Our teenage daughters being away in Irish college for two weeks offered a glimpse into a child-free future. I mean, sure, this child-free future won’t be happening for a while – thanks to the ineffective housing policies of successive governments, they’ll probably be cohabiting with us well into their 30s – but at least now we have a good idea of what it might look like. There will, for example, be no more need for the Big Shop.
This was a seismic revelation. It turned out we’d only been doing the Big Shop for the past several years because of the pressure to have a variety of answers to the question “what’s for dinner?” asked by people gazing existentially into the empty, echoing fridge and intoning as a follow-on question “why is there never any food in this house?”
We didn’t do one Big Shop the whole time they were away. There was no need. There were, instead, a few intermittent visits to the fancy grocery shop, which we had got out of the habit of frequenting. Left to our own devices for dinner each evening, we’d hum and haw and look in the fridge and say: “Will we just have some picky bits?” And then we’d assemble a dinner. A bit of cheddar, a few slices of good ham, a smattering of crackers, some forgotten olives, anchovies, half a sausage roll. It doesn’t sound like much, granted, written down here, but with a nice glass of red and no labour whatsoever, it was a lazy person’s feast. “Oh, you mean ‘girl dinner’?”, my friend said when I told her what we’d been at. Apparently, a young woman on TikTok had coined the phrase to describe a random, snacky, picky dinner and it had gone viral enough to get into the New York Times.
I’ve been kind of obsessed with girl dinner since, even though the teenagers have returned and are expecting shepherd’s pie and other more complex dishes that require actual cooking
“The girl dinner is a giddy experience,” said Olivia Maher, the OG coiner of the phrase. (I like to hope that with a name like Maher, the inventor of girl dinner has some Irish in her.) “You’re just so pleased with yourself. You’re like, ‘I barely worked for this and it feels like an indulgence.’ That’s what makes it girl dinner.”
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I’ve been kind of obsessed with girl dinner since, even though the teenagers have returned and are expecting shepherd’s pie and other more complex dishes that require actual cooking. They won’t be satisfied with girl dinner, having no truck whatsoever with thrown-together meals that completely let the beleaguered house chef off the hook.
Since discovering the joys of girl dinner I’ve noticed the discourse is endless. Of course, this being a trend, there is also the obligatory “dark side to girl dinners” conversation with people saying it pushes the notion that women should eat less. All I can say is that they haven’t seen my extremely bountiful “girl dinners”. There’s also, naturally, a Barbenheimer twist. Barbie definitely eats “girl dinners” for example, whereas Oppenheimer didn’t really eat, unless you count the cigars and martinis. “Girl dinner” also sounds like something you’d have as a lodger in Fianna Fáil Cllr Deirdre Conroy’s house, where you’d be able to keep your picky bits in a fridge even if you couldn’t heat them up in her broken microwave. Heating things up is against the spirit of girl dinner anyway, so in this at least, Conroy is deeply on-trend.
In other girl dinner news, uber-notiony Dunnes Stores, which has long been transformed from the Dunnes Stores of yore, is selling padrón peppers. A friend texted me this news the other day even though it’s very far from padrón peppers either of us were reared. She took them home and tossed them in olive oil and sea salt. “Ultimate girl dinner!” I texted back enviously. (At home with normal service having been resumed, we were having fish fingers, waffles and beans, a sort of heated-up girl dinner.)
If you are now convinced by this new trend and are picking things up for your girl dinner, let me recommend a gorgeous cafe on Dublin’s Talbot Street called Ella’s Heaven. Due to recent events, nobody is recommending much about Talbot Street, but I was walking down there the other day when I noticed Rory O’Neill on Twitter – which nobody is ever going to call X (like ever) – singing the praises of some of the brilliant local businesses on the street near where he lives.
This is the perfect summer for giddy girl dinners and girl lunches and randomly assembled meals of all kinds
Being nearby, I was fully influenced to try two gorgeous cafes he recommended. I had lunch in the Wooden Whisk, a chicken tikka wrap with excellent coffee and friendly service, followed by dessert in Ella’s Heaven. This is the place for authentic Turkish delight and pistachio-encrusted pastries, and börek-style bites filled with spinach and cheese. Perfect girl dinner fare.
I had been on Talbot Street with a mission, having felt a bit sad about the lack of patriotic bunting on my street compared with, say, Ringsend, the home place of 18-year-old Irish soccer wonder kid Abbie Larkin. To my surprise, I’ve been experiencing Italia ‘90 nostalgia, pangs for a time when everyone seemed to stop working and the entire country was coming down in bunting. Even us non-soccer fans became enthusiasts. I don’t know where he is now and I am sure he’s a perfectly decent man, but I still sometimes find myself humming, “We hate Schillaci we do, we hate Schillaci we do, we hate Schillaci we do, (oh, Schillaci we hate you”).
In Carrolls gift store on Talbot Street, I purchased more bunting than I actually needed and posted news of this bunting-bonanza on our street WhatsApp group; so the green, white and orange is now fluttering a little bit more round my way in support of our women down under. With the Women’s World Cup in full swing, and Ireland facing Canada today in Perth (1pm, RTÉ2), this is the perfect summer for giddy girl dinners and girl lunches and randomly assembled meals of all kinds to be enjoyed while watching amazing Irish women representing us on the world stage. Long live girl dinners. And come on you girls in green.