Monday, March 18, 2024

Bar Italia - Truly Italian!

Bar Italia is located right at the heart of Dublin city center and sees it's existence dating back to the previous century. It is one of the few ventures which has seen it's light being prevalent right since 1999 onwards and you would see the proud display inscribed in white text with below quote "Open 7 days for lunch and dinner since 1999". This and the popular Italian eatery joint Toscano are the 2 restaurants in Dublin which have now been serving customers for around quarter a century.

As the name connotes it's pretty to surmise that this is a restaurant which prides on Italian fare with a variety of pasta and pizza options along with samples of antipasti on the board. It was however very limited on the vegetarian side of things and I just had couple of items to choose from on the pasta or pizza menu.

For starters, I went with Rosemary Potatoes. They were large chunks of pieces shaped like a spiral and slathered with garlic, oil, butter and flourished with seasoning. They felt good on the mouth and it was nice consuming these giant sized juicy potatoes.

On the main course, I decided to go with Pasta and I literally had just 2 items to choose from one being ravioli with mushroom stuffing and another being a cheesy pasta sauteed with pepper in what you call a cacio de pepe pasta. I chose the latter and it was brought in a big 2 tier bowl with the upper end being garnished with parmesan cheese and the bottom portion were the rolled up pasta infused with cheese and a dash of pepper. It was quite lovely though for the Indian palette of mine felt a bit too bland lacking the masala you're so used to but nevertheless the tinge of cheese and pepper worked really well and it was flavorful on the whole.

The place gives a rich appeal with a black carved theme with dim lights associated. You have the bar right at the entrance and a row of seating to go along once you get inside. The service was crisp and on point. There was hardly much waiting time and you got your stuff without any delay. It's definitely a good spot to dine out however being a vegetarian options felt a bit too limited and will certainly be helpful if they have little more items in the fray. The two items which I had set me back by about 23.5 Euros with the pasta costing 19 and started about 4 and half Euros. Pricing seems par for the course and on similar lines to other places. Overall a cozy smooth dining place at Ormund Quay right around the corner of Dublin city center.





Sunday, January 28, 2024

Cricketing Nostalgia Edition - Test Cricket of 2002, ODI WC 1999 & beyond

We were in the process of disposing off old items in the house when an old notebook running more than a quarter century caught my attention. I was quite fascinated to see that I had documented handwritten scorecard of all ODI matches played during the 1999 World Cup along with plenty of other notes pertaining mainly towards cricket, a bit of movies and some random scripts.

This was much before the advent of blogging came into existence. I recall around the late 1990s and early 2000s, most homes didn't even have a personal computer and it was only around the early 2000s that internet came into existence with the good old netcracker dial up edition which used to take quite a while to connect.

I had also incidentally penned a summarized version of the year 2002 that played out in test cricket chronicling on the major events that took place during the year. I couldn't beleive it myself that I took the pains to write about test cricket decades back when I was a wily teenager hooked on to the sport in a major way. Also looking at penning scorecards from cricket matches noted down from newspapers brings back a lot of vintage memories.

I am sharing below my hand written documentation of the 1999 ODI World Cup match played between India and Pakistan and producing verbatim my write up of the year 2002 and how it was for test cricket.

2002 - The Year that Was 

2002 will go down in history as one of those years in which bat completely dominated the ball.