One evening in early 2013, Aidan Mullally found himself nervously hovering outside the Foggy Dew pub in Dublin city centre. After “a bad Christmas” overshadowed by grief, Mullally had taken to Google in search of a sense of community. He stumbled across Dining Out, a social club for gay men that meets regularly in the capital’s restaurants.
“They were in the Foggy Dew. I was standing outside the pub afraid to go in. Somebody went out for a smoke, spotted the lost soul and brought me in by the hand,” he recalls of his first event with the group, laughing.
“I was a very very introverted person back then.” Mullally, who works in the Civil Service, now forms part of Dining Out’s committee, having taken charge of the club’s social media presence two years ago.
“It was my saviour.”
READ MORE
Sitting around a table upstairs in MJ Wright’s Eating Rooms on South Great George’s Street with him are fellow committee members Rory Ruane, John H Pickering, Alan O’Sullivan and David Langan. They are preparing to welcome 30 men for dinner in the restaurant, where the group can choose from a menu specifically curated by head chef Adrian Dragoman, who has had stints in Luna and Chapter One.
“It doesn’t happen so much now but occasionally we’ll get a phone call saying, ‘I’m outside and I don’t want to walk in on my own’, and one of us will walk out,” says Ruane, the club’s chairman.
Annual membership of Dining Out is €20, but there is also an option to attend a meal as a guest for a fee of €5. As it prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2027, the club is nearing 500 members. Events are typically attended by between 15-50 people, Ruane says.
During his presidency, Michael D Higgins recognised the organisation for its voluntary commitment to gay men’s social wellbeing, with committee members invited to attend a garden party at Áras an Uachtaráin. For its 20th anniversary, Dining Out hoped to host former taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who had expressed his support for the group. Unfortunately Varadkar couldn’t make it to the gala dinner at Wynn’s Hotel, O’Sullivan says, but Gogglebox Ireland stars Dave Baxter and John Sullivan made a special appearance.
While the average age of the group’s members is around “mid-late 40s”, attendees range between 30 and 80.
“Some are farmers, people in the legal profession, shopkeepers, judges, clerical workers, journalists and so forth. It’s a good mix,” says Ruane. “So when people come to a meal it’s very easy for them to sit beside somebody different and get a conversation going.
“It also appeals to people who don’t really want to go to nightclubs or to pubs,” he adds.
“It wasn’t why we were set up but we found that a lot of people coming here were coming out, and in coming out they didn’t really want to go to the clubs or didn’t feel comfortable. It wasn’t our intention but we’ve sort of facilitated that.”
While not a dating club, there have been a few relationships and even marriages that started with Dining Out.
Across the road from MJ Wright’s Eating Rooms at the Hoxton Hotel, a crowd has gathered at the bar for some predinner drinks. Among them is Muiris O’Reilly and his husband, Fergus Finlayson. The pair “met indirectly” through the club 20 years ago. “He wasn’t there but the person who introduced us was,” says O’Reilly, who is from Wicklow.
O’Reilly had come to his first event at French wine bar and restaurant Le Cave a couple of years before as “a late bloomer”. “I met some people there that are here this evening. That’s a testament to the long-standing friendships.”
“I was a little bit shy, coming out of the closet late in life so it was really wonderful to meet people who were accepting and welcoming,” he says. To find a space “absent of any hostility” has meant a lot to O’Reilly and other members of the group.
“It’s a great camaraderie. We all know why we’re here.”
So how does Dining Out choose its next destination? “It’s taken very seriously,” says O’Sullivan, who joined the committee in 2014.
“We have to go somewhere where it’s fluid, where it’s moving and there’s no bad service.” Offering variety in cost and cuisine is important for the club, with gatherings designed to appeal to every member.
“We’ve everything from Michelin-star restaurants down to casual places. We give it a cross-section for everybody,” O’Sullivan says. They like to try new openings in the city, but also have some old reliables, such as Trocadero.
“The art is to keep finding new places.”
Together with fellow committee member Langan, O’Sullivan manages special events for the club, which not only hosts meals but also organises trips at home and abroad. As a nurse with several languages at his disposal, O’Sullivan’s skills are useful for the group on foreign holidays.
Next year, Dining Out has planned a cruise for 10 nights around Japan and Korea. Other memorable holidays include Berlin, Madrid and Serbia; membership is mandatory to secure a place on these trips. Next up is an excursion to Glasgow and Edinburgh in September.
“In the summer we often get tourists. It’s not just Irish people, it’s great to have visitors,” says Langan, who joined in 2005 after coming across an advertisement “in one of the magazines of the time”.
The group attracts “mature people to some degree”, he says. “As people get older, it’s harder to make friends, it’s hard to arrange places to meet.
“It was a natural thing for me to want to join the committee. It means a lot to a lot of people. We’re something that’s here to stay.”
He was previously in another dining club that did not last very long.
“So it just shows you these things aren’t easy to do – there’s a lot of work to keep it going.”
As guests start to flow into MJ Wright’s, they are given a comment card to fill out, which acts as both an interactive element, allowing them to be restaurant critics for the evening, and a helpful form of feedback for the committee. The options include rating meal quality, price and service.
Starters of smoked salmon, mushroom arancini, Toons Bridge burrata, chicken liver foie gras parfait, and cauliflower and truffle soup begin to arrive at the tables.
Reflecting on Dining Out’s sustained success, treasurer Pickering says the group has “managed to continue and increase and establish ourselves as the premier [gay] dining club in Ireland”. Pickering puts this down, in part, to the strength of the committee.
“In all those years we’ve never had a fight, we’ve never had an upset or a split. Clubs come and go,” he says.
“To a lot of people now it’s their night out in town ... They feel safe when they come in; they know what’s going to happen,” says Ruane. “We are so successful now that as soon as we announce an event it will be sold out within 48 hours,” adds O’Sullivan. “It’s a big part of my life.”
