Viva Stoneybatter!

Gordon Bennett! Can you adam'n'eve it? When we lived in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, which is not so long ago, the local sport was smashing the windscreen of our car (2 direct hits) and kicking the gutters of the house of our septuagenarian neighbour.

How things change! Stoneybatter is now home to a loose collection of arts journalists, bijou novelists, and feng shui consultants, and we bet our elderly neighbours, who always played pétanque in the park, now sip pastis whilst they play, muttering "Alors"! whenever someone has a particularly good boule. Stoneybatter now has cafés featuring live jazz (in our day the cafés featured chips, and it was almost certainly old Stoney that put the Batter in Batter Burger) and ethnic restaurants. There is a new Indian restaurant, and now Mero Mero Café has opened.

Now this is seriously good news, for the team behind the Mero Mero are Theresa and Gus Hernandez, known to food lovers as the makers of the superb, authentic Mexicxan specialities sold in shops and Temple Bar market as Sabores de Mexico.

"We will still be doing the Temple Bar market, of course", says Theresa, "but at the Café we will be selling a much broader range of foods with lots of organic ingredients in the mix".

So, real tortillas and quesadillas and all the other wonderful foods of Mexico, a cuisine, which remains the most misunderstood and misrepresented in the west.

And who's for betting Stoneybatter will swiftly be the first Spanish-speaking district of Dublin?

MERO MERO café, 56A Manor Street, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7.
Tel: (01) 670 7799
Open Mon-Fri 8:30am-7pm
Email: sabormex@indigo.ie