There’s an oven in Cabra, Dublin 7, that’s older than most of the people queuing for its wares. Seventy years of stone and heat, still turning out brown bread and apple tarts for locals who grew up on its birthday cakes and now buy christening sponges for kids who’ll grow up on them too. It shouldn’t still work – let alone bake bread worth queuing for – but under Yvonne McKinley’s steady, flour-dusted hands, it fires up six days a week before sunrise.
This is the opposite of Instagram feeds. There are no mason jars, no sourdough loaves, and no €5.95 croissants.
This is McKinley’s Phoenix Bakery – a fitting name for an old-school establishment. Nearly 40 years ago, she took the plunge and opened the doors with her friend Theresa Carberry, with whom she’d worked at Clarke’s, Cabra’s other old-school bakery. Carberry has since retired; McKinley has kept it going. “Everything’s baked in that oven. Four trays fit in flat like a big bed. You could climb into it if you wanted,” she laughs.
She spent three years in Kevin Street on the Bakery Production and Management course. There were 12 lads on the programme, and no other women. They were mostly family apprentices who had bakeries waiting for them back home. She didn’t, but had managed to secure a place on the course after working for a summer in Clarke’s. The programme, now a degree in TU Dublin, has changed significantly in the meantime.
The ovens at Phoenix switch on automatically, well before the first local rattles the shop door at 7am. Inside, the brown bread is being mixed in what McKinley calls a baby bath – by hand, no machines. There’s the yeast bread too, fermenting overnight. And in no time, the oven’s full: brown soda bread, scones, tarts and coffee slices.
Coffee slices. Remember those? They’re still made the old way here – no frozen sheets from a catering supplier. She makes her own puff pastry by hand, folding it into thirds like an envelope, and giving it a quarter turn to trap the butter in layers before chilling it and then repeating the ritual. The same goes for the choux pastry in the chocolate eclairs. Every bit is made by hand.
Everything is made in house because it’s cheaper, McKinley says – those pre-mixes cost more than you’d think, and once you know how to do it properly, you can’t justify cutting corners. Strong words from a woman who clearly doesn’t factor her skilled labour into the overall cost.
Then there’s that oven. Seventy years old, stone decked and rewired more times than she can count. You can’t bake brown bread with the same crust at home, she says. The heat comes straight from the base. The trays are pushed in with a hook because you’d burn your arms off trying to reach the back.
The brown bread and the apple tarts are the biggest sellers. And then there are the people who drive across Dublin to keep tradition alive. She talks about the girl who had her christening cake from Phoenix Bakery, her 21st cake and her wedding cake, and now brings in her own children.
McKinley is aware of how the bakery scene has changed. Many traditional bakeries now buy in frozen items and add preservatives to their cake mixtures to extend shelf life. Then there’s the micro-bakery trend, the sourdough, morning bun and inventive pastries, the “fancy spots where people nearly drop dead at the price of a croissant”.
That same standard held firm in the North too. Ciara O’Hartghaile remembers how her own bakery – Ursa Minor, in Ballycastle, Co Antrim, which opened in 2014 – worked side by side with Donnelly’s across the street, a family-run bakery that had been there for decades. If somebody came into Ursa Minor looking for a soda farl or a sausage roll – things they didn’t bake – they’d send them over to Donnelly’s. And if Donnelly’s got a customer after sourdough or something more modern, they’d send them right back. It was a two-way flow.
Donnelly’s finally shut its doors, lay vacant for a while, and is now operating under new owners, although not with a different line-up of baked goods.
O’Hartghaile is blunt about what’s replacing many of the “home bakeries” in the North. Frozen pastry arrives from big catering suppliers. Scones, Danish pastries, sausage rolls – part-baked somewhere else, delivered by the truckload. “It’s terrifying,” she says. “The choice is there to cut corners, and too many do.”
At Ursa Minor, she has taken the opposite road – everything made by hand, from scratch. Slow sourdoughs, seasonal pastries, proper provenance for the ingredients. The old home bakery is fading, but for some – such as O’Hartghaile and her husband Dara who run their micro bakery together – the craft and the community it feeds are still worth the graft.
