Green Nineteen is one of the best restaurants I’ve ever eaten at. A locally produced ingredients based restaurant, Green Nineteens off kilter, creative reinterpretation of classic food s like cheese burgers and onion rings blew me away. Their vegetables were imbued with the warmth of having been freshly plucked from under a rare warm and sunshiney Dublin day, and they were ripe to perfection. This blog post isn’t going to focus on the food quality of what I strongly suspect is a contender for best restaurant in Dublin, however. It will instead focus on the way food informs my understanding of place and my place in place.

Every time I move to a new place, I know there will be one specific food that in going to miss. Whether it’s from a particularly good restaurant or a combination of unique local ingredients, there’s always something that I’ll miss enormously. In Burlington, Vermont, for instance, there’s an all-night sandwich  shop near the edge of Church Street in Burlington, Vermont. I get powerful cravings for their Cajun Chicken Philly Cheeseseteaks. I crave, at times, the Croque Madames of Paris, and at other times the biscuits and red-eye gravy of my native Appalachias. Whenever I think of a place, I think of its food first, and there seems to be something in food, I think, that reveals the soul of a place. The rules of place often seem to be outlined by the rules of places’ foods and getting to the heart of place can be done most pleasurably through food.