This is a 10/10 sandwich but the cheffy touch needs more provenance

IPC House, Shelbourne Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin ★ 7.5/10
Cast your mind back to an era when the panini had an awful chokehold on the Irish café. Let’s dub it the paninidemic. The height of fashion at one time where fast lunches were concerned. Sandwiches? Out. The toasties you grew up eating at home? Far too casual to be seen hanging out of our mouth at lunch. Paninis were the epitome of “very demure, very cutesy, very mindful”, a whole era before a toasted special and a pint outside Grogan’s became considered, in many circles, a lunch of champions.
Sorry to whoever brought the panini to life and fecklessly set it free on these shores but it represented everything wrong with Ireland’s café offering at the time. The food equivalent of fast fashion, where buyers are fleeced for poor quality, processed bread rolls (did they already have the weird artificial grill marks emblazoned on them?), steamrolled to within an inch of its existence, fillings converged into one molten mass.
Sometimes a whisper of a ridged crisp came on the side but the plate always bore the unavoidable “side salad” garnish. A few sad, dry salad leaves, whole cherry tomatoes (halved only in fancy places) and astringent slices (sometimes massive erroneous chunks) of raw red onion. The lot drizzled in thick, sticky lines of balsamic “glaze” like you would adorn an ice cream cone in caramel.
Alongside, Diet Coke in a glass bottle with a plastic straw, slim jim with ice nearby. Think the “Diet Coke Break”, which was meant to be 11.30am but because of the time difference from the States it ended up lunchtime here somehow. A latte in one of those tall glasses with the little stumpy handle (ick) and a tall, skinny spoon ordered “extra hot” for after. Pray we forget these difficult times.
Thankfully, we have moved continents beyond this. Tir Deli, 147 Deli, Poulet Bonne Femme and more are anointing Dublin in proper sandwiches, generously — even lavishly — filled with good ingredients and little scrimping. Dublin is very much settling into her well-made sandwich era and it suits her.
A relative newcomer to that list is Carved, established in 2021 as a purveyor of gourmet “sandwiches by chefs”. This is a sandwich shop presenting its chef credentials seriously, with a mission “to take the sandwich scene to the next level”.
Its debut sits on Ropemaker Place at Grand Canal Dock but we’ve come to its second branch, an imprint within the embassy land we all know as Ballsbridge, which opened six weeks ago in the ground-floor retail unit of IPC House on Shelbourne Road.
Unlucky us for arriving an hour before close, as a number of menu items aren’t available, including both specials: a smoked turkey and ’nduja number and an aubergine parmigiana situation. The specials always appear inventive and exciting, and are the main impetus that coax us off Instagram and in store, so a shame to miss (and the chefs are profusely apologetic) but we opt for three of the mainstay signatures anyway: porchetta, beef brisket and buffalo chicken.
The porchetta is phenomenal with tender, succulent slices and none of the chewy gristle or fatty bits you sometimes have to suffer with slices of roast pork. There’s a welcome sprinkle of toasted fennel seeds, pork belly’s ideal flavour mate, coating the slow-roasted meat.
A slather of salsa verde brings bright, herby zinginess to each mouthful alongside peppery rocket, while a crunchy rubble of crispy onions affords welcome texture. It’s a 10/10 sandwich, and we are highly critical of sandwiches in general, having worked in making them for too many years than we would like to recount.
Close behind is the beef brisket with slow-cooked and tender slices of beef, though inching on dry, this would be better if they were dragged through a deeply meaty jus before assembly.
There’s a layer of nicely sweet and concentrated caramelised onions and a properly deeply garlicky aioli. A sprinkle of chalky, grated white cheddar interrupts the experience — if it were melted atop it would offer oozy, stringy cheese steak vibes. If it had a layer of Italian giardiniera (a chunky, oil and vinegar-steeped vegetable and chilli condiment) it could be epic.
The bread rolls, sourced from the award-winning Bretzel Bakery, offer banh mi levels of shattering crunch on the outside. It’s the perfect roll type — the interior isn’t overly fluffy or stodgy, it’s airy and light allowing ample filling space and added flavours to shine. We also like that meats (porchetta, ham, beef brisket) appear to come in whole and are prepped and cooked whole, rather than taking the easy route and arriving in vac-packed and pre-prepared.
If you like Frank’s RedHot Buffalo Wings Sauce (personally we could drink the stuff, and are never without a bottle in stock) you will love the buffalo chicken, which has nicely grilled proper chicken breast quite literally drowned in the piquant liquid alongside a spicy slaw filling and lettuce. If you are not a lover of the emblematic sauce it might be a bit overwhelming.
Sandwiches are €10.95, so leave any notion of Boots, Tesco or WH Smith meal deals at the door. This is incomparable anyway, with big, bold flavours in every mouthful. The one gripe is that if this is all about cheffy sandwiches, chefs should know better — provenance is expected and should be demonstrated. There is little to none on show here. Is the beef Irish? Is the pork or chicken free-range? A little more sourcing visibility is needed (and justifies the price in certain ways).
It’s not just sandwiches, the menu offers salad bowls, soups and roast potatoes as a side, plus fresh pastries and muffins too. A deal combining soup and a sandwich for €14 feels like good value for the quality on offer here.
Who doesn’t love a sandwich? The painful reign of the panini is thankfully banished to memory and we are in safe hands as we bask in the era of gargantuan, generously filled, flavour-bomb sandwiches.
Beef brisket €10.95Porchetta €10.95Buffalo chicken €10.952 x Coke Zero €4.30
Total: €37.15
Three more epic sandwich spots across Ireland:
Hero Subs, Belfast Unapologetically indulgent bodega-style subs in Belfast’s York Street; @hero_subs
Hapi Bakery, Galway Kai’s micro-bakery offshoot slings stellar focaccia sandwiches weekly; @hapi_bakery_
Sonny’s Deli, Cork Don’t miss the Reuben or banh mi at this tiny Leeside deli on a corner of Albert Road; @sonnysdeli
carved.ie, @CarvedSandwiches