Blacklion Retail Park Greystones, Co. Wicklow.
Pebbles Café is just outside Greystones, in the Blacklion Retail Park. Gaye Carroll’s busy daytime café serves good homemade food from breakfast right through the day until early evening.
Pebbles Café is in a modern development outside the town, and so doesn’t suffer form the parking police who make trying to stop in the town so stressful. The café is bright and airy with banquette seating down one wall, while the other side is devoted to the main food counter, and some very nice chocolates, and shelves of various foodie goodies, including an intriguing looking chocolate pizza.
From early on Pebbles attract a good crowd for breakfast and has a very busy lunch trade. Expect to find a pie of the day, a selection of tarts and a daily Spanish tortilla. There is any amount of variations of homemade salads and each day there is a homemade soup, and a large choice of sandwiches, wraps and Panini.
We enjoyed the homemade pate as a starter; served with toast and red onion marmalade, it was a winner and we stopped eating it before we finished, lest we left no room for what was next. The pie of the day, chicken and broccoli was very good, while a last minute choice of goat’s cheese tart with chicken and red onion was delicious. A Croque Monsieur is a menu staple, and I find it hard to pass one, so purely in the interests of research we chanced one, and this wasn’t so much a door stop, as a truck stop – large slices of fresh bread, thickly sliced home cooked ham, cheese and a Béchamel sauce, we couldn’t finish it, but it was great, and a lunch in itself.
We finished with two coffees and took our time before heading out in the January cold. Pebbles Café is warm, welcoming and a million miles from the dreadful chains selling chilled sandwiches wrapped in plastic and flavoured milk drinks that masquerade as coffee. Pebbles is authentic, cosy and serves good food; the three things that make a café tick are, well, ticked.
