We are delighted to present our much salivated over Food Issue.

The last time we ate together we talked about Damson Diner, The Fumbally, and Food Game - all of which are all still going strong.

This time round, we present some new amuse-bouches. Plus, we've added a new ingredient.  We are proud to present the first in a series of new videos from forkful.tv (see Le Interview). A new recipe by Mark Duggan and Aoife McElwain, this dish is best served le cool.

And what trends do we want to see take shape before our next food foray? Of all we've encountered, Food Trucks is the one that has us watering at the cake-hole. Already enjoying huge following in New York, London and San Francisco, we recommend this food on the move fad as Dublin's just deserts.

We already hear that KC Peaches, Sheridan's and John Farrell are ready for a green light from the council to get a Convoy of cuisine moving. Ten four, rubber duckie.

Who has had a forkful this week? Ciaran, Michael, Kate, Amy or Kristen?

Following a nasty run in with our nation’s patron saint over a goat, the townsfolk of Skerries embarked on one of the longest running PR campaigns of all time to re-establish itself as a bastion of respectability. It has successfully achieved this. Considered Fingal’s answer to Cannes, suburbia doesn’t come much prettier than this picturesque little anchorage. With an array of cafés and bars to choose from, the discerning grubber heads directly for Blue on the harbour. Here you can quaff from the comprehensive drinks menu which boasts a vast selection of craft beers and signature cocktails whilst gazing out at the wooden mermaids that bounce loftily on the waves. The Red Island platter is a great way to become acquainted with local wares whilst the wings have a cult status in the area. A great reason to say à bientôt to the city. / Aaron Purcell

There's a somewhat Edward Hopperesque forlorn sweep to Poolbeg Street. The Vintage Kitchen is huddled beside the venerable institution that is Mulligans pub and stares out at the architectural armpit that is Apollo House. However, it's fast becoming the culinary equivalent of a Northern Star, which should cause all gourmands to rejoice. €25 for two courses sourced from the finest local produce and a BYOW / no corkage policy means you don't rock up out of curiosity anymore. Top this with the chance to spin your own Vinyl and create the perfect soundtrack to your evening or test the limits of diners appreciation of hard house. Highlights include the Slaney River slow roasted lamb shank smothered in liquorice and Kilmore Quay hake showered with wild Galway cockles. There's genuine passion and flair emitting from this Kitchen. / Zach Joyce

Have you grown weary of chicken fillet rolls smothered in mayonnaise and complimented, nay, insulted by day-old lettuce? Does the question, “Cut in half for you?” fill you with despair and make you question whether you are living your best life? Then Crave may hold all the solutions, my friend. A café located in the heart of Aungier Street, Crave offers an affordable, healthy alternative to the deli counters that populate Dublin. Purveyors of posh pittas, the café boasts a vast menu of such delights as the “Cheeky Cow” (minute steak and red onion marmalade) and “This Gets My Goat” (goats cheese, rocket and sundried tomatoes). Moreover, it serves a number of hearty soups and summer salads suitable for eating in or taking out, all uniformly delicious, cheap and bound to leave you craving more. / Amy O’Connor

Dublin outfit SPIES would make pretty lousy agents of espionage. For one thing, that all-caps moniker is hardly inconspicuous. And I imagine their penchant for pounding drums and grinding guitars would make it pretty hard to avoid detection by foes. Simply put, SPIES are not cut out for the secret service, so it's probably for the best they've decided to pursue the business of musicmaking instead. Earmarked as 'ones to watch' after the brooding intensity of earlier releases earned comparisons to Interpol and The National, the band now return with the rather brilliant single Distant Shorelines, their first release in two years. The five-piece are supported by charming alt-folk troubadour Myles Manley tonight. I'll be the one brandishing a briefcase in trenchcoat and shades. / Joey Kavanagh

I remember my younger sister returned from the Gaeltacht one year with a copy of Jeff Buckley's 1994 album Grace tucked into her mála. Initially I was annoyed to discover she was listening to music that hadn't been sanctioned by her overbearing older brother who had, until then, been rigidly enforcing the dictates of Smash Hits! and Top of the Pops. Even I had to admit though, after a few listens, that this was a special record, and soon it earned pride of place between Ja Rule and Jennifer Lopez in my own collection. Buckley's life was cut tragically short, but thankfully events like Born Again From The Rhythm offer an opportunity to hear his music in a live setting and to celebrate his legacy. Dave McGuinness of LiR takes on vocal duties on this occasion, with proceeds benefitting the Niall Mellon Township Trust. / Joey Kavanagh

