In Galway’s busiest restaurant street McDonaghs has been serving fish and chips long before this part of town became a magnet for tourists in search of food and drink.
Nationally renowned as one of the best of its kind, it is today a thriving multi-faceted business: takeaway fish bar, indoor restaurant and boulevard seafood café in summer. Décor is decidedly nautical with stone floors, plain wooden tables and murals of traditional red-sailed Galway hookers and fishermen at work.
This Galway restaurants renowned for the menu’s extensive listing of fish species in more than a dozen different languages in confident confirmation of a cosmopolitan clientèle: everybody knows McDonaghs!
The fish choice is wide and guaranteed fresh: you’ll find McDonaghs Fish Soup, various fish in batter (cod, ray, whiting), local oysters (€12 per half dozen), spicy seafood pasta, grilled salmon, sea bass, scallops and mussels.
For best value choose the whiting or cod and chips at about €5.75 per portion. (There are even choices for carnivores - chicken & chips, striploin steak - but that misses the point of McDonaghs).
Desserts are few and simple: apple & rhubarb crumble, for example, or ice cream, all priced €4.50. The wine list of about twenty bottles has a chardonnay for €19 and includes Charles Heidsieck champagne €65.
The fare itself is predictable enough - what you get here is a definite local flavour of a bustling chipper, offering a pleasant experience at fairly reasonable prices.
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