The Red Bank Restaurant (19-20 D’Olier Street) was one of the city’s most famous and long-running restaurants, open from 1845 – 1969.
Culinary historian Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire wrote that it was:
…established by Burton Bindon on the site of a famous city hostelry (and) known originally as ‘Burton Bindon’s’. (It) took its current name from the famous ‘Red Bank’ oysters which grew on beds owned by Bindon in Co. Clare and were available in season in his Dublin establishment [1]
Taken over by the Montgomery family at the turn of the century, by 1934 it boasted a ground floor with a grill room and luncheon bar, two further floors of dining rooms and some of the best food in the city.
Sadly, it perhaps best known for being a popular meeting place for pro-Axis supporters. American historian R. M. Douglas described it as a ‘well known haunt of ultra-nationalist and extremist bodies owned by a German-born member of the Dublin Nazi Party’. [2]
It was a regular meeting place before the war of Adolph Mahr’s ‘German Association’. Mahr had been a leading Nazi official in Dublin, and also the Director of the Irish National Museum. The ‘German Association’ would often invite sympathetic Irish men to these dinners where the table was draped with a Swastika flag.
The Irish Press (Apr 22, 1939)
In February 1940, 1916 Rising veteran and long-serving fascist organiser WJ Brennan-Whitmore invited a select group of ‘Celtic Confederation of Occupational Guilds’ (CCOG) veterans, most of whom he had known from his Blueshirt days, to the Red Bank restaurant to sound them out for a new group called ‘Clann na Saoirse’ (‘Tribe of Freedom’). [3]
In May 1940, the ‘Irish Friends of Germany’ (aka the National Club) held a meeting in the restaurant that was attended by 50 people. George Griffin, veteran anti-Semite and ex Blueshirt, spoke on the subject of the ‘The Jewish Stranglehold on Ireland’. Griffin mentioned many Jews by name and went onto advocate that ‘… we should never pass a Jew on the street without openly insulting him’. [4]
In 1942, the restaurant was host to a number of meeting from the ‘Aontacht na gCeilteach’ (Pan Celtic Union), a front group for ‘Ailtri na hAiseirghe’ (‘Architects of the Resurrection’). [5]
Images from Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire’s ‘The Emergence, Development and Influence of French Haute Cuisine on Public Dining in Dublin Restaurants 1900-2000: An Oral History’
As aforementioned, RM Douglas is of the opinion that the restaurant was owned by a German Nazi party member. Historian Gerry Mullins (author of Dublin’s Nazi No. 1) supports this theory and names the Schubert family as owning the restaurant.
However, respected culinary historian Mairtin Mac Con Iomaire has said that he has ‘found no evidence of the Red Bank leaving the Montgomery family ownership from the beginning of the twentieth century until its sale in the late 1960s’ and that the Mr Schubert referenced was actually the manager of the Solus factory in Bray. Mac Con Iomaire also seriously questions the claim by David O’Donoghue (author of ‘Hitler’s Irish Voices’) that newspaper advertisements for a new lounge in The Red Bank Restaurant were coded messages for Nazi meetings.
The standard of food at The Red Bank declined over the war years, when it became a late night drinking establishment. It closed in 1948 but was reopened under new management. A fire in 1961 gutted the place and the restaurant finally closed its doors in 1969.
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Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
This is so very random…
Do the flags still fly on the odd occasion?
This is brilliant, I’ve been looking for a photograph of the front of the Red Bank for years, great research by you. It’s telling how central it was to Nazi social life during the period. I seem to recall that the Mullins book suggested that the manager was German and that his adopted daughter was Jewish which seems unlikely, but perhaps there’s further information yet to come.
“It’s telling how central it was to Nazi social life during the period”…. and their familiarity with our own extreme nationalists.
[…] national independence. Some were socialists, some were feminists, a handful would later go on to become fascists, but the vast majority believed in the traditional nationalism that was such a craze on […]
Hi I worked as a apprentice barman in the 60 many people ate at the restaurant fro Sophie Lorien to use brenner son and manny well know Paper peopel Noel Fanning to well know writers great memories Joe Conroy
Almost contradictory, The Red Bank was also the Headquarters of the Dublin Central Branch of the Old Contemptibles Association – an esteemed group of British (regular) Army who stopped the German advance at Mons and the Marne in 1914. Funny to think of them rubbing shoulders with Nazis.
How ironic! During O’Connell’s struggle to restore Grattan’s parliament in Dublin—from 1830 until his death in 1847–the most passionate and revolutionary of the ‘Repealers’ hung out at 1. Jude’s pub; 2. The Red Bank—then know as Burton Bindon’s oyster bar; 3. the Abbey Theatre. (Chapter 1, A. Trollope, ‘Kelly’s & O’Kellys).
Nb. As late as 1868, British parliament was characterizing Jude’s pub as a meeting place for insurrectionary nationalists—Jude’s seems to have vanished from Dublin city history. Might it have been a pub near St. Jude’s next to Kilmainham Gaol?
I was working as a copy-boy in Irish Press when I was told to hie me to the Red Bank to tell editor that Harold Wilson had fired George Brown.
I worked at the Red Bank restaurant in the 50’s as a commis waiter. Fond memories.