Before my deli education began, I was a picky eater. My diet consisted of a handful of things eaten only in their plainest forms. As a teenager in Dublin, I stood in after-school deli queues to order a plain bread roll – not even buttered – while watching the assembly of the mysterious delicacy that most other people ordered: the chicken fillet roll.

The CFR has lately made an unlikely bid for status as an iconic Irish foodstuff, as evocative of the country’s beating heart as a packet of Tayto crisps or a pint of Guinness. Signs above shopfronts claim to offer ‘the best chicken fillet roll in Ireland’. Motorway signs threaten: ‘Last chicken fillet roll until Athlone’. In the online communities, deli staff are known as ‘CFR technicians’. But until very recently the chicken fillet roll was to me a puzzle. I could see what was involved: the large spatula knife used to open the roll; the slapping of butter into the roll’s interior; the shoving in of slices of reconstituted chicken; and the ‘salad’: pale green lettuce, purple onion, red pepper, yellow corn, orange cheddar – the garish colours clashing in a confusion under the harsh lights of the deli counter. But I didn’t really know what was going on.

Then I moved to Galway.

 

 

1. Centra (G&L), Newcastle Road

At first, in Galway to attend university, my diet did not greatly change. Friends said my grocery receipts were like those of a small child left alone for the weekend, plus vodka.

My college boyfriend, a local guy, was proud to show me the haunts of his youth, tenderly pointing out locations where someone had kicked someone’s head in, gotten off with a girl or stolen a car wing-mirror. I had left Dublin, so I thought, to escape the people I went to school with and their web of gossip. I was pitifully ignorant about the West of Ireland, unaware of what a misstep it was to move to Galway for anonymity. Unaware, too, that entering a relationship with a county footballer would invite commentary on my every move.

So it was that I felt myself under observation when I made my first visit to the G&L Centra, just across the road from the university campus. I panicked at the counter and ordered the same as my boyfriend: my first chicken fillet roll, with butter, mayo and ketchup. Mayonnaise was a new addition to my diet, in both its regular and garlic forms. I had yet to ask what coleslaw actually was.

The blend of mayonnaise and ketchup was metallic. I removed larger pieces of the damp breaded chicken from my roll and sneaked them into the surrounding ketchupped paper when my boyfriend wasn’t looking, enjoying a more expensive, more socially acceptable version of my preferred plain roll from home.

I had always felt painfully self-conscious eating around others, but I also hated eating alone in public. My anxieties began in school and worsened in college. I would go hungry in the absence of anyone to eat with on campus. But once I got myself to actually eat it, the chicken fillet roll, wrapped discreetly in its paper, was a lifesaver. I could eat it on the move, darting along the river Corrib, which flowed beside a tree-cloaked campus path. I could eat one half of the roll with the other hidden safely in my bag. As time went on I added coleslaw, cheddar cheese. The more flavours that were layered over the breaded chicken, I came to understand, the better it tasted.

Brown or white? Butter or mayo? Plain or spicy? Salad? Sauce? Toasted? Cut in half? I began to know the questions not by sound (sometimes imperceptible over the din of the college queues) but by the order in which they were asked. My favourite of the G&L technicians was a very tall man who spoke in low tones and moved quickly, thus relieving me of my usual queue-induced anxieties. He wrapped the roll in its paper immaculately and handed it over blank-faced. I imagined we were kindred spirits, destined for depression, and that this was what I could taste beyond the scrapings of butter and the mayonnaise.

A group of men I didn’t recognize, part of my boyfriend’s enormous collective of friends and teammates, shouted my name when they passed me in the still-foreign streets. People posted on his Facebook wall about being ‘shacked up with the Dublin beour’. On nights out, texts from my boyfriend made clear he knew not only where I was, but what I was wearing. With over seventeen thousand students in the university, deli queues were a place where things were seen, and reported. When ordering my deli rolls I tried to speak as quietly as possible. At night I worried that when asked the fateful question ‘Salads?’, I had responded with ‘No, thanks.’

The term ‘salad’, in Irish deli culture, refers to anything that isn’t meat or sauce. Your local deli is the only place where anything from a boiled egg to a falafel may be considered ‘salad’. The word ‘deli’ itself has, in Irish usage, travelled a distance from its etymological roots. In some countries – and in some elite corners of this country – a deli is a place where you might buy a wire-cut wedge of pecorino or some almond-stuffed olives. It is not a place where you’d ever encounter a tub of sweetcorn. But the Irish deli of which I speak is a hospital-lit sandwich factory, generally located in convenience stores and petrol stations.

In the queue at the G&L Centra, I studied the gestures of the other queueing girls with their carefully painted nails. I tried not to make eye contact with the glossy fried eggs behind the glass: uniform in shape, curled at the edges, with yolks that looked as though they’d been cooked separately to the whites and then placed on top.