But it’s not all frozen pastries and dusty shelves. As JP McMahon, the chef/patron of Michelin-starred Aniar in Galway points out, it’s more nuanced than that. Ireland’s small independent bakeries haven’t been steamrolled so much as overshadowed by industrial bread and mass-produced pastries that reshaped what people expect from a “bakery”.
Bread became cheap when technology industrialised its production. Steel rollers in the 1870s and the Chorleywood Bread Process in the 1960s made white bread fast to produce, cheap, plentiful and ubiquitous. Sliced white is ultra-processed: modern hybrid wheat, pesticides, nutrients stripped in milling, then additives and enzymes bulk it out. It keeps the shelf price low, but the true costs run deeper.
Much of what sparked the new wave came from the Nordic countries. McMahon credits Scandinavian bakeries with rethinking what he calls ‘sexy baking’ – sourdoughs, layered cardamom buns, clever fillings that moved beyond plain custard. New Zealand’s neighbourhood bakeries played a part too – local places baking premium bread and pastries.
But that doesn’t mean the modern micro bakery has taken over. It’s a different beast – a layer added on top, not a replacement for the supermarket batch loaf or the corner shop cream slice. And there’s no denying it: artisan sourdough and creative laminated pastries cost more.
A supermarket loaf can be as little as €1; an artisan sourdough can hit €6 or more. This sparks debate: some see the pricey loaf as elitist; others see cheap industrially baked bread as unhealthy and unsustainable.
If you want to see how the micro-bakery trend has taken hold in Galway, you can join the queue at Cian Mooney’s Magpie, in an old indoor mall. From the street outside, you can see straight through to the bannetons (baskets) stacked on suspended shelves and the bakers working behind them. “It’s nice in the winter when it’s dark outside – we’ve got someone in there until 11pm laminating croissants for the next day, so the place is lit up and people can see what’s happening,” Mooney says.
Mooney didn’t start out shaping dough at dawn. He cooked in restaurants across Galway for nearly a decade – including four years at Loam, where the highlight of his day became baking bread for staff and guests. By 2019 he wanted to get deeper into baking, so he moved to Melbourne and got a job at Tivoli Road – one of Australia’s best-known neighbourhood bakeries.
“Every neighbourhood has a couple of bakeries doing proper sourdough and laminated pastry. Australians get up at 7am and go to the bakery first thing. They’re dedicated bakery customers,” he says.
When he came home, he joined Bread 41 in Dublin for eight months, working the bread section, turning out 400 sourdough loaves on a Saturday – three times what he’d been used to. By 2021 he was back in Galway to help launch Éan, running the bread and pastry programme in a cramped backroom kitchen. Magpie – his bakery with partner Tabitha Day – opened later that year, first in partnership with the Éan team, then fully independent.
Quality is non-negotiable for Mooney – not just the craft, but what goes into the dough. He uses Shipton Mill organic flour for his bread and pastries. “I’d tried others but Shipton was so consistent,” he says. “It’s certified organic and regenerative. It’s the same flour I’d used in Bread 41, so I knew exactly what I was getting every time.”
It’s part of the appeal – just a tiny crew shaping, mixing and baking within arm’s reach of the queue. “It’s not that micro bakeries have replaced the classic neighbourhood bakeries – it’s different. The old places were about feeding the street, the family batch loaf. This is more about premium ingredients, craft, the experience. And yeah, people are willing to pay for that,” Mooney says.
What really sets these small artisan bakeries apart from the old-school ones, he says, is that so many bakers bring restaurant-kitchen discipline with them. That means a real focus on sourcing local, organic or unusual ingredients – and doing everything from scratch, whether it’s sauces, fillings, jams, creams or fruit preps. “It’s time-consuming, but if you’ve worked in restaurants, you learn that’s what makes the pantry stand out,” he says.
“At the very beginning, our customers were kind of like bread nerds and pastry nerds and older people interested in bread,” he says. “That’s shifted. Now more than half our customers are under 25. They’re not going out spending loads in pubs. They’ll spend a tenner on an interesting pastry and a good coffee instead.”
