Davy Byrnes Pub: The Bloomday Feast on Duke Street

Why is it significant?

Finish your journey on fashionable Duke Street right before the polished brass thresholds and striped awning of Davy Byrnes Pub.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Finish your journey on fashionable Duke Street right before the polished brass thresholds and striped awning of Davy Byrnes Pub. Look through the plate-glass window at the Art Deco bar, mahogany counters, and murals painted by Cecil French Salkeld: you have arrived at the most famous literary pilgrimage site in Irish fiction.

In James Joyce's epic nineteen twenty-two novel Ulysses, protagonist Leopold Bloom enters this very pub at two o'clock in the afternoon on June sixteenth, nineteen zero four. Bloom famously sits down and orders a Gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of sweet Burgundy wine, savoring the cool, clean glass and observing that Davy Byrnes was a moral pub because the proprietor didn't chatter too much.

Every year on June sixteenth, thousands of Joycean pilgrims from across the globe dress in Edwardian straw boaters and corsets for Bloomsday, crowding this mahogany counter to order the exact same Gorgonzola sandwich and burgundy.

James Joyce famously remarked that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt completely from the pages of Ulysses. Order a drink, raise your glass, and toast the enduring soul of Dublin's writers and rebels.