Brambles Cafe Bistro

This light and bright café resistant in Terenure is gorgeous on the inside. So plush and relaxing. You can come here for a coffee and to chill with the paper or indulge in some good food. I’ve only tried the breakfast and lunch menu here and both are really good. Really great options and the veggie breakfast is great if a little expensive. The goats cheese salad is one of my favourite dishes and the club sandwich is also very good and very big.

Had lunch here. I really liked the modern purple interior. Parking is not great. I think the menu in here is a good lunch menu but I’m not too sure I would be rushing back for dinner. I had the fish cakes. They were pleasant enough. This place is okay… there isn’t really anything bad about it but there isn’t really anything good about it either. I suppose what I most liked about it was that you are not sitting on top of the person next to you. There is plenty of room to have a nice private chat!

Enjoyed a lovely evening here with my wife on Sunday evening about 5:30pm. It was not overcrowded and the furnishings, layout and smartness of the place is very warming and comfortable. We had just the two main courses and a dessert to share which were reasonably priced as expected but the wine list starts at € 21+ which might take you by surpirse a bit. Nevertheless, the wine chosen was very good and at the right temperature. Our meals of roast lamb in wine jus, fresh vegetables, and lightly battered haddock, chunky chips with mashed peas were to our surprise served quite quickly but they too were excellent. After sharing the chocolate cake and ice-​cream dessert, we lounged the next hour over coffee and the wine remainder, delighting in the atmosphere. A very pleasant place.

This place was a real disappointment. Terenure has a reasonable selection of places to eat, and I was hoping Brambles would be up to the standards of its competitors.
First impressions were good, the restaurant is really pretty and well laid out. The dining area is large, and still relatively private. The bar is far enough away that you won’t feel like you’ve an audience while you drink. That’s as far as the positives go.
The menu is pretty standard, with nothing to really get excited about. I had a soup which looked like cardboard dissolved in gravy, and tasted like it too. A fish dish followed, although I’ve seen more fish in a tuna sandwich. And then a very meh dessert.
Worse still was the prices. It’s as though Brambles took the menu of a very average bistro, and then added between two and four euro to every dish. It manages to be both moderately priced and a complete top-​off at the same time. Quite an achievement!
I think the most annoying thing about this was that there was nothing here that I couldn’t have done at home. Why bother?

A friend and I decided to go out for a drive one Sunday afternoon, and as I was feeling a bit tired and hungover, I was really dying for a coffee. Just as I said ‘do you want to get a coffee?’ a magical purple and white beacon of a sign appeared, ‘Brambles’. Being a nerdy historian, I’ve become quite a fan of the little Brambles café in the National Library, and so I was really excited to see this.
The café was a bit of a departure from other Brambles in that it’s a stand alone outlet. It was also quite fancy inside with plush purple velvety seats and proper place settings. That’s where the joy ended. The service was absolutely atrocious, our waitress was so rude that I felt personally offended (there was another server that came along later and was much more polite, but the damage had been done). I ordered a coffee and a dessert. It’s hard to make a chocolate and cream combination wrong, but the dish was missing a bit of flavour, though I did finish it off anyways. My friend ordered a salad, which was a bit small for the price, and she was still hungry at the end and ordered a dessert of her own. She was a bit more impressed with her dessert.
Might give it another chance just because the restaurant itself was nice, and hope that I don’t get that same miserable waitress!