Favourite Places, The Winding Stair

Ormond Cē

Nikon F3 28mm F2 HP5 (400)

The Winding Stair

Dublin Autumn 2026

There are few pleasures in life more reliable than climbing a narrow staircase out of a howling Dublin evening and finding, at the top, a warm room full of people eating well. The Winding Stair sits above a bookshop on Ormond Quay, gazing across the Liffey at the Ha'penny Bridge. The night I went, the wind was doing its best to remove the bridge altogether and deposit it somewhere in Wales. Umbrellas were turning inside out along the quays with a sort of weary resignation, like elderly gentlemen giving up on a crossword. I arrived looking as though I'd been assembled hastily from spare parts in a wind tunnel. Nobody seemed to mind, which is one of the many things I have come to love about the Irish. They have seen worse, and they have usually seen it that afternoon.

I ordered the seafood starter, and then, in a moment of reckless self-indulgence I can only blame on the weather, I asked for extra crab. I am not a man who often asks for extra of anything. I generally assume it will cause a scene, or require a form. But the waiter simply nodded, as if this were the most sensible request he'd heard all week. Perhaps it was. The crab, when it came, was sweet and generous and tasted faintly of the sea at its most agreeable. That was a pleasant contrast to the sea outside, which was audibly furious about something. The Chablis was poured, cold and flinty and so precisely what the moment required that I briefly considered writing to the French to thank them personally.

Then came the cod, a handsome, glistening slab of fish, flaking apart at the merest suggestion of a fork, the sort of thing that makes you wonder why you ever eat anything else. Outside, the window showed autumn properly arriving. Leaves skittered along the quay, the river had taken on the colour of strong tea, and people hurried past hunched against the wind like characters fleeing a Dickens novel. Inside, I had a second glass of Chablis and a plate of excellent fish, and the comfortable conviction that I was, for once, exactly where I ought to be. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that happiness is mostly a matter of being warm while other people are cold. It is a shameful thought, I grant you, but a deeply satisfying one.