Eating in Enniskerry, and what is actually open when

Enniskerry has about two thousand residents and a visitor economy several times that size, which produces an eating scene with a very specific shape. There is not a lot of choice, but what there is has been here a long time, and the whole thing runs on a timetable that catches people out at both ends of the day. Get the timetable right and you eat well. Get it wrong and you end up in a petrol station on the N11.

Mornings belong to Poppies

Poppies has been on the Square since 1982, in the corner unit that older residents still call Buckley's, and which before that was the post office. It opens at seven in the morning, which is the single most useful fact about eating here. Take a table before nine and you get the village version of the Square: deliveries, the school run, the same handful of people at the counter. Arrive at eleven on a July Sunday and you get a queue out the door.

The cooking is country-kitchen food done properly rather than reinvented: a fry, soup, quiches and savoury tarts, jacket potatoes, brown bread, and a cake counter that is the reason a lot of people stop in the first place. It is counter service, there are seats outside, and it does not take bookings. It also closes in the late afternoon, which is the first half of the gap you need to plan around.

The afternoon gap, and how to cover it

Here is the trap. Poppies stops around five. The demesne restaurants stop with the gardens: Avoca's Terrace Cafe at Powerscourt House runs 9.30am to 5.30pm, but last orders for hot food are at half four and for cake and coffee at five. Emilia's, the village's Italian, does not open until five in the evening. So there is a stretch in the middle of the afternoon, exactly when a lot of people come off a walk hungry, when the obvious options are shut or shutting.

The answer is the Enniskerry Inn on Church Hill, the short pull up out of the Square. Its kitchen runs lunch from noon, and dinner service starts at two and goes to nine most of the year, with the kitchen generally running straight through from noon to nine between March and September. It is the village's proper eating pub: the Coach House bar with pews and leather seating, a dining room behind it, and rooms overhead. It took Best Casual Dining in Wicklow at the Irish Restaurant Awards in 2022. Book a table at weekends, either online through the site or by phone.

Evenings, and the one Italian

Emilia's on the Square is the village's evening room, family run, dinner only, Tuesday to Sunday, closed Mondays. Straightforward Italian and pizzeria cooking rather than anything clever, takeaway as well as tables, and locals who treat a Friday table as a standing arrangement. There is no website; you ring. On a Saturday in summer you should.

For a drink rather than a meal, Mac's Bar occupies the Powerscourt Arms on Main Street, the long mock-Tudor block on the northern side of the Square. Sport on the screens, bar food, tables out the front facing the clock tower in summer. It is the pub the village uses, which is another way of saying it is at its best on a wet Tuesday in February when the demesne car park is empty and the Square belongs to Enniskerry again.

Up on the demesne

Two of the best rooms to eat in around Enniskerry are not in the village at all. Avoca's Terrace Cafe fills the ground floor of Powerscourt House with a self-service counter of salads, soups, hot dishes and its own bakery, seating about 160 across the room and the terrace, tall windows and French doors giving onto the lawns with the Great Sugar Loaf on the skyline. The thing worth knowing, and it catches people out in both directions, is that you do not need a gardens ticket to eat there: the house courtyard and the shops sit outside the paid gate, so Avoca is a legitimate stop even if you never go through into the gardens.

At the other end of the scale, Sika at Powerscourt Hotel is the serious cooking within reach of the village: contemporary Irish, third floor, floor-to-ceiling glass pointed straight at the Sugar Loaf, an occasion rather than a Tuesday. It is named after the sika deer that were introduced to the Powerscourt demesne in the 19th century and spread from here into the whole of the Wicklow Mountains. Book ahead by phone.

Self-catering and the rest

There is a convenience shop on the Square for basics, and the village post office is up at Kilgarron Park rather than on the Square itself, which surprises people. For a real supermarket shop, Bray is six kilometres away. If you are staying self-catering out toward the waterfall or Crone Wood, stock up in Bray on the way in rather than expecting to do it in the village.

One last piece of local arithmetic. The waterfall has free barbecue stands, wheeled ones only, no disposables, and picnic tables in a big grass meadow. On a decent summer day, buying lunch in the village and eating it in front of Ireland's highest waterfall is a better use of eight euro than any restaurant meal you will have here.