Nationality and language are two utterly central lynchpins to the creation of any identity. But, what if you were best known for being the American novelist of a generation while your first two (unpublished) novels were in French and you’re actually half Breton? What effect does that have on your relationship with not only the language you communicate most effectively in but on the person that was shaped out of two, arguably opposing ideologies? Translating a ream of personal and creative work by Kerouac, Gabriel Rosenstock and Gearoid Mac Lochlainn will explore many questions posed by the enigmatic writing of iconic Jackie boy in a literary capacity. In true beat style, the readings will be accompanied by improvised jazz. Is this a legitimate reason for throwing on your Levis? You betcha. / Laura Hayley Kavanagh

Thanks to Family Guy you probably already know the ending but know this, what Mr Kane meant by muttering “Rosebud” before popping his clogs is the least interesting aspect of Citizen Kane. The debut feature from the tragic genius that was Orson Welles, Kane is the blueprint of modern cinema. Everything that has come since; from the French New Wave of the 1950s and 60s, through the New Hollywood of the 1970s and even the blockbuster fare of the new millennium all carry Kane’s DNA. Although there’s more here than just a cheap film school lesson; for a set of fresh Irish eyes it’s the all too relevant tale of the abuse of power, the corruption of politicians and the influence of bias within the press. To air that clichéd quote once more: “for what has a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Win Tickets / David Cadwallader

Flipping words and reinventing the stalwart that was Eden, partners Yannick van Aeken and Louise Bannon are bringing the fruits of their collective experience at Noma to bear on their new venture. As a sous and pastry chef respectively at the famed Copenhagen restaurant, they settled upon a return to these shores with their finely honed skills. Testing the gravy with pop ups in Ballymaloe, Kai in Galway and Urbun in Cabinteely, they were approached by Jay Bourke, the proprietor of Eden, to revamp this city staple. With an evening menu offering up to a dozen dishes in the €9 - €15 price range, they are surfing the current lingua franca of cuisine focusing on seasonal and locally sourced produce, whether it's prawns from Dublin Bay or oysters from Clarenbridge. There's a new Adam and Eve tempting us to their culinary garden of delights this summer. / Zach Joyce

In the ground floor salon of an old city-center Georgian, a haystack sits quietly in a neat, albeit towering, pile. A mound of straw as high as the ceiling, it sings of misplacement, planted between the door and the hearth as though dumped by a clueless farmhand on his way to a field faraway from this post code. You’re reminded of the countryside of your youth where bales of hay were scenery, not large-scale installation. The focal point of The Consideration of the Planets by Patrick O’Reilly, the haystack’s scent reaches you before the sight of it, and the sight is astonishing. Asking yourself if there’s a needle in there, you realize the obvious connection to the exhibition’s title. You want more than anything to search for the needle, hop atop this heap of a thing and gaze up at a night sky somewhere, but you Can’t Touch the Art. / Kristen Pye

A$AP Rocky was born to be a rapper. He was literally named after Rakim of Eric B. & Rakim!  His parents knew what they were doing. Those are some sizable shoes to fill, but A$AP Rocky has quickly established himself as one of the eminent playas in the rap game. Like Kendrick Lamar, he has successfully managed to transform his Pitchfork kudos into commercial success with his debut album LongLiveASAP, debuting atop the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this year. Not bad for a 24-year-old sporting gold teeth and French braids. The content of his raps might seem passé – bitches, motherfuckers, etc. – but the flashiness and ferocity of his flow cannot be ignored. As young Rocky would say, “Long live ASAP, now bow to your Messiah, bitch!” Win Tickets / Amy O’Connor

A seething wave of market envy and hipster foodie alarm radiated from us millenial Dublin 8-ers during our last excursion there. How DARE they occupy a vacant lot in a northside industrial estate all guerrilla-like outside our postcode! This foodie cool-lective boasts a chilled out Pantry cafe and toys for the kids to boot! Their motto; the au courant "Quality starts at the point of origin" says it all. Next weekend charcuterie and cheese platters, made up of market fare, will be served with wine by the glass and a wine sale continues. WholeHoggs are bringing chinese style pork ribs, Australian Farmers will be visiting and Neals Yard are bringing samples for punters dreading hayfever season. To top it off, they have also nailed it by being an indoor food market what with all the Global Weirding going on.../ Elish Bul-Godley

Hailing from Oslo, Todd Terje (pronounced terr-yeah) arrived on the scene in 2004 with his single Eurodans released on Soul Jazz Records. Since then he has remixed more than 100 artists as oddly diverse as Chic, Astrud Gilberto, Chris Rea and The Osmonds. More recently in 2011, he released the slow burning club anthem Ragysh, full of shimmering, arpeggiated synths over a rock-solid rhythm track. It wasn’t until the release of the It’s the Arps EP, which features that massive hit Inspector Norse, that Terje really hit the mainstream. It really is one of the bounciest, catchiest discohouse tracks around, complete with an infectious melody and pinging syndrums. If you haven’t heard it already on a night out in Dublin then you really need to get out more. The perfect soundtrack for a summer’s night. Win Tickets / Dave Desmond

