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Scotsman
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
I tried Dublin Street Social and had the best brunch I've had in a long time
Since opening last month, Dublin St Social has proven popular with customers thanks to its brunches and small plates. So we thought we'd pop along and see what all the fuss was about. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The bar-bistro is just a short walk from Princes Street, making it really handy if you want to avoid the super busy areas of the New Town. It has a great outdoor seating area that would be perfect for sitting with a drink and watching the world go by, but instead I headed inside to see how their food fared. Offering both small plates and a brunch menu, there's plenty to choose from. Because it was a solo visit, I picked the Scottish Stack from the brunch menu and I have to say it was one of the best Scottish breakfasts I've had in a long time. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad At £14, you are paying a premium for that quality, but it's worth it if you're looking to treat yourself. The stack had a good portion of bacon, black pudding, haggis, a tattie scone and a sausage patty all topped with an egg that's cooked to your liking. Inside Dublin St Social bar and bistro in Edinburgh's New Town. | Dublin St Social I'm generally quite fussy when it comes to black pudding and extremely fussy when it comes to things like a sausage patty, but on both fronts you could tell just how good the quality was. The egg, which I chose to be fried, was also cooked really well and not over done as can often be the case. I washed it down with a Staropramen, which I picked from a long list of lagers - I counted around half a dozen from the list that the waiter offered - with all of them premium lagers, except the old faithful Tennent's. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad If I'd have been choosing from the sharing plates, I'd definitely have been struggling to pick just a few. They've got a great selection, including chorizo and manchego croquettes and a cider-braised pork cheek and Stornoway black pudding bon bon. The vibe of the restaurant felt quite laid back, however it was around lunchtime when I visited and it was on the quiet side. It's easy to see how, on an evening that was full that it could have a completely different vibe. The staff inside were super friendly and helpful, which goes a long way. So I'd definitely say Dublin St Social is one to add to your list. Speaking shortly after opening, owner Anna McShane, 23, said that she hoped that the intention was to offer good food at a good price, and if my first visit was anything to go by then I'd say she has achieved that. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad She said: 'We offer nice, well-priced small plates with wines to suit the food. It's very good food at very good prices and the location is phenomenal, with outside seating for 14 people also. 'It's a nice offering here, with a great range of beers too, not just wine. All the food is Scottish produce, we try to do as much as possible to support local businesses. We are very Scottish-orientated, apart from the wine of course.' Dublin Street Social 26B Dublin St, Edinburgh EH3 6NN
Scotsman
20-05-2025
- Business
- Scotsman
Edinburgh's newest bar and bistro opens its doors at the Dublin Street Social
A young Irish woman who has lived in Edinburgh for five years, with years of experience of working in the hospitality sector, has began her first solo business venture. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Anna McShane, 23, opened Dublin St Social on Dublin Street in the New Town street last Friday, May 16, following a soft opening attended by around 100 people the previous night, with the new bar and bistro doing a roaring trade in its first weekend. The Dublin St Social has been popular since opening last week in Edinburgh's New Town. | Dublin St Social The new venue serves food 12pm-9pm, Wednesday to Thursdays, and Fridays to Saturdays, 10am-4pm for brunch and 12-9pm for small plates, with the bar opened until 1am every night, except Sundays when it closes at 5pm. Dublin St Social is also opened from 12pm until 1am on Tuesdays, serving drinks only. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Dublin St Social also includes a separate venue, Ollie's a private events space for up to 120 people, complete with it's own bar. Anna has been delighted with the response to her first venture already, having previously worked in hospitality in her native Derry and in Edinburgh for the past seven years. The Dublin St Social bar and bistro on Dublin Street in Edinburgh's New Town. | National World Revealing more about what the new business plans to offer customers going forward, she said: 'I'm definitely happy to get started. We have been very busy since it opened. Every sitting was busy. 'We started from scratch when we came in here. We got a great head chef, who has come up with a great menu, adapted to suit the location. We've created a new look and a new offering for the local community to enjoy. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'This is my first venture as owner. I have been in hospitality for a long time and now I'm ready for the leap. We are hoping we are a very good addition to the neighbourhood and we have been very busy so far, with seven future events already booked at Ollie's. The signage for Dublin St Social bar and bistro and Ollie's private event space. | Dublin St Social 'The restaurant itself is well booked for this coming week ahead as well. We have had plenty of locals in already, and that's what it is all about for us, offering a great service to the local community. 'We offer nice, well-priced small plates with wines to suit the food. It's very good food at very good prices and the location is phenomenal, with outside seating for 14 people also. 'It's a nice offering here, with a great range of beers too, not just wine. All the food is Scottish produce, we try to do as much as possible to support local businesses. We are very Scottish-orientated, apart from the wine of course. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'We have a nice partnership with Johnnie Walker coming also, with tasting events planned for Ollie's, where we also plan to host monthly wine tastings with our suppliers.' Inside Dublin St Social bar and bistro in Edinburgh's New Town. | Dublin St Social The unit at 26B Dublin Street was previously home to the Little White Pig restaurant. For more information about Dublin St Social, check out the new bar and bistro's website.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
