The rise and rise of the Irish foodie could easily be charted by the changing social profile of juice. Not so long ago, making up a Tupperware jug of Squeez from a tin was considered the last word in fresh fruit beverages. Now every 24-hour Spar is offering a positively Californian range of pineapple, cran-apple and ruby grapefruit in cartons. Interestingly though, fresh juice, really fresh, it-was-a-carrot-two-minutes-ago juice is still relatively hard to get. Venison burgers, no problem. Seaweed and squid, sure. A freshly squeezed juice that isn't orange, now that might be a problem.
There are two options in Dublin if you want a fresh glass of juice, whether it's simple apple and strawberry combo or a whacking fruit and veg cocktail. Nectar in Ranelagh is the new kid on the block, having opened its doors late last year, while Juice on South Great George's Street was the pioneer and now has more than four years' trading under its belt. Nectar is the brain child of Christopher Keegan, who came up with the idea for his juice bar during various trips and working stints abroad.
"The idea first came to me in America but where I really saw the idea working was in the zumerias of Tenerife. There would be all these elderly Spanish ladies drinking juice as opposed to their jerez, or sherries, and I thought this is interesting. If you can convince elderly Spanish people to drink healthy juice drinks you can probably convince the Irish."
Nectar is a sleek little cafe where the chrome is complemented by soft blue and brown upholstered banquettes and where the menu offers intriguing drinks like the Manhattan Energiser (apple, carrot, beetroot and ginger) or The Workout (banana, orange, vitamin C, passion fruit, mango and cranberry juice). There is also a range of smoothies that combine fruits such as strawberries, blackberries or kiwis with fruit juice, ice and natural yoghurt. If you fancy a bit more than a liquid lunch or dinner there is also a neat and interesting menu of cafe food which is served through the day until 11 p.m., Monday to Friday, and during the day at the weekends.
"I knew juice and smoothies wouldn't exclusively sustain a cafe so I brought the concept a little further and looked at food. It's cafe food essentially but we've made it healthy food as opposed to stodgy and heavy. The price point is all about the same thing so it's inexpensive. Somebody can come in and have juice and a sandwich for about £5 and actually feel invigorated."
The food item that Keegan is particularly excited about, and the one he feels complements the range of juices best, is a range of wraps - floury tortillas with hot or cold fillings. Nectar offers exotica such as The King Creole (chorizo, basmati rice, onion and sauteed vegetables) or the Caesar (spicy chicken on a bed of tomato and lettuce). "Wraps are a really a Californian /Mexican kind of idea. Neither a sandwich nor a heavy meal, it sits right between the two."
Apart from the juices and the food, Keegan's main passion when he first set up Nectar was getting the total atmosphere right. "I wanted it to be really, really modern. I wanted it to be different to anything I'd seen in Ireland and I wanted it to be light and bright - somewhere you could come in and eat quickly but also chill out for an hour or two if you wanted to."
Keegan employed architect Dermot Boyd to transform the space which was formerly the Red Spot laundry (a Keegan family business) into a sleek LA-style cafe. There is a curved steel bar, a free-floating end wall, lots of natural light and, for that final Californian touch, Keegan even got feng shui and quark (something to do with cell-levels, apparently) clearance. One whole wall is decorated with screen print panels provided by Irish artists Siobhan McDonald and Deirdre Barry (who also cooked up the groovy Nectar sign which was installed on top of the original Vitrolite blue laundry sign).
While this is the kind of place you would normally expect to find in the "Left Bank" of a city, where tourists and urban cowboys would together make up the clientele, Keegan is very positive about his location. "People of my generation have left Temple Bar to the tourists. They've drawn back from the city centre and in a way, they're circling the city and heading for the inner city suburbs, places like Portobello, Donnybrook and Ranelagh. Ranelagh is going through a metamorphosis. We're one of the first people to start changing and within two or three years, I believe it'll be radically changed."
Juice cafe and restaurant was one of the first businesses that brought a similar renaissance to South Great George's Street a few years ago. When Juice opened its doors in early 1995, its tubular steel and sweet-tasting juices were revolutionary, bringing a whole new concept to the city centre: a slick, modern and vegetarian juice bar. Juice founder and general manager, David Keane explains: "I had been a vegetarian for a long time so I wouldn't have been involved with any kind of meat operation. At the same time, I had never really subscribed to the 1960s' beans and open-toed sandals brigade. While I'm quite comfortable with that, I felt it was really doing a disservice to the vegetarian cause. So I wanted to do vegetarian food in a regular contemporary setting, but with restaurant service rather than a food counter, which was all that was really available at the time," Keane explains.
Concentrating on juice was the obvious choice for Keane: "I had been in the States for nine years during the 1980s but had left before the juice thing really kicked in. I came by it second hand through books and so on after I had been in Asia travelling and returned quite done in. After a few weeks of juicing everything - proteins, carbohydrates, the lot - I felt great. So at the time I did feel I had a message to bring the world."
While the Juice menu still holds some juices you'd be hard-pressed to find in your average greasy spoon, such as wheatgrass, spirulina, fennel and parsley, Keane did have to eliminate some of the more unusual juices; "Mung bean and alfalfa sprout juice is great for protein but is truly a difficult juice to hold down."
Aside from its extensive juice and smoothie selection, Juice also operates as an extensive vegetarian restaurant with a Sunday brunch menu that offers everything from organic muesli to scrambled tofu, and a lunch and dinner menu offering dishes such as quesadillas, hot miso broth, Thai curry and their take on a burger and chips. Then there are the almost infamous late night sessions: from 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. the kitchen offers "things people can get their head around like crostini, potato skins and yam wedges - almost first-cousins of that post-alcohol diet that people normally go for."
While the food is great, most late-night Juice devotees would agree the atmosphere is just as important. Large groups of apres-clubbers and late-night drinkers flood in to take over large tables, drink juices or organic wine and to stay until the party finally winds down at around 5 or 6 a.m. Interestingly, Keane claims the late-night business from Thursday to Saturday is necessary to subsidise the vegetarian kitchen for the rest of the week.
Another interesting point is that there is rarely any rowdiness or trouble of the kind usually associated with late night emporiums. "Because we're vegetarian we don't need a bouncer on the door and that's sheerly because people are put off by the word vegetarian."
So with two booming businesses proving exotic juices are a viable option in Dublin, why are there not more places offering a glass of fresh passion fruit and mango? Keegan of Nectar points out that fruit and vegetables are really rather expensive and can be hard to source in Ireland. In addition, the juices use a lot of raw product - my regular-sized glass of juice took two large apples, two carrots, half a beetroot and some ginger to make. Keane says new members of staff are rather inclined to break the machines, citing a number of well-known restaurants that have given up on using their juicers for that reason, and adds: "It's very labour-intensive; it's so much easier to flip the lid on the can of Coke and put it down beside your customer. You're getting the same margin from a glass of wine."
For all that, both have plans to expand: Keegan hopes to open a bar in Dublin's city centre and possibly another in Cork; and David Keane is looking at moving into the more main-stream restaurant business - with a vegetarian slant. Both are aware that in future Irish restaurants will have to offer something a little out of the ordinary to remain in business. "In the past, anybody who served a bit of lasagne or pizza was considered a cool and hip restaurant, but we've moved from that now. There's a big challenge to restaurant owners to get it together because people aren't accepting average food now; they actually want value for money," says Keegan.
Nectar, 53 Ranelagh Village, Dublin 6, tel: 01 4910934: Juice, 73-83 South Great George's Street, Dublin 2, tel 01 4757856