The Sideline Bistro

Stayed for 5 days at this hotel. Food was good, and the service superlative. I recommend this place.

We had just arrived into the Croke park hotel around noon after a 10hr flight. We were able to check in at that time exhausted & ready to crash in our beds to try to adjust to the time difference, but were famished & needed to eat before doing so. We checked trip advisor & saw all the great reviews at this convenient place in our hotel & thought we couldn’t go wrong — Unilocal only had one review but it was highly rated. The servers were nice & took our orders, but after that things started to go downhill. My iced tea had a slice of lemon in it — not unusual but the taste was extreme lemon with a hint of tea — had I added sugar it could have been lemonade. Our order was a soup & cold sandwich for me & a quinoa salad for my wife took nearly 40 minutes to come out — seemed odd that items like these would take that long to come out. The place was half full so I didn’t think they were that slammed but who knows? In fact, a family of 4 that came in after us actually received their cooked food before us. My turkey meat was dry, & both my sandwich & seafood chowder were bland. My wife’s quinoa salad had ok flavor according to her but she had to stop eating it as she bit on a few hard rock-​like sediment pieces that she feared would chip or break a tooth. We ate less than half of our meals & had enough. We had difficulty flagging down a server for the bill — our main server was having a 10 min. conversation with a lady having drinks at the table next to us & had her back to us — I could not get her attention. We nearly fell asleep at our table trying to flag someone down. We were able to finally flag down a waiter & pay our bill after 20 min of waiting for someone to acknowledge us. Maybe it was an off day, but it was our 1^st & last time there. We’ve had many amazing meals & experiences since then in a lot of other restaurants around the city & even outside of Dublin though.

We were lucky enough to eat here a few times while staying at The Croke Park Hotel and were very impressed with both the hotel and the bistro. It was a great spot to grab a bite before heading out to see the sights of Dublin or filling our bellies at the end of the night with some delicious grub to soak up the Guinness.
The service in the bar area was great, they were there when you needed them, but didn’t seem to be hovering over us. The décor is a little fancy, but not too stuffy that we felt uncomfortable in our casual clothes. Everything that a sleek modern hotel bar lounge should be. There were high tables, low tables, bar area, couches, and a huge projection screen that would be great to watch a big game! At that was just in the lounge area, which was so nice, we never made it past the lounge and into the actual restaurant.
Delicious vegetable soups, fantastic ‘classic’ sandwiches when you want a small meal (and the ‘crisps’ that come with the sandwich are very yummy). More hearty sandwiches and plenty of typical entrees to choose from. Everything was delicious! My favorites were the soups, the roasted vegetable panini, and the chicken with stuffing classic sandwich.