If Magpie in Galway shows how a micro bakery can slot into the community, Dún Artisan Bakery in Dungarvan is what happens when the same idea takes root through Irish grains in local ground. Fergal Walsh, who first trained as a chef before moving fully into baking, spent years honing his skills in Ireland, Australia and Copenhagen before opening Dún Bakery in June 2021 with his partner Caitriona Keating.
They set out to do things differently. Every loaf and croissant starts with Irish grain – spelt, purple wheat, emmer, rye, coarse and fine wholemeal from mills such as Dunany and Oak Forest. Sometimes that commitment to local grain means pulling a favourite loaf when the harvest lets them down. One of Dún’s most popular breads used emmer from Oak Forest Mills – an Irish soft wheat that brought a gentle sweetness to the mix. When the harvest failed last year, they didn’t look abroad for a substitute. They pulled the loaf from the roster altogether. They’ll wait until the Irish crop comes good again before it goes back on the shelf.
It’s hard graft for two people. Work in the bakery starts at 3am. They’ve tried for two years to find another baker, but it’s proving difficult. “You need someone who wants to be in at 3am, who knows how to handle the dough,” says Walsh.
Like the best of these new bakeries, Dún does a tight range – sourdoughs, baguettes, croissants, laminated and savoury pastries. Their local approach runs through everything. Their milk comes from Ballyconnery Bó, a family-run dairy that delivers unhomogenised milk in glass bottles. Irish cheeses such as smoked Knockanore and Hegarty’s cheddar appear in shortcrust pastries. They grow their own produce – blackcurrants, gooseberries, plums, hazelnuts. If they can’t use it straight away, they preserve or ferment it for later.
Patrick Ryan of Firehouse Bakery has seen Ireland’s appetite for real bread grow from the ground up. Thirteen years ago, he and his partner Laura Moore opened Firehouse Bakery on Heir Island, west Cork. Back then, the idea that people would travel to a tiny island with a population of just 27 for a bread class seemed far-fetched. “When we started out, we thought we’d run it for a summer and see if anyone would come,” he says. But they did – and the island became part of the story.
Ryan’s roots go back further. He was previously based in Bath, England, where he set up the Thoughtful Bread Company and filmed a BBC series called The Big Bread Experiment. The real bread ethos was something he’d watched gain traction in the UK through the Real Bread Campaign.
Back in Ireland, when sourdough was still niche, he and a handful of like-minded bakers founded Real Bread Ireland. Today, Real Bread Ireland has more than 150 members – a sign of how much has changed in a decade.
Sourdough bread needs only four things – flour, water, salt and wild yeast – plus the time to ferment. Campaigners argue that this is about more than crust: it’s about health, class and food justice. They want affordable, additive-free bread for all – not a hipster trophy loaf.
But changes are possible. Other countries show it can be done. France’s 1993 bread decree insists that baguettes stay additive free and baked on site, and Germany’s classic rye breads, such as pumpernickel, still follow traditional methods. Ireland, meanwhile, sells industrialised white bread, with some, such as that found in Subway, having been found to fall outside the legal definition of bread, with a 10 per cent sugar content five times the statutory limit.
Lists abound for Ireland’s new wave of micro bakeries – from Eoin Cluskey’s high-profile Bread 41 on Pearse Street in Dublin (and Greystones, Co Wicklow) to Shane Palmer and Charlotte Leonard-Kane’s Scéal, also in Greystones. No Messin’ in Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, keeps the vibe casual, with Proper Order coffee and a rotation of laminated pastries since 2020. Artybaker – run by Romain Tessier and Jodie Dignam – now has five Dublin outlets serving croissants, pain Suisse and New York-style bagels in Kimmage, Dublin 12.
In Carlow, Seamus Jordan grows, mills and bakes his own wheat at Plúr bakery, selling the Carlow Loaf at Joyce’s Pub each week.
Hugo’s in Lahinch draws constant queues for Hugo Galloway’s sourdough and laminated pastries. His pastéis de nata are the best I’ve tasted in the country.
