Irish Embassy

Breakfast of (hurling) champions

by Stephen Heuser

on the cheap

Bamboo, March 9 Restaurante da Tia, March 2 La Terraza, February 24

The Full Irish Breakfast, a meal always served in a bar and available almost exclusively on weekends, is one of those food traditions so calorically prodigious that you need a good hangover just to reconcile yourself to eating it. The building blocks are eggs, rasher bacon, black pudding, white pudding, and the peculiar bready sausage endemic to the British Isles. When you consider that black and white puddings are also kinds of sausage (blood and liver, respectively), you get a sense of the conflict faced by my friend Jeffrey, who is both a deep Hibernophile and a committed vegetarian.

This year I had time for only one FIB before the deadline for our St. Pat's issue snuck up on me, so I dropped in on the Irish Embassy, a bar in Bulfinch Triangle that also serves as a hostel for recent arrivals and a magnet for soccer fans. At 12:30 on a Sunday afternoon, after a nightmare hunt for parking, I settled in with the Times and a highly non-vegetarian friend. The bar was almost empty. (Saturdays, when the BBC Match of the Day beams in, the place is packed.) Breakfast hour was just ending, but we prevailed upon our rather intractable waitress to bring us coffee and two fabulous plates of fried ex-livestock. The plates brimmed with shimmery soft-cooked fried eggs, two slices of clove-y black pudding, two slices of fine golden-fried white pudding, generous slabs of rasher bacon, and the classic wrinkly sausages. Plus, a pile of Americanized peel-on wedge fries and two slices of griddle-fried tomato. It was worth the trouble. It was almost worth the hangover.

Irish breakfast, $6.95, served Saturday and Sunday from about 10 a.m. to about 12:30 p.m. at the Irish Embassy, 234 Friend Street (North Station), Boston. Opening hours vary according to soccer broadcasts. Call (617) 742-6618.

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