A Fry-up and an Espresso: Bewley's Café and Cosmopolitan Dublin
Rent from DeepDyveIn November, 2004, the famed Bewley's Oriental Cafés of Dublin shut their operations on Grafton and Westmoreland Streets. The news generated an intense response in the national media regarding the loss of an icon that defined the city, the loss of a storied place that marked many epochal changes in Dublin and Ireland, and the loss of what, for many Dubliners, was a home away from home. "Dubliners are in shock," reported David McKittrick in The Independent. McKittrick continued,
The demise of the cafés has produced waves of nostalgia for a business which stretches back more than a century, and waves of regret that affluence and economic advance should mean the loss of such venerable institutions. . . . The irony," he goes on to say, "is that the cafés, famous for their tea and coffee, should go under amid an international boom in the demand for coffee.
In the background of all of these perceived losses was a larger concern regarding the dramatic changes Ireland had undergone in recent years. Many newspaper reports, including McKittrick's, began with the tag line, "It's the end of an era."1
As an indicator of the hold these cafés had on Dubliners, Dublin city councilor Charlie Ardagh "called on the State to rescue the Bewley cafés as bona fide historical institutions that are 'part of Dublin's soul'."2 In announcing the decision, even Bewley's owner Patrick Campbell said, "It's like part of Dublin [End Page 9] dying."3 In this, he echoed the description of the coffee shops then found on the web site of the Campbell Bewley Group (the corporation that owned the shops):
The Irish poet Brendan Kennelly once described Bewley's Café in Grafton Street as the 'heart and the hearth of Dublin'. Dublin, he said, would not be Dublin without Bewley's. These sentiments have been echoed by generations of Irish people since Joshua Bewley first introduced tea to the Irish public in 1835. Bewley's is a name synonymous in the history of Dublin and more recently of Ireland as a whole. Bewley's itself has a rich history of growth and survival which has proved it to be one of the last bastions of tradition in a changing Ireland.4
In having to close "one of the last bastions of tradition," the Campbell Bewley Group admitted that a changing Ireland actually brought about the demise of this particular bastion; in a sense, the group had to eat its own words. And Dubliners were no longer going to be able to eat any of Bewley's famous cakes or barm bracks.
The Grafton Street premises have since reopened, much to the relief and celebration of many. But a question remains: What does the name Bewley's mean now? And what does it mean to say that it has been "saved"? A letter to the Irish Times offered this stern evaluation:
The idea that Bewley's has been "saved" (Magazine, August 27th) is quite misleading. Jay Bourke and his associates have, thankfully, preserved the internal physical architecture that housed Bewley's Café of Grafton Street. However the large café itself, which was the essence of what Bewley's was about, is completely gone. It has been replaced by two restaurants and a tiny area for coffee-only customers. Bewley's is no more, it has not been "saved."5
The concerns expressed over Bewley's closure, and its reopening—concerns that were often framed as an ethical collision over the question of the identity of Dublin, the meaning of the loss of a city icon, and the meaning of the culture of Dublin itself—lend themselves well to the reflexive method of radical interpretive inquiry.6 [End Page 10]
One way to make sense of the closure of Bewley's and...
