In my time in Snaffles Restaurant in Leeson Street in the early seventies we had some very regular customers, one particular man, who worked for Bord Failte at the time and spent a lot of time in the restaurant entertaining American clients was David Hanly.
Now this gentleman, always to my memory resplendent in a pepper and salt tweed suit and sporting a bright red beard, was of course shortly afterwards to leave Bord Failte and make a serious name for himself as one of the anchor journalists on Morning Ireland on RTE.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the same man also wrote a novel; In Guilt and in Glory, in which the hero was a thinly disguised portrait of himself in his Bord Failte days.
I used to have a copy, long lost now, but as my friends Petra and Donal have recently made friends with his brother, the singer Mick Hanly, I got curious , found it on the internet and ordered a copy.
It has, as I remembered, a scene set in Snaffles when John Nolan was head waiter (as he was in my time there):

‘He crossed the street and stepped down into the cool gloom of Snaffles.
John Nolan opened the door, an immaculate relict of the Red Bank, where you could once get a good cheap meal, and a good expensive one too.
“Mornin’ Mr. C. Brisk enough for August.”
Crossan looked about the dark room, relieved to find it empty. He sat under the large gilt mirror, looking at the heavy brown tables of old mahogany and the salmon in the painting opposite, lying dead and cold and awkward against the furry brown background. Horses and greyhounds, their bodies made rigid by the painters brush: no life no movement.’

It is a fact an excellent representation of the restaurant, and of course since I was the kidney chef in chief for four years there, it was good to see, later in the chapter, that that was what they ate for lunch.