Enemies occupy an aural space many bands try to replicate. Their music floats in a dreamy resonance akin to the aftermath of a perfect day, but they’re not easy listening for a middle aged Sunday. Most of the songs from their second offering, Embark, Embrace follow winding patterns that peak and ease harmoniously, while their catchy melodic accompaniments showcase a talent for creating a truly versatile sound. These are not inaccessible, genre-driven songs, these are something altogether more wonderful, and with a reputation for live shows, you should get ready for a little bit of a head bang before you're lulled back into the delicate guitar riffs and ambient delights these lads have in store. With members of Heathers, Cast of Cheers et al you’d be mad to miss a night of such gargantuan Irish talent on display. Win Tickets / Laura Hayley Kavanagh

Besides grooming facial hair more distinguishable than that of Groucho Marx, Andrew Weatherall has also found the time to dip in and out of the music industry over the last 20 years. DJ and producer, a touchstone of his prolific output includes collaborations with Primal Scream, a tasty remix of My Bloody Valentine’s Glider EP and a banging Villalobos cover. Weatherall brings his tasche and tats to the Pepper alongside fellow clubbing comrade and disco consultant Sean Johnston for a night of “spacy dubby disco music”. ALFO was born on a road trip when both aficionados realised the stuff they were both playing and enjoying peaked at no higher than 120 BPM. Some epiphanies are greater than others…The result makes for a cross genre and relatively chilled out night of “drug-chug” beats. Win Tickets / Aaron Purcell

Arguments over the best kebab in Dublin could go on until well after closing time. Claiming one is better than another is as futile as suggesting there is one definitive pub for the best pint of Guinness in the city. Sure, there are preferable situations in which to imbibe the black stuff, but it ultimately comes down to a combination of factors. In terms of the humble kebab, those factors could be understood as the following: the succulence of the meat, the sauces, the salads, the setting and in the case of Keyif, the receptacle in which these bountiful temptations are served. Karol, the ultra-sound owner, is reluctant to reveal exactly what makes his homemade Turkish flatbread so divinely mouth-watering. Whatever the secret ingredient is that Karol’s grandma passed down to him, it is lip-smackingly delicious. / Simon Judge

Rebecca Solnit is something of a female Indiana Jones in that her writing seems to traverse every subject and every discipline with an ease and audacity that are on the lines of heroic. Her best-selling book Wanderlust put the act of walking at its centre, analysing it as a cultural phenomenon that is disappearing and how with its demise “goes an ancient and profound relationship between body, world, and imagination.” Her subjects are place, history, urban spaces, travel, gender, art, politics, etc. She won a Guggenheim for her biography of fin-de-siecle photographer Eedweard Muyer, in which she condensed an unlikely and inspired description of the industrial formation of the world seen through the photographer's lens and work. If this all sounds stuffy… well Beyonce named her baby, Blue Ivy, after one of Solnit’s poems so it can't be that bad./ Roisin Agnew

War! What is it good for? Absolute nothing! Apart from inspiring countless writers with inspiration for literary works, that is. Whether it’s Siegfried Sassoon condemning “scarlet Majors” in Base Details or Joseph Heller detailing the exploits of Yossarian in Catch-22, war has provided fodder for many a scribe. In the past year, two novels have surfaced to be added to the great canon of war literature, courtesy of Kevin Powers and Ben Fountain. Kevin Powers’ Yellow Birds is a concise, visceral account of a soldier’s tour of duty in Iraq. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, meanwhile, is a searing comic novel following a group of soldiers as they return to Texas after a tour of Iraq. Two of America’s finest contemporary authors, Fountain and Powers join forces to discuss their work and more. Ten-hut! Win Tickets / Amy O’Connor

Monto, Pimlico, Phibsboro, Marino, Rialto, Casino (hm, technically Marino, but still...) and Portobello aren't just places in Dublin where you should hold on to your iPhone extra tight, but also as Dublin City Food's menu. Plastic primary-coloured school dinner plates have never looked so appetising...the sandwiches are grilled to toasty perfection, while the sides are criminally moreish (think red cabbage slaw). The ingredients feel fresh and bright, which you shouldn't dwell too much on, if like me, you sometimes drift into a dreamworld where the chicken you're eating is playing happily with its chickety-pals. The subway-tiled café is a slice of New York effortlessness, smugly facing Nando's with their overpriced roadkill and uninspired piri-piri everything, with staff who look and act like they're actually happy to be there, even if it doesn't get you a state pension. / Dusty