In Kilkenny, Nicole Server-Pawlukojc and Bart Pawlukojc run Arán. Their 48–hour sourdough – made with Öland and purple wheat – is shaped, rested in baskets and fired at 260°C. Amie Costello and Conor Higgins keep things creative with the bakers at Elliot’s – growing from a single-tray oven in Phibsborough, Dublin 7, to a six-person team on Arran Street East. Their sourdough, baguettes, Basque cheesecake, seasonal buns and croissant tarts sell out quickly.
If these bakeries show how sourdough became a national obsession, Graham Herterich reminds us nostalgia still sells. At The Bakery in Rialto, Dublin 8, Herterich is known for blowing up Irish classics – giant Mikados, Bourbon biscuits and Jammie Dodgers – the sweet stuff that takes people straight back to their childhood.
Herterich doesn’t bother with croissants or Nordic loaves. His shelves are stacked with staples from the Athy bakery he went to in his childhood – brown soda bread, spiced bracks and cream buns. The Mikado biscuit is oversized on purpose, “so when you hold it, it feels the same as it did when you were a kid”, he says. And that’s the point. All the sourdough in the world can’t outdo the memories baked into sweet things like this.
For all the cruffins and saffron Danishes, JP McMahon doesn’t think the classic Irish bakery is going anywhere – not completely. If anything, he sees it circling back, kept alive by a new generation who never grew up with the real thing but are fascinated by it now. Younger customers and bakers are looking back to the 1950s and ’60s for cues: soda bread cream buns, Black Forest gateaux.
He calls it a kind of “golden age” – not because it was perfect, but because Ireland’s bakery history isn’t centuries deep. We don’t have 300 years of patisserie; we have a few decades of family-run bakeries with modest window displays that were once the height of glamour, and then fell out of fashion.
“People love the idea of sourdough, but they don’t want to eat sourdough all the time – so they still go back to brown soda bread,” says McMahon.
That past still lives on in Cabra. Yvonne McKinley – helped by her 70-year-old oven – has kept Phoenix Bakery turning out brown bread and apple tarts long after many peers shut their doors. She plans to retire and has a family-adjacent successor lined up: Ross O’Brien, who has spent six years working with her, learning the rhythm no catering college can teach.
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For all the artisan sourdoughs and €3.95 croissants, there’s a question worth asking: how many old-school bakeries are still baking the old way? Some sell out to the trucks delivering frozen goods, the pre-mixes and catering trays, and adding preservatives to their cakes to extend shelf life is now pretty standard.
There are no guilds any more, no list on a wall. Cheap industrial bread comes at a price – the costs are hidden in soil, biodiversity and our health. A proper loaf shouldn’t be a status symbol. The challenge is baking real bread that everyone can afford.
If you want to know who still does it right, look for the locals tapping on the bakery window at seven in the morning. Go to Phoenix Bakery. Say hello to McKinley – and to 70 years of stone, heat, and the kind of bread that never needed an Instagram filter.
Pastries and breads worth queueing for
Phoenix Bakery
It’s an early start at Yvonne McKinley’s Phoenix Bakery, and the locals know exactly how to time things. The first trays that come out of the oven hold the soda bread, then scones, apple tarts, coffee slices and eclairs follow. So get there in the morning and stock up. It’s worth having a bit of banter with McKinley when you’re in, and find out what’s next to land straight out of the 70-year-old stone oven.
Every pastry, sponge and tart is mixed and shaped by hand, using traditional methods. There are no frozen shortcuts, or pre-mixed doughs. Just the same recipes that have worked for decades.
What to get: Brown soda bread, €3.50; scones, €1.20 each or four for €4; cream slices, eclairs and pastries, €2.80 each or four for €10; Victoria cream sponge, €9. And if you’re there early, the apple tart.
16 Baggot Road, Cabra, Dublin 7, D07 XCX5; facebook.com/PhoenixBakeryDublin/
Una
John Wyer built a big following for his sourdough before teaming up with the Bunsen Burger team to open Una. Head baker Daniel Farrelly runs the ovens, working with organic heritage flours including Mariagertoba wheat from Quartz Mølle in Denmark, farmed regeneratively by Irish grower Fintan Keenan.
