It might be the season of romance but these fail-safe date ideas in Dublin can be enjoyed any time of the year. Grab your significant other, platonic friend or blind date for an evening that’s not dinner and a movie.
Food Tour
Feeling a little shy and need something or indeed someone to help break the ice? Let Fab Food Trails and Delicious Dublin Tours do the talking (and the walking) with a guided food tour across the city.
Fab Food Trails can accommodate private tours of two or more and they offer delicious jaunts around Cork city too. Additionally, both companies offer a tour en française, i.e., in the language of love. Expect to stop at some of the best worst-kept secret spots and gourmet institutions across town.
Cocktail Making
If a regular pilgrimage to the cinema is no longer cutting it for date night, “mix” things up with a cocktail-making class. There’s a range of group classes in some of Dublin’s top bars but once monthly, The Blind Pig, a speakeasy and restaurant, hosts an intimate cocktail class. Self-described as “ideal for a date”, bartender and mixologist Andrew Ennis teaches everything from the history of cocktails to flavour profiles and ingredients, learning how to make the classics and most importantly, sampling them too. Add this one to your list for date ideas in Dublin.
Picnic
Rain, hail or shine, a picnic is always a winner. Elements permitting, decamp to the back garden, local park or living room floor with a gourmet picnic for two. Skerries-based deli, Olive, has a selection of alcoholic or booze-free picnic boxes full of grazing goodies. With a vegan iteration available too, think fresh antipasti, charcuterie, hummus, cakes and other nibbles.
Available for collection and delivery throughout Dublin, Sweet Cicely’s has a similar offering packed with treats and a personalised message option to boot. Spell out your true feelings in writing or with breadsticks. Your choice.
Cooking Class
The ultimate exercise in team building. With varying degrees of direct involvement and cuisines to choose from, there’s a cooking class – and potentially a soulmate – out there for all. Big fish of the Irish seafood movement Niall Sabongi and his Seafood Café crew are hosting two masterclasses in February with hopes to continue into 2023. Sidenote: Sabongi’s retail platform, SSI, has a Valentine’s supper available to buy here.
Alternatively, nothing says amoré quite like a big (homemade) pizza pie. Private chef John O’Connor offers an at-home one-day pizza course with his transportable pizza oven in tow. Definitely one to add to the list for date ideas in Dublin.
Spirit or Wine Tasting
Join Dublin Whiskey Tours and your favourite travel buddy on a “journey through 1,000 years of Irish whiskey.” Travelling across a small selection of Dublin’s premium whiskey bars, there’s three whiskey-themed experiences tailored to “the seeker”, “the foodie lover” or those in search of “a decadent treat”.
Alternatively, go straight to the source and visit the sustainably-minded Stillgarden Distillery for an Irish spirits tasting. Revellers are greeted with a welcome drink, the opportunity to try samples and are talked through the ropes of modern Irish distilling.
If wine is more your thing, A Wine Idea’s founder Sevgi Tüzel-Conghaile holds intimate tastings from her intimate six-seater tasting room on George’s Street. A fine evening to add to your dates ideas in Dublin, we think.
Breakfast in Bed
The Divine Foodie and Good Morning Box are on hand to facilitate a love lock-in with their respective brunch and breakfast delivery boxes. The Divine Foodie’s brunch box features homemade brown bread and sausage rolls, eggs, granola, fresh fruit, orange juice, and a raft of optional add-ons.
The build-your-own Good Morning boxes are packed with the usual breakfast essentials and can be custom-designed too. Keep it casual with the “You’re great!” box or go all out with “I love you”. Build a duvet fort, queue the movies and dig in.
Fermentation Course
Find yourself in a pickle having exhausted all of your date ideas? If the way to one’s heart is through their stomach, it needs to be shipshape and lined with healthy gut bacteria. I digress. Clumsy gastric and gastronomical jokes aside, a fermentation workshop might just be the remedy needed.
Helen Cassidy of Food Hugs is holding a series of one-day workshops throughout the year from her Glenageary base. From kimchi, kefir, to kraut and kombucha, this bonding exercise is sure to give your tummy butterflies.
Date Ideas in Dublin – By Hazel Byrne
Hazel Byrne is a lifestyle, travel and food writer and editor. Originally from Ireland, she’s just returned home after almost a decade of eating and drinking her way around London. Over four of those years were spent at Condé Nast, where she worked across editorial and branded content on titles including British Vogue, Vanity Fair,GQ, Glamour and Condé Nast Traveller. From reviewing the world’s finest luxury experiences to producing celebrity shoots and events, she has a story or two to tell. When she’s not eating, drinking or talking about doing both, she’s plotting her next adventure.
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