Messy, Peppercorn-Packed Chinese Irish Spice Bags Take the World

Eater

29-07-2025

is the associate editor for the Northern California and Pacific Northwest region writing about restaurant and bar trends, coffee and cafes, and pop-ups.
On any given night, a tactile, no-frills plate of fried splendor lands on tables at Little Dumpling in Dublin's Temple Bar neighborhood, right around the time it lands on thousands of other tables throughout Ireland. It's a spice bag: a collection of spicy, starchy bits and bobs on top of chips (french fries). Something like disco fries, it's a staple of Chinese takeaways across Ireland, and the stuff of post-bar street food legend.
Since the dish premiered at Templeogue's Sunflower Chinese restaurant around 2006, the spice bag has morphed and spread in Ireland, abroad, and all over social media. As chefs mix in their own variations, it's become an entire genre of food, its own galaxy in the universe of Irish culinary culture.
Unless it arrives in a tremendous pizza box (in which case it might be called a 'spice box'), the dish's traditional packaging is a brown paper bag nearly translucent with grease. This quotidian container unleashes a messy, yet tantalizing combination of fried and spicy items. There's always chicken, usually in strips, whether they're coated, breaded, or fried. And there are always fries and onions. There might be other vegetables too, like spring onion, fresh chiles, or grated carrot. Then come all sorts of accouterments, from spring rolls to chicken balls. And there's curry sauce on the side, except if the takeaway is among the feverish camp that swears by satay sauce.
Then there's the signature spice, which varies bag to bag. The Gaelic name for the finger-licking late-night hit, 'mála spíosraí' (roughly 'mala spice') hints at the dish's particular genre of numbing heat. Sichuan peppercorns are a throughline, as is nutty, earthy Chinese five spice, but chefs apply flavors in various forms.
Chef Jules Mak goes for muddled and ground Sichuan peppercorn, salt, pepper, sugar, a bit of chile powder, and a tap of MSG. Once a year, his high-end Hong Kong-inspired Mak At D6 in Dublin sells a metric ton of spice bags for one month only.
'We blitz them out a bit more bougie,' he says. 'We do a hundred a night.'
Per national outlet RTE, Hong Kong diasporic communities, known simply as 'Hongkongers,' represent much of Ireland's Chinese migrants. Their use of spice in items like spice bags looks a lot like the genre of salt and chile dishes that spans across South Asia, applied to everything from ribs to prawns.
Mak, whose father hailed from Hong Kong and mother from the Emerald Isle, grew up seeing to-go orders for chips, curry, and rice at Furama, his dad's stalwart Chinese restaurant in Dublin that closed about a decade ago. It was called a 'three in one' then, and Furama wasn't the only place doing it. Following Sunflower's spice bag, Mak says, the three in one faded, as the three items fused into spice bags across the restaurant scene.
'It's a bit of a bastardized Chinese dish,' says Irish food critic Russell Alford, 'but it's ours.'
As Sunday Times food critics, hosts of the Gastro Gays podcast, and authors of Hot Fat (a book all about fried foods), Alford and Patrick Hanlon have watched the spice bag spread over the years. They point to the early 2010s as the first time the dish jumped to the international stage. Australia and New Zealand were early adopters.
'It's kind of this icon of Irish cuisine, of Irish culture,' Hanlon says. 'It's changing the perception of Irish cuisine abroad.'
The Chicken Salt Fries at Pecking House. Pecking House
Spice bags are particularly tuned to spread on social media. The dish combines items — fries, fried chicken, spicy food — that are known winners online. The oil-slicked bag also unfolds to reveal its contents like a Christmas present, making for a great reveal in TikTok or Instagram videos. Versions made with an air fryer, which received international star treatment in 2017, spurred the dish further into the global consciousness.
The dish also capitalizes on a rising tide of Irish cultural exports. Arguably Ireland's most famous culinary offering, Guinness, is also having a moment; 'splitting the G' (downing a Guinness until the foam lands in the middle of the letter G on the glass) has fueled a boom in the Dublin-made beer. Actors like Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan, and Cillian Murphy have cemented themselves in young American minds the way John Hurt and Richard Harris did for their Gen X parents, rap group Kneecap is taking the world by storm with frenzied gigs, and global focus on the ongoing siege of Gaza has brought Ireland's own history of colonial struggle into focus.
A lot of these factors come together at Bar Snack in New York's East Village (recognized as the 85th best bar in North America), where Kneecap plays on the speakers all the time, a dedicated tap whips up foamy pints of Guinness, and the spice bags flow like stout through cobbled streets.
When co-owners Iain Griffiths and Oliver Cleary were ideating the menu for the bar, which opened in November 2024 before the kitchen came online in April 2025, they saw the smash burger trend waning. Griffiths, who is Scottish, and Cleary, who is Irish, thought spice bags could be the next hit thing.
Their rendition arrives in the characteristic paper bag: buttermilk-fried chicken tendies, peppers, onions, and fries with spices and a curry sauce. They also put the Spice Girls logo on T-shirts to hype the bag's debut.
'That felt like one of the most U.S. things we could do,' Griffiths says. But the spice bag was good enough to earn fans among their Irish clientele as well. '[They] would look up and give us the nod, like, this is good.'
At New York's spicy fried chicken specialist Pecking House, chef-owner Eric Huang approached the dish from another side. He grew up in a Chinese restaurant, so the flavors of the spice bag were nothing new to him. After learning of the dish while cooking with chefs from the United Kingdom and clocking the version by New Zealand's Andy Hearnden, Huang rolled out his own iteration, titled Chicken Salt Fries, on Saint Patrick's Day 2025.
The dish goes heavy on an in-house seasoning salt, along with cumin, coriander, Sichuan peppercorns, and a few more seasonings. It arrives with a curry sauce meant to evoke classic Japanese brand Golden Curry, providing a sweet, sentimental edge to the feisty medley.
All around the globe, the cost of the dish has a lot to do with its cultural supremacy. Little Dumpling serves a generous spice bag for just 13 euros, Pecking House's goes for just $9, and Bar Snack serves the Georges St Special, a happy hour-ish combo of a spice bag and a Guinness pint for $22. As a U.S. recession looms and the EU fights to avoid sliding back into an economic downturn of its own, these familiar, affordable items — especially versions given a facelift to make them feel like a treat — draw diners out when James Beard starts to look like a bank robber.
But chefs also recognize that upscaling the dish too much would rob it of its 1 a.m., effortless cool. Though some international spice bags have diverged significantly from the original dish, including 'healthy' recipes made with tofu or more vegetables, most iterations stick to the unkempt joy of a greasy, cheap mess of fried stuff. Despite the spice bag's online virality, Hanlon and Alford insist it shouldn't be a destination, phone-eats-first dish.
Huang acknowledges that, for Pecking House at least, the spice bag's viral moment is already over. But he keeps serving it for the Irish expats and anyone who fell in love with the dish while visiting Ireland, the folks who tell Huang the dish takes them right back.
'They pour the sweet chile sauce over, the hot curry sauce, too,' Huang says, 'and it's this steaming, greasy bag they're eating. And when they put their hands in the bag, it's a really, really awesome eating experience.'
A few more spice bags to try around the world:
The Kitchen Bronx (New York City)