Pretend, Dublin

I often use the Happy Cow website to search for vegan restaurants in my area and shortly before coming to Ireland, I read this blog post about the ‘10 Best Vegan Fish and Chips Restaurants in the World’. I was excited to see that there was one in Dublin! The blog post has the restaurant listed as ‘Vish Shop’, but the name has recently changed to ‘Pretend’.

We were able to easily order online and then pick up our food in the shop. It was a bit awkward trying to find parking so my husband just let me out at the side of the road and he drove on to find a spot to wait while I ran in to pick up the food. The food was ready when I got there and the staff were very friendly.

I ordered the ‘Vish and Chips’. The vish is made from Cassava, which is a nutty-flavored, starchy root vegetable. The meal came with hand harvested seaweed from the West Coast of Ireland, tartar sauce, pickled samphire and triple cooked chips.

In case you don’t know (I didn’t and had to look it up), samphire is a succulent from the parsley family that grows in rocky and marshy areas near saltwater sources, like shorelines and salty mudflats.

The Vish tasted okay. It was very doughy and didn’t really taste like or have the texture of fish. My son didn’t like it at all and couldn’t eat it. I thought the chips were okay, but weren’t really ‘chipper chips’.

It was good to try something new and I love that everything they serve is 100% plant-based, but I don’t get what all the hype was about. We likely wouldn’t order from Pretend again.

If you have a favourite vegan fish substitute, let me know in the comments below!