TradeNamesThe trademark counter may have gone in a recent revamp, but Sheries on Lower Abbey Street still has a loyal clientele, writes Rose Doyle

Lower Abbey Street always had a certain place at the heart of things in the capital. By any criteria for any city the location's great - just off the main thoroughfare, yards from the central bridge and river, home to the national theatre.

Some buildings have always been more vital to the beat of Lower Abbey Street's heart than others. Number 3 is one of those. Before the second World War, when you were nobody in Dublin if you didn't have a bike to get around on, Number 3 was a bike shop. After the second World War, in 1947, with life and commerce picking up, it became Sheries diner.

These days, after 60 years as a diner, a revamped Sheries caters to the eating demands of a 21st century Dublin. The floors are Canadian walnut, there's room for 110 diners at tables and chairs of mahogany sapelia. The lighting is subdued, the menu global. The old dining counter has gone.

The Isherwood family came to Sheries in 1947. Adrian Isherwood, a third generation Isherwood, tells the story. Adam Isherwood, his son and the fourth generation to look after things, serves us coffees as we sit at a table in the window which used be home to a chicken rotisserie.

"The day we reopened," Adrian says, "a woman came and said 'congratulations, you've ruined it! It was the last place in Dublin you could go to and you ruined it!' Two days later she was back saying 'there's no place else to go so I decided to give it a try'."

He begins the story pre-1947. "The bikes were everywhere, when it was a bike shop," Adrian begins, "in the street, in a laneway alongside. You can see them in old photographs. After the war Major Barney Freeman, an entrepreneur who'd been to New York and was taken with the American diner, bought the place and set it up as a diner. He set up another Sheries in Belfast, in the Cornmarket. "This one here was a going concern, about six months old, when my father Ronnie saw it and was fascinated. He was in catering already - in partnership with his father, Ernest. He'd owned the Unicorn for a while, and Hynes coffee shop."

Catering was in the Isherwood blood: Ernest Isherwood was a Mancunian who'd worked with the Red Cross in the first World War and, afterwards with his wife Anna (a Tullamore woman), had run a total abstinence hotel in Oxford.

Ernest didn't share his son's enthusiasm for Sheries. "He didn't believe people would eat at a counter," Adrian says, "insisted you'd have to have tables and chairs. But my father went for it and he came along with him."

The dining counter was a core part of Sheries from 1947 to 2005. "It broke my heart to see it go," Adrian says, "everyone remembers it."

And so they do - including this writer. With affection.

Ronnie and Ernest Isherwood, in the early Sheries, "did steaks, fish, chicken Maryland for years", Adrian says. "Chickens were tough as hell and had to be boiled before roasting. We introduced the first chicken rotisserie in town in the mid 1960s, put it here, in this window. We sold to people passing by; in those days you were allowed have chicken smells into the street. Not any more."

He remembers coming into the restaurant when he was just six years old. "I'm 55 now, so that was 49 years ago. I've been operating the business for the last 36 years."

It's what he always wanted to do. "My sister and brother, Jennifer and David, quite liked the academic life but I found it boring." He grins. "Wasn't academically inclined at all. I went to catering college in Bournemouth: great years. When I came back my father said 'come into work here for the summer'. That was 1970 and I'm here ever since, through good and bad times. I've enjoyed them all. Wouldn't change a thing - and I'm extraordinarily proud that Adam's here now."

When Sheries opened it had a sweetshop in the window and a bakery on the premises where all the bread was made. It had a staff of 28, including a head chef who was paid £5 a week, plus waiting staff, six/eight people in the bakery, cashiers, cleaners - and three doormen. Everyone was Irish.

Today's Sheries has a full-time staff of 10 plus six part-timers and they come from around the world.

Sheries was the eatery of choice for the local government workers during the 1940s and 1950s, as well as "huge numbers of English holiday-makers", says Adrian. "When Wales played Ireland the Welsh spent some of their money here. But the 1973 and 1974 bombings nearly finished the place. In 1974, the day after the bombings in Sackville Place, we took in £8. A week later we had to make all the staff redundant. We'd no choice. My wife Valerie and myself kept the thing going, working a seven-day week along with a chef, washer-upper and one waitress."

Business picked up eventually, "but Dublin had terminally changed. It's my view that the centre of the city died when the Metropole and Capital went - people started staying in the suburbs. Peggy Dell, who sang and played the piano in the Metropole, used come here with the band and they'd buy bowls of oxtail soup for one another. That was the sort of spending went on then."

Ernest Isherwood died in the mid-1960s and Ronnie Isherwood ran it alone until Adrian came in, in 1970. His wife Peg, Adrian's mother, helped out when there was a shortage of staff.

Eating in Dublin lacked a certain adventure in the 1960s. "We did great business in Irish stew. I remember the first bowl of spaghetti I put in front of someone. 'I won't have that,' she said. 'I don't know what you put into it'."

Sheries hadn't changed from its original 1947 diner-style when Adrian arrived in 1970. "It had a counter, tables and chairs with a 70-seater restaurant downstairs which was always very busy. The chicken machine was still going strong. When health regulations changed we weren't allowed use it any more. Molly Furey, a Galway woman, was the manageress when I came. She was a tough lady, worked extremely hard. She gave me a lot of my work ethic."

Ronnie Isherwood died in 2002, when he was 81 years old, interested in the business right to the end.

"Over the years I've had quite a few offers for Sheries," Adrian says. "I'd a good offer in 2002 and went to talk to my father, then on his deathbed. He turned away and said, 'if you're going to sell then I've nothing more to say to you'. I told Adam who said, 'I won't talk to you either - your father gave you a chance to run it and now I want one'. That was when we decided the place needed changing. We went back to my father and told him and he sat up and said he was glad, that he'd worried all night."

Adam is the eldest of Adrian and Valerie Isherwood's three offspring - his brothers Paul and Tom are forging other careers. Sheries closed in September 2005 until January 2006 and "opened as you see it", Adam says. When the counter went Adrian found he couldn't come near the place for three days. But the old name sign has an internal place of honour.

Adam, with sports and leisure management, as well as four years in Cathal Brugha Catering School behind him, has got no doubts about Sheries' future.

"This is a great location and it's getting noticed more by young people. The Luas stopping outside means other people are noticing us. It's bistro-style and is the only place like it on the northside. You can get a plate of good food and bottle of beer and be in and out for €20, it's that sort of place."

He looks at the smooth new walls. "We're still trying to figure out what to hang." Adrian has an idea. "Maybe we could open a tapas bar downstairs." The idea takes fire. They're discussing it as I leave. Who's to say where Sheries is headed next, now they've forsaken the counter?