Cork Penny Dinners keep pace with recession demand

CORK Penny Dinners lies not far from the main gates of UCC, on one of the narrow potholed lanes that run off Washington Street.

You may well have walked past it and not given the single-storey squat building a moment’s thought. Its exterior is entirely nondescript: the kind of white pebble-dashed building that is swallowed into its grey surrounds.

But look closer and you’ll see a simple teak plaque with Cork Penny Dinners engraved. The name harks back to its 19th century origins for Cork Penny Dinners may have been set up as a soup kitchen by the Quakers during the Famine when the practice of paying one penny for soup and bread was born.