sure that�...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/08/cleaver-east-review.html

3-COURSE MENU TO SERVE 4 (WITH WINE!) FOR €20 OR UNDER: This was a challenge put to me by the Marian Finucane Radio programme on RTE Radio 1. All of the shopping was done in either Lidl or...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/07/menu-for-marian.html

When the Lexus project was launched way back in 1983, what they had in mind was something that could match, at least, the Mercedes S-class. Numerous Mercedes cars, it is said, were taken apart ...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/07/lovely-lively-lexus.html

At one point last month Ireland’s horticultural bush telegraph cranked up and spread the good and rather unexpected news that one of the country’s great gardens would be open again but just...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/07/we-have-to-save-mount-congreve.html

Whereas the largest gatherings of Passats in other countries tend to be in well located supermarket car parks or at conference centres, here in Ireland they congregate in significant numbers...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2013/06/my-passat-week.html

We live on a hilliside in Co Cork between the valleys of the Bride and the Blackwater and from our kitchen window there’s a panoramic view stretching from, on one side, a great deal of West...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-in-kitchen.html

GIVE EVERYONE THEIR DUE This piece first appeared in the Irish Daily Mail in March 2012 Tullamore, having for decades given its name to one of the world’s most famous whiskeys, is to get...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/06/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-ja-x.html

This book review first appeared in the Irish Daily Mail in December 2012 In the late Spring of 1967 Jammet's, the grand restaurant which had dominated Dublin dining since the dawn of the twen...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/05/dublin-in-rare-oul-times.html

This review first appeared in the Irish Daily Mail in March 2012 It’s tempting to claim that there’s no recession in the smarter bits of south County Dublin, but it’s not entirely true....

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-ja-x_13.html

This review first appeared in the Irish Daily Mail in February 2012 Brendan Behan used to claim that members of the Garda Siochana were recruited by luring them from the Kerry mountains wi...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-ja-x.html

I wrote this piece for the Irish Daily Mail way back in 2007. I joined the Church of Ireland at the age of 21, having been brought up by very devout Roman Catholic parents and educated, up to a p...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/05/i-wrote-this-piece-for-irish-daily-mail.html

As the 1990s dawned on this misty island, condoms could only be bought on prescription and there was no divorce. It was an interesting decade in many ways and one feature of those years which gav...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/04/past-is-foreign-country.html

THE OLD BLOG ROAD... At the height of what Michael Parsons, in The Irish Times, calls the Septic Tiger, I was chatting to a friend of mine about our mutual interest in cars. “I can’t unders...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/04/old-blog-road.html

In 2004 The Irish Times published an extract from a book of mine, and the passage they chose concerned my time at Belvedere. Not suprisingly, it also concerned the biggest influence I encountered...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2012/04/gerry-haugh-1950-2011.html

SWEET PEAS "All human life is there." That's what they used to say about the late and unlamented News of the World, perhaps adding that there was some inveterbrate life forms involved too. To...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2011/08/sweet-peas-all-human-life-is-there.html

ARE WELFARE SCROUNGERS HAVING SEX WITH SWANSEA'S BRITONS? OR, THE MEANING OF MYERS, by Garvan Tiddley. Sigh. Or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it in his recent book on the dialectical discursivity of s...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2011/04/you-know-what-i-mean.html

It seems that Nando's is becoming the acceptable face of fast food. Not only did Observer Food Monthly run a lengthy paen of praise some time ago, but now John Lanchester has reviewed the chain ...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-duty-of-chicken-wing.html

Last Saturday night I repaired to something that used to be one of South London's best kept secrets, a restaurant with no signage and just an intercom through which you negotiate entry. It's call...

http://tomdoorley.blogspot.com/2011/01/not-quite-restaurant-review.html