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GASTRO Double Take Doll Society As One I was watc
hing my wife watching an unflinching documentary about the economic impossibility of living in Manhattan recently when an important question bubbled up from my depths. Is brunch still a thing? Or rather – do people still do brunch. You do hear of people doing dinner or lunch but no other meal is as done-to as brunch, it is a sub to dinner’s dom – a gastro-gimp awaiting the load of our expectations. Come to think of it, it may have been an episode of And Just Like That... rather than a documentary but I had found my subject regardless – a snapshot of the state of brunch today. In Dublin. Nevertheless, what was soberly conceived as a survey of the broad spectrum of Dublin brunch became instead a couple of expeditions mounted to report from its very poles. There’s a limit to the expenses I can claim here. The following are true accounts pieced together from the remnants of my journal. Doll Society is a kind of cocktail bar with kind of food in a space on Francis Street that was previously called Societal Collapse. I’m told it is brought to us by the people who also gifted us Jackie’s down the street – a bar designed to forever commemorate our noble failure/scrappy success at Italia ’90. Fuck Schillaci etc. Having given the Jack concept a lash the owners’ thoughts have obviously turned to the fairer sex and it’s difficult to argue with 36 their logic. If a football theme works for the lads then surely pink will do the same for the ladies. Right? When the lady who tells me about things that social media does tells me of an impending Bottomless Beyoncé Brunch happening there the die is cast and I begin to count the sleeps. On a subsequent sodden Sunday we find ourselves seated next to the DJ booth and feeling a little sheepish. In the large L-shaped room every surface is pink or reflective or fringed with tinsel. Expense has been spared throughout. I ask for a Bloody Mary but the young woman behind the bar makes a face like I’d asked for Bovril on the rocks and shakes her head. So now I know that young folks don’t drink Bloody Marys. They don’t eat eggs at brunch either. There’s no sign of Beyoncé or anything Bey related. There’s no mention of anything bottomless at all. Some phone checking confirms that we are not here on the wrong Sunday. As a result perhaps of our relative antiquity we are given the ‘Bites’ menu rather than the brunch one which I suspect contains references to bottomlessness. It’s about 2pm now and gaggles of girls are pouring in, live streaming as they go and pausing for selfies next to the neon piece inside the door exhorting us to Live (our) best F*cking Lives. Most are lavishly illustrated. The Bottomless brunchers all seem to be enjoying huge half-discoballs of Pornstar