John Fallon's "The Capstan Bar" — Restaurant in Dublin

All the negative reviews on here about staff members' bad attitudes and no sense of hospitality or friendliness are very well founded. Avoid this pub. Absolutely abyssmal experience. My family has lived in D8 for generations and I've never known anything like it. So bad it put us off having a drink at all and we just went home. The "manager on duty" was extremely unwelcoming, unfriendly, and bossed us around from the second we sat down, when it wasn't even very busy and we were all entirely sober, well presented and reasonable (at 8pm on 20th June 2024 in case you are the owner and would like to know what a mess your manager is making of running your establishment - if i was employing this person i would be disgusted with tonight's "performance", and the first thing i would do would be send them for serious retraining in how to deal with customers). It was like she was a difficult customer and we were trying to appease her. The experience of our arrival was repeated when I went to the bar to order drinks. No effort was made to accommodate us and there was just non stop complicating things and arguing and trying to score points and establish her authority. Did she really mean to make us all miserable? It was like she was on a mission to do so. Ended up leaving our four drinks 80% full on the table because we all felt sick from dealing with her. It's a vibey room when you first walk in, and in a nice part of town, but it's absolutely not worth trying to have a drink there. Bad show all round. Would give zero stars if it were an option. Have never felt sufficiently motivated to leave any review of a pub before but this evening...

Spent a weekday evening here recently as a tourist and enjoyed myself. I really appreciated the lack of music/TV noise, which led to chatting with the bartenders, three sets of locals in for a pint, and one pair of American tourists passing through on the way to Scotland. One very friendly bartender and one bartender who was maybe a little sharp but quite efficient. Clientele seemed to be maybe 60% tourists and 40% locals at any given time, but the locals came and went while the tourists tended to hang out longer. Somewhat limited selection of beers on tap (and only a single cider on tap) but I can't blame them, as easily 80% of incoming orders were Guinness. There was an intermittent, not entirely pleasant smell about my spot at the bar, somewhere on the "old leather" to "garbage truck" continuum; I never did figure out where it was coming from. My memory of the restroom is a little fuzzy but I suspect that it was not the cleanest.

I think it's easily better than the pubs where I come from just on lack of music and whiskey selection, but it's harder for me to say how it stacks up against other...

Despise locals who would have drank there for years. Seems a pre-requisite that you have an attitude problem to work behind the bar. They don't want locals, just want tourists and people who have a specific accent that reeks of gentrification. Not an ounce of politeness from the staff ever. Had a bar man ask me for identification at the age of 24 when sitting with two of my pals who had been drinking there for hours without being asked for ID. My mother went in with her friend for a drink this evening and asked for her last drink, was told the pub was closed, after pointing out they never called last orders, he merely shrugged. They make it perfectly clear they don't want anybody from The Liberties, despite parading themselves as some sort of...