The sourdough is the backbone: a signature loaf for €6.75, and a sourdough focaccia, fermented for up to 48 hours. The croissants are fermented with wild sourdough yeast and freshly made each day. Expect sweet and savoury pastries, quiche, cinnamon buns, pain au chocolat with extra chocolate, and seasonal specials like Bakewell croissants.
What to get: Signature sourdough, €6.75; almond croissant, €5; pain au chocolat, €4.50; and seasonal croissant Bakewell, €5.
116, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, D06 R5P6; unabakery.ie
Elliot’s
Conor Higgins and Amie opened Elliot’s in Phibsborough in 2022 with one baker. What began as a small bakery with a two single-tray Tom Shandley deck oven has grown into a grand bakehouse in Arran Street East, now running a four-deck, twelve-tray Salva oven with a dedicated pastry room.
Their six bakers start at 3am, turning out French-style baguettes, sourdoughs, croissants and morning buns, all with Cloud Picker coffee on the counter. Weekend specials generate a lot of excitement with creative and seasonal pastries. Recent summer treats included an apricot and noyaux brioche bun, a fig leaf, raspberry and coconut croissant tart, and a strawberry elderflower Danish.
What to get: Country sourdough loaf, €5.25; weekly croissant special €4.95-€5.95; lemon poppy seed and lemon thyme brioche, €4.75; and Basque cheesecake, €4.95.
43-44 Arran Street East, Dublin 7 and 330 North Circular Road, Phibsborough, Dublin D07 YXY4; elliots.ie
Magpie Bakery
Magpie keeps its sourdough and pastry prices fair, with no single pastry over €5 – from plain croissants to decadent cruffins filled with raspberry pistachio namelaka or chocolate ganache and salted caramel. All croissant dough ferments over three days, so once they’re gone, they’re gone.
They work with organic Shipton Mill flour, Mad Yolk eggs, dairy from The Village Dairy in Cavan, Dozio cheese in Mayo, Freamh Farm greens, and local fruit growers around Galway. Calendar Coffee is on the brew, and there are always at least four vegan options.
Breads include an 80 per cent white/20 per cent wholemeal sourdough and a seeded version with pumpkin, sunflower and linseed. Bestsellers cover both savoury and sweet: pork, apple and fennel sausage rolls, filled pastries, and seasonal Danishes.
What to get: White sourdough, €5; pork, apple and fennel sausage roll, €4; pecan and caramel croissant, €4.80; summer greens Danish with St Tola goat’s curd and Freamh Farm vegetables, €4.60; and Connemara organic blueberry cheesecake Danish, €4.60.
Unit 12, The Cornstore, Galway, H91 CC44; magpiebakery.ie
Dún Artisan Bakery
Fergal Walsh and Caitriona Keating run Dún as a true field-to-loaf micro bakery – every bread, croissant and pastry starts with Irish grain from mills such as Dunany and Oak Forest. They grow much of their own produce, keep bees for house honey, and use local suppliers for the rest. It’s a tiny team doing everything by hand, from fermenting croissants for up to three days to turning out hearty seeded sourdough, spelt and emmer loaves.
The fillings for the pastries come straight off their own farm: think strawberry and coriander herb purée with hazelnut creme diplomat, or red gooseberries and black basil Italian meringue. Savouries follow the same rule – a recent lattice had spiced whipped Macroom feta with crushed chickpea, and Ballinacourty onion with harissa chicken, Templegall, smoked scamorza and home-grown rocket.
They bake six days a week, with Saturday specials showing off what the farm and local growers have – like a rye loaf with Ballinacourty potato and Garraí Mara rocket, or a tinned oat and Dungarvan honey loaf using their own hive honey.
What to get: Seeded sourdough, €6; spelt loaf, €6; sourdough baguette, €3.50; croissant, €2.80; cruffin with redcurrant gel, oat and farm honey yoghurt; savoury swirl, €4.20; spiced whipped feta lattice, €4.50.
