Visit some of the best coffee shops in Ireland

Friends and Central Perk introduced Ireland to the concept of the coffee shop. Today, business is booming with cafes dominating the high street. But which ones are best? Food writers Tony Clayton-Lea and Joe McNamee decide.

BOOM or no boom time, it looks as if coffee houses are not going away. While it has been many years since having a mug of coffee could be equated with radical political thought (by the end of the 19th century, the coffee houses of, for example, Budapest, were places where artists, intellectuals and other freethinkers gathered to discuss, debate, gossip and generally plan their lives and the lives of others) it seems that a year hasn’t passed since the late 1990s without some variation of Friends’ fictional coffee shop, Central Perk, opening up and acting as a cosy location for discourse. And gossip.