#RestaurantWeek #MyFavouriteRestaurant #IndependentPizza #30years For all who met here & lived happily ever after ❤️ pic.twitter.com/rqGFl9LuQC
— Gotham.ie (@GothamDublin) June 7, 2014
Thirty years is a long time for any restaurant to last. But this one's managed it, simply because it's good.
The Independent Pizza Company was the first truly New York-style pizza to appear in Dublin (and as a native-born Manhattanite, I like to think I know the real thing when I run into it). We descended on the place's Drumcondra branch within a couple of weeks of it opening, and have been happy patrons ever since, both in the north-city branch and at IP's central-Dublin one in South Anne Street that later became The Gotham Cafe. Since then (as Peter likes to say) we've eaten enough pizza in there to pave South Anne Street, and we've never had a bad one yet.
This is the place where Dark Mirror was conceived at the end of a long discussion about the differences in Star Trek uniforms between movies, and the sudden realization that no one seemed to be looking at the "Mirror, Mirror" alternate universe in terms of ST:TNG. We then hastily ditched our table and begged David and Jackie to keep our pizzas hot while we ran across the road to public phones outside the post office so I could call Dave Stern at Pocket Books and pitch to him. (This was before mobiles/cellphones: a time when all Irish post offices had phones associated with them, harking back to a time when private phones were rare and unusual and the Post Office ran the telephone network. As opposed to now, when [as they say locally] even "the dogs in the street" have mobiles.) And when we came back, our pizzas were produced: hot, and (as I recall) with extra cheese.
To this day, upstairs in David's office (as far as we know) the framed cover and acknowledgement page still hang. The whole business looks a bit like this:
It was a pleasure to be able to give these guys a prezzie, as reliable high-end pizza is never a thing to be taken for granted -- nor is a place where (in a busy town) you know you can expect a warm welcome when you arrive for a leisurely lunch or dinner and a long chat about how to run a universe.
Happy anniversary to all the staff at IP and Gotham Cafe. See you in a couple of weeks, guys!
