Food | really good chips | John Joe | Piper''s Rest

Speaking of drinking, where would you go have a pint or a shot? You can have great Guinness and whiskey. At Christmastime, everyone has a bottle at their house, basically, and you can do little shots of whiskey. In Kilcar, there are all these really wonderful pubs. If you just look in the local paper, you can [find out where to] hear whatever kind of music you want. I'm not a huge bar person, but there is a pub called John Joe's in Kilcar where I would go to hear music. It's just a pretty simple pub, and then in the back is a big room with chairs and then just wonderful local musicians that change every night. I always like to hear traditional Irish music. There were these young girls called the Wee Band. They were just these beautiful young Irish girl singers. They had the prettiest voices. There is also a pub called the Piper's Rest, which is a really old village house with a nice fireplace and very comfortable seats and a beautiful old bar with extremely nice bartenders. When you go into a pub there, it's like you are going into somebody's home, in a way. Very friendly.

What kind of food do they have in the pubs? When they have food, it is very simple but usually very good. Some of them have good fish, sometimes salmon or stews, often Irish stew. It depends on the size of the pub. Often, people sort of stagger out of the bar and over to the chip shop - which is across the street - where they have fish-and-chips and burgers. I like all of them. There's a nice chip shop in the middle of Kilcar. In Killybegs, there's one called Melly's Café. Dunkineely, which is just an old-­fashioned little one-road town, has a really good chips place. It probably has a name, but I don't remember it. But there is only one of them.