When I’m flicking through the television guide on my digital box I always check to see how they’ve described Columbo in the synopsis. The dishevelled detective, the scruffy sleuth, the lowbrow lieutenant... there’s only so many ways to describe the man without mining too deep into the thesaurus. Eddie Pepitone is the same. Every reviewer stretches for a word that will do justice to his anger. Indignant, apoplectic, dyspeptic and even colicky have been used to sum up Pepitone’s demeanour, but none quite fit the bill for a man whose act includes a bit where he heckles himself for his innermost thoughts. “Hey Pepitone! How come you started praying? You struggle with that shit all the time...” The anger is genuine enough to be unsettling but Pepitone is balanced perfectly on the line between catharsis and comedy. Win Tickets / Aaron Rogan

With my cockney accent, there's a definite satisfaction in talking about my Forbidden Fruit freads, I mean, threads. As it's not a typical dry-shampoo and novelty wellies deal, you've got so much more opportunity to rock a real look and be weather appropriate without worrying about someone nicking the Barbour in your tent. Like all reputable pimps, 9 Crow Street will be temporarily operating out of a basement on South William Street - so far, so sketchy - and facilitating sartorial superstardom with Sick Studs' ghetto-beanies, vintage for your mates to fawn over and DJs spinning tunes to get the party started. All this, as well as ticket comps, so if the coffers are coffin-quiet, cross your fingers, and you never know, you might get lucky before the cock crows thrice. / Dusty

When Rosie first told me she had spent the day food foraging, I thought that, finally, she had hit the skids. Was there no discount grocery store out in Sandymount for Aldi Lidl things? When she enthused that nettles can give you an intravenous hit of Vitamin C, I really started worry. Poor Rosie, banging up Vit C and trawling the Dublin streets for food. Turns out, Food Foraging Trails are the next big thing and Dublin's hedgerows, beaches and grasslands are bountiful, when you know what you are looking for. Niall O'Sullivan (chef at Isobel's restaurant, Baggot Street) along with Paul Quinn and David Gallagher invite you to join them as they search for wild carrots, seek out dandelions for tempura and discover suitable nettles for risotto. As for Rosie, last I heard she was eating road kill (duck) at a Barbecue. / Vernon Steel

There's a Rayburn stove in my parents' home. It heats the house, boils the spuds and dries the socks. I'm sure Simon Keegan (sommelier) and Joy Beattie (chef) have more high-minded yet homely thoughts behind the naming of their food joint on Parnell Square. But yes, there's an Argyle in the main dining room. While they won't shout it out, the Hot Stove is astutely pitching in on the Chapter One truffle trail yet is keenly aware of the coin jangling needs of the moment. In the basement of a Georgian house, there's a pristine elegance to the surrounds. They are championing the frutti di mare with mackerel in seared rillette form whilst embellishing more traditional dishes such as a tenderloin of rabbit by with an accompaniment of a bed of apricot and pancetta lentils with confit cannelloni. This food fizz adds to the eventual pop that is the most exciting part of the city in development right now. Gimme some of that Hot Stove baby! / Zach Joyce

Another bearded singer-songwriter. Yippee. Exactly what our country needs. Because, let’s be honest here, we could fill the rebuilt Titanic with the amount of lonesome crooners we produce on a yearly basis here. So when one drifts across the great open ocean, they have a tendency to get lost in the maelstrom. Not Sam Bean of Iron & Wine. Not for a man that can make an epic like Trapeze Singer feel like it was only ten seconds long when you’ve finished listening to it…for the third time in a row. Touring with his new album, Ghost on Ghost, the song style is not lovelorn laments but rather interwoven stories and melodies that brew together in a constantly evolving mixture. Each album has had something new, and a welcome addition each of them. Not that you won’t be depressed at some point, this is a bearded singer-songwriter after all. Yippee. / Hugh Torpey

If you like your music witty, your theatre engaging, and your opera comic, this is your show. Following the critical and audience successes of the first two Opera Briefs,, the third installment brings you Igor Stravinsky’s two chamber operas Mavra and Renard. Presented with a mafia twist, Mavra is a tale of cross-dressing and love against the odds, while Renard is a moralising farmyard fable of the Fox, the Cock, the Cat and the Goat. Produced by the dream team of Tom Creed (director), Aedin Cosgrove (light design), and Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh (costume), constructed and managed by the students of the Lir Academy, and performed by the young stars of RIAM, under the batons of David Adams and Andrew Synnott, Opera Briefs promises to be a charming evening’s entertainment. / Robert Blake