64 Main St, Dungarvan, Co Waterford, X35 DD30; instagram.com/dunbakery
Angel Dust
Stepping into Angel Dust feels like slipping into a Parisian patisserie – bright white interior, glass shelves stacked with vivid, jewel-like pastries. Opened in 2021 by Finn Robson, this high-end patisserie and Viennoiserie has become Limerick’s place for exquisite French-style indulgence.
Choux, eclairs, Paris-Brest, macarons, blood orange tarts and glossy croissants line the counter – all crafted with serious finesse and snapped up fast by locals who know there’s no room for last-minute regrets here.
Everything’s done with a light hand and a perfectionist’s eye: crisp shells, lush fillings, careful flavours that don’t drown in sugar. If you want to bring a box home, get there early.
What to get: Pain au chocolat, €3.10; elderflower and strawberry choux, €5.80; pistachio tart €5.80; and giant macarons, €5.80. Larger cakes for four are €25, go for fraissier with stawberries and vanilla.
12 Thomas Street, Limerick, V94 KXF1; facebook.com/angeldustpastry; instagram.com/angeldustpastry/
Scéal Bakery
Charlotte Leonard-Kane and Shane Palmer met on day one of Culinary Arts at DIT – a partnership that took them to San Francisco’s bread scene, River Cottage for Palmer, and Petersham Nurseries for Leonard-Kane. They started Scéal as a market stall in Dublin 8 in 2017, later operating from The Fumbally Stables Hatch, before opening their first standalone cafe-bakery by the waterfront in Greystones in February, 2024.
Scéal keeps things seasonal and creative – sourdough, sweet and savoury pastries, choux buns with craquelin, flaky croissants and focaccia. Expect inspired flavours including sauerkraut, quince, masala chai and Irish cheeses, always using Irish growers and producers where they can. The morning bun and the “everything croissant” are now firm signatures.
What to get: Country sourdough, €5.50; Demerara sugar kouign-amann, €4.50; choux au craquelin (coffee and blackcurrant for July), €5.50; and whatever special Danish or seasonal bake is on the counter that week.
Unit E, The Bracken, Marina Village, Greystones, Co Wicklow, A63 K7W7; scealbakery.com
Bread 41
Eoin Cluskey opened Bread 41 with one goal: real bread, milled and baked the old way but for a modern city. Every loaf starts with organic grains, milled onsite in their New American Stone Mill – a cold, stoneground process that preserves the vitamins and oils that get stripped out of industrial flour.
The team works farm-to-fork: organic grains from Oak Forest Mills and Shipton Mill, local veg from McNally’s Farm, eggs from North Wicklow, honey from Olly’s Farm, dairy from The Village Dairy, and free-range pork from Pigs on the Green. They’re B Corp certified, run on renewable energy, and keep waste and carbon footprint down wherever possible – right down to the high-efficiency ovens.
Everything is hand-shaped and baked fresh each morning – from sourdough loaves to pastries – with a short supply chain and a big local following.
What to get: Bread special of the week (Thu–Sun), €7; sausage roll, €5.70; croissant, €3.50; baker’s selection of six pastries, €20.
41 Pearse St, Dublin 2, D02 H308; Stillorgan, Co Dublin, A94 C9A2; and Eden Rd, Rathdown Lower, Greystones, Co. Wicklow, A63 EH73; bread41.ie
Hugo’s
Hugo Galloway’s pasteis de nata are widely claimed to be the best in Ireland – crisp pastry, silky custard, made fresh every day. But everything else coming out of his small blue-fronted bakery is worth the drive too: proper benchmark sourdough distributed locally, golden croissants and Viennoiserie, plus coffee from Anam, a local Kilfenora roaster.
Hugo keeps the counter evolving, so watch out for what’s new; perhaps canelés de Bordeaux. The bakery is right in the thick of Lahinch’s community – surfers, locals and weekenders all know to queue early for a loaf, a pastry and a pastel de nata to eat before you even hit the street.
What to get: Country Loaf 950g, €5.50; focaccia 850g, €5.50; ciabatta 350g, €2.50; croissant, €3 and pastel de nata, €2.40.
Ennistymon Road, Dough, Lahinch, Co Clare, V95 XR58; instagram.com/hugos_lahinch/