It's the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human
It's the love-hate relationship that defined a generation. We think we know all about teenagers and the phones to which they're so umbilically tied: sleeping with them under the pillow, panicking at the prospect of ever being denied wifi, so glued to the screen that they're oblivious to the world unfolding around them. Yet the first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart. Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project, a thinktank founded by a former teacher, Anna McShane. Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they'd keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn't how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable. Though the focus groups she conducted confirmed that parents were desperate for help weaning children off screens, what's refreshing about McShane's research is that it suggests the generations aren't as locked in combat as they sometimes feel; that increasingly, we're all on the same side. Gen Z, it turns out, don't need more lectures from their (often equally addicted) elders about getting off that bloody phone. If anything, they may have something to teach us. This Friday, parliament will vote on the Labour MP (and former teacher) Josh MacAlister's private member's bill on safer phone use, expected to be backed by the government but only after being notably watered down. Though MacAlister originally favoured raising the legal limit for accessing social media from 13 to 16, the bill now only commits ministers to reporting back in a year's time on the case for doing so, plus conducting further research and publishing fresh guidance on children's screen time. With X's CEO, Elon Musk, virtually embedded in the White House, some will suspect ministers of ducking a confrontation with American tech giants. But there are other reasons not to rush in, at least until the complex new Online Safety Act due to come into force this spring has settled down, and ministers have had a chance to learn from similar bans being introduced in Australia and Norway. Rather cheeringly, however, it seems in the meantime gen Z are taking things into their own hands. A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way. Nightclubs and gig venues from Manchester to Ibiza to Berlin have started asking punters to put stickers over their phone cameras, encouraging them not to film on the dancefloor but just to lose themselves in the moment like their parents got to do. Meanwhile an explosion of gen Z running clubs, reading groups, in-person singles parties for people exhausted by dating apps, and 'digital detox' events where phones are left outside the door, reflect a palpable and touching new hunger for old-fashioned face-to-face connection. The 25-year-old writer Adele Zeynep Walton founded Logging Off Club, which organises real life social meet-ups for people trying to wean themselves off their phones, after a chance conversation during a 25th birthday weekend away with friends. All of them, it turned out, were worried about their screen time and were secretly trying to cut it down, but felt self-conscious talking about it. At Logging Off Club events, she says cheerfully, 'we take people's phones off them at the door and put them in a bucket'. It's like ripping away a comfort blanket at first, but it makes people talk to each other rather than hiding behind a screen. At one event she organised jointly with City Daze, another social club that organises phone-free walks round London, attendees were even given cue cards to help them start conversations. What seems to be building up among younger women in particular isn't just a backlash against the kind of toxic content, bullying or political disinformation rampant in their online lives, but a feeling that spending so much time on their phones has deprived them of something human and important. Walton is starting to think about where she might want to settle down in the next few years, only to realise that she feels curiously unrooted from any real-life community: though she's been talking for years online to people she has never met, she doesn't even know her physical neighbours' names. Her generation has, she says, 'been sold that lie of connection' by the big platforms but are finding the pseudo-communities offered there ultimately unsatisfying, leaving them wanting more. Her book about all of this, Logging Off, is published in June and though it's hard to read as a parent without thinking guiltily that society has been asleep at the wheel here, there's something oddly uplifting about watching gen Z start to try to rebuild the lives they clearly feel they've been missing. The US sociologist Robert D Putnam is best known for describing the downs in his classic Bowling Alone, which argued that society became more fragmented, polarised and distrusting over the second half of the 20th century as Americans retreated from collective activities – from team sports to churchgoing – that once knitted them together. But in his more recent book, The Upswing, written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, Putnam goes back another half a century to explore how that sociable state of bowling together originally came about. It was, he argues, also in part a reaction to a period of loneliness and isolation, but this time caused by people moving from close-knit rural and small town America to bigger towns and cities where there were jobs and opportunities, but where they had few ties. What followed was a mushrooming of social clubs, from rotary clubs and scout groups to unions, that brought them together; though they didn't know it, in retrospect their members were building the beginning of an upswing. The moral of the story, for those daring to be hopeful? That once societies get far enough down the path of isolation, sometimes the only way left is up. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
