Tiny Breakfast Selections, On the Cheap

And then we were on to the final full day in Dublin before we returned home from our trip. As we had a destination in mind for our travels, we elected to not get breakfast from an actual restaurant and, instead, simply grab coffee and pastries on the way to the train so we could head over to a town just outside of Dublin. That led us to a Spar, one of a chain of convenience stores dotting the Emerald Isle and, spoilers, this was not the best decision.

We were probably expecting something better considering we’d had decent luck with the Circle K breakfast items we’d picked up before, but the items we grabbed from Spar just were not as good. That goes for both the pastries we picked up as well as the coffee. And the coffee was a big surprise considering it was coffee from a chain we’d been frequenting during the week, but apparently the Spar version of that same coffee just isn’t as good as when you get it elsewhere.

First on our list were the pastries. I got a custard danish, which looked great when I first picked it out. Custard, in a flaky crust, with a bit of berries on top. It’s a really lovely picturesque piece of baking, but that was only when you looked at it. Upon eating, it was a different matter. The custard needed flavor, as it was bland and lifeless. It tasted more like gelatine than proper custard, and it simply wasn’t sweet enough. The pastry crust was also not good, too flaky and papery without any kind of body to it. The whole thing underwhelmed, from the first bite to the last.

My wife, meanwhile, eyed a chocolate croissant. What she got was not, in fact, a chocolate croissant despite the fact that it was in the area marked “chocolate croissant”. Instead it was something with apples and nuts as the filling. The consistency was okay. A little too dense for a good croissant (which, hell, this might not have been), and it still lacked flavor. It was just as underwhelming as the other pastry, and that’s if we’re being kind and assumed it was what we’d wanted. I knock further points off for not being what we wanted despite where it was placed and labeled.

As for the coffee, that was abysmal. We’d be frequenting Insomnia Coffee, a small chain across the isle that was honestly pretty great. It’s Starbucks-like, but with a better flavor to their coffee (I tend to think that Starbucks overcooks their beans, giving it a harsh flavor). I’d been getting their Caramel Macchiato, while my wife was getting a Mocha, both of which are our usual selections at coffee joints. From the main Insomnia Coffee stores, these two items are great. From Spar, though, they were awful.

The mix was all wrong. For starters, the coffee was burned. Horribly overcooked and very harsh tasting. It’s like they saw what Starbucks was doing (as there were Starbucks in Ireland and we purposefully avoided them) and said, “hold my mug.” This was some of the harshest brew I’d tasted on the trip, and I’d been drinking instant hotel coffee when I didn’t want to leave the room. This shit was hands down just absolutely nasty.

And then there’s the balance of syrup. Despite presumably them having a menu of how to make the various drinks, and both my wife and I getting very standard drinks (our usuals, no modifications), the guy still managed to make them both overly sweet. Too much syrup, and not mixed at all well. The coffee was thick and burned and gross and after about half a cup each we threw the rest of our brews away. Suffice it to say, for the next time we wanted coffee we just went back to a proper Insomnia branch.

Spar was about as bad as you could get from a convenience store. It’s not like Circle K is fantastic by any metric, but in comparison to what Spar was serving, they were positively gourmet. Spar was gross, and even if I lived in Dublin I would not go back.