Sandymount has some advantages in that there are now a number of restaurants, maybe too many, for one to choose to dine out at, but my favourite place to eat out around Sandymount has to be Borza’s Fish and Chip shop on the Green.

Bruno Borza tells me that the competition from the other food outlets is healthy and keeps everyone on their toes. There’s Mario’s, Itsa4, Browne’s, Café Java, Matisse, and Dunne and Crescenzi as well as Butler’s Pantry, Spar, Michael Byrne’s butchers and greengrocers and Tesco if you want to cook your own.

Sandymount is an excellent location, beside the Strand, just five minutes walk from Lansdowne Road and ten minutes walk from the RDS in Ballsbridge. All this with the proximity of the Dart station make Sandymount the ideal place to get some sustenance if you are out to a big event or maybe after a pint in O’Reilly’s or Sandymount House.

The menu is wide-ranging including traditional fish and chips, pizza, chicken, kebabs of various types, and when I’m ordering I can’t exclude a batter burger, onion ring or sausage in batter.

I sat with Bruno in the Green and he told me how his father Elio, with his mother Angela, set up the shop in 1965. “My family comes from a place in Italy near Monte Casino called Casalattico. Before coming to Ireland they first moved to France in the mid-fifties, where my father worked as a bricklayer for five years before coming to Ireland in 1960.”

Bruno told me how his father first started with a chip shop in Dún Laoghaire called the Lido with his brothers, which is still there but as the family expanded and needed more space they found the current shop here in Sandymount because the village was so attractive with the Green in the front of the building. He says he was born two weeks before they opened the shop.

Bruno and his wife Angela have two children, a daughter of 17 in Muckross who is facing the Leaving Cert next year and a son of 11 in Star of the Sea, where Bruno himself went before secondary school at Sandymount High. Bruno has now worked for over 20 years in the shop, which is also home.

I reminded Bruno that he had told me one night I was in for a feed that the Green was his front garden and he has been looking at it for so long that it’s a permanent feature in his mind, “I have counted the trees,” he says. He recommends that the best place to eat his food is in the park.

“Al fresco eating adds flavour to the food. Weather depending, of course. We get some famous visitors to the shop, some on a regular basis. There’s Colin Farrell, Christy Moore and Daniel Day-Lewis, and most days Ruairí Quinn walks past and sometimes dines on his way home.”

The opening times for Borza’s are Tuesday to Thursday and Saturday 12noon to 2.30pm and 5pm to 12.30am. They’re open all day Friday from 12noon to 12.30am, Sunday 5pm to 12.30am. Borza’s is closed on Mondays unless there’s a Bank Holiday when they close Sunday and open Monday 5pm until 12.30am. Borza’s will take a telephone order on 2694130.
Above: Bruno and Angela pictured in Borza’s of Sandymount.