I’ve been following The Happy Pear (Dave and Steve Flynn) on Instagram for a couple of years now. I quickly became a huge fan of theirs because of their energy and enthusiasm around plant-based food, holistic health, happiness and community. Not to mention that they are Irish and that’s pretty awesome since my husband is also from Ireland!

I bought one of their cookbooks, called The Happy Health Plan. I wrote more about the cookbook in this blog post. Over the past year, I’ve been working through the cookbook and I’ve made almost every single recipe in the book! The recipes are really easy to follow and my family has enjoyed the majority of the dishes. Some of our favourite recipes are the sweet potato and chickpea soup, the burrito bowl and the easy creamy roasted red pepper pasta.

Dave and Steve share a new podcast each week. I usually listen to the podcasts while cooking dinner. I love how excited they are about each of their guests and the topics they are learning about. A few of my favourites were with guests: Martin Penner, Sam Corlett, Light Watkins, and Simon Hill. If you are looking for some other great podcasts, check out this post.

I have also taken several of their Happy Pear courses. I did the Happy Mind Challenge and the Happy Shape Challenge. My daughter took the Happy Skin course and she is also working through the Vegan Baking course. The courses were really good. I learned a lot about plant-based cooking and nutrition.

Recently Dave and Steve released a new app. All of their courses are on the app plus yoga, workouts, breathe work, recipes, community forums, live zoom calls, and so much more! It’s a monthly or yearly subscription. I signed up a few weeks ago and took advantage of the introductory rate of 99 Euro/year.

As you can see, I’m pretty obsessed about these guys! So when my family and I decided to spend the summer in Ireland, I knew we would have to go to Greystones to eat at the Happy Pear café!

Happy Pear Cafe — **Our first visit to the Happy Pear café in Greystones, Ireland.**

If you are plant-based or vegan, you know that dining out can be tricky! You scour the menu looking for that one vegan option and hope there’s more than just fries and a side salad! So you can imagine the excitement when we stepped into The Happy Pear café and saw that the whole menu was plant-based! I decided to order the toasted cheesy reuben sandwich and an oat milk latte. It was a warmish day so we sat outside on the patio. After lunch we did a bit of shopping!

Our next visit to the café was a huge fan girl moment for me! We stopped in after hiking the Bray to Greystones trail, which is a 7km walk. We were hot, sweaty and starving! I was so excited when I saw Dave working behind the coffee bar, I just had to introduce myself!!

Every two weeks, The Happy Pear organizes a Supper Club upstairs in their café. We were lucky enough to attend two of these dinners. You can buy tickets online and each week is a different themed dinner. At the first dinner, we sat with a lovely couple from Kildare. Our kids came along with us for the second dinner. The food was excellent!

If you follow The Happy Pear, you know that they regularly swim in the Irish sea at sunrise. I’m not a huge fan of swimming or of being cold, but I couldn’t leave Ireland without taking part in the famous sunrise swim in Greystones. There are no words to explain the feeling of community and belonging that we got to experience on that chilly summer morning. Even though we were complete strangers, the people on the beach welcomed us and chatted with us like we had been friends forever! We ended up going for the sunrise swim a few more times during the summer. There were always hugs, laughter and hot tea!

Several months ago, Dave and Steve started a farm where they grow produce for their café, shop and CSA boxes. Each Saturday, they welcome friends and family out to the farm. We were lucky enough to get an invite and we spent several mornings helping to build new beds for planting vegetables, as well as pulling weeds and harvesting. At the end of the morning, everyone gathered around to eat soup, bread and hummus.

If you have never had this opportunity before you may think this is strange but working on the farm made us so happy! We were outside, enjoying beautiful scenery all the while meeting new people and working the land.

Before we left Ireland, we stocked up on a few of our favourite plant-based treats! Now I have a new cookbook to work through :)