 

 

2. Ward’s Corner Store, University Road

The pistachio-green Ward’s Corner Store, sitting opposite the cathedral where the canal meets the university campus, has been a Galway institution since 1931. Ward’s is a lunch hotspot for college and secondary school students, and for staff from the University Hospital around the corner. They serve fresh pastries and scones and a daily soup, and the deli boasts a variety of breads for your sandwich (focaccia among them). Alongside the usual deli options, Ward’s go above and beyond, offering items like honey-baked ham, chargrilled chicken, grilled peppers, olives, feta, swiss cheese. There is a menu of ten different roll options for €3.49; among these is a glam version of your standard chicken fillet roll, featuring Cajun sauce and fresh peppers.

The staff wear green uniforms that match the walls, and flat black chef’s hats. The same characters stand behind the counter today as they did years ago, when I was first led to the place by my boyfriend. If G&L was my opening lecture, Ward’s was the honours course. I hadn’t been long eating chicken fillet rolls, but I was making up for lost time, and it was obvious even to me that  Ward’s was operating on a higher level of quality. After my college relationship fell apart, I would visit Ward’s to feel closer to my ex; I was an outsider lunching like the most authentic of locals. My boyfriend left me with insider knowledge of Galway’s best shortcuts, its best sandwiches, and the itchy feeling that I was being watched.

While your standard Irish deli counter has at least two operating staff, Ward’s sandwich station is operated by one man on his own. I have never seen him compromise on either service or quality.

The two other staff members keep the system running smoothly from their points behind the till. They are experts at distinguishing, in a shapeshifting crowd, those who have already placed their sandwich orders from those still waiting. One or other of them will catch your eye and then widen theirs slightly, a signal universally understood to mean And will you be adding a tea/coffee? If you have a usual, a nod will suffice in response, and they’ll have it made and added to your total by the time you reach the till.

Ward’s has an outdoor terrace with metallic tables and chairs spread under a striped awning. Plastered over the garden seats are heavily hungover students, student nurses, lecturers, and vaping schoolkids passing around a single bottle of Lucozade original.

Over our college years, friends and I had switched courses and houses and jobs and relationships; we had stayed living and working in Galway for years beyond the duration of our respective degrees; but our Ward’s sandwiches remained a constant. Unlike the convenience stores, Ward’s had to close during the Covid lockdown. When the time came, they welcomed every regular back joyfully, and by name. Shortly following the reopening, Ward’s was hiring, and after applying for the position online I was offered a trial shift. I wrestled with myself over the opportunity, but eventually I emailed the owner and told him that I’d been given a position elsewhere. In truth, I was still on the hunt for work but I couldn’t bring myself to move over to the service side of the Ward’s experience.

 

 

3. 24-Hour Gala, Prospect Hill

The Gala on Prospect Hill, just off Eyre Square, sits nervously between an off-licence and a Domino’s and is the epicentre of a zone containing at least four bookies. A long taxi rank churns opposite. People come here in their hundreds to queue in the post-nightclub hours and to begin coming to terms with everything they’ve ingested throughout the night, squinting under the bright lights and meeting gurning reflections of themselves in the vertical mirrors that line the drinks fridges. Here food is ordered more for the sake of a next destination than consumption.

Behold the queue of students trailing down the road, with their false eyelashes falling out, their hair extensions clumped with sweat, their heels cradled in their hands, and, sometimes, bridal trains of toilet paper trailing behind them. The air smells of fake tan (a combination of chemical coconut and chipper vinegar). Rollies are attempted with filters missing, with skins missing, and nobody has a lighter. Boys’ shirt collars are tattooed foundation brown and powder white. Eyes roll backwards. Outside the automatic doors, friends of those inside wait for their orders, which are likely to be forgotten; while they wait they vomit, chase seagulls, avoid oncoming cars, get off with each other.

Rolls come with the offer of free potato wedges, and a roll-and-wedge combo comes with a free drink. Having received your food from the tormented staff down the back of the shop, you join the queue for the tills at the front. The decision to drop another pill before the club closed now wreaks havoc: many experience the flood-fizz of a come-up on the pavement outside and brandish rolls and cardboard boxes like extra limbs, no longer capable of understanding their relationship to that for which they have just paid.

 

 

4. Daybreak (McGuire’s), Raven Terrace

A shop has been operating here under the ownership of the McGuire family since 1935. Last year, McGuire’s closed for a week for renovations. Regulars still waited outside, assuming they might be let in across the planks and sheets and working hands. The Daybreak sign in its hearty shamrock green above the entrance was replaced by a matte-grey background with more modern, all-caps lettering, featuring a new logo of a pot-bellied bird. A large family coat of arms which hung high on the shop’s outer wall disappeared, and was recently replaced by a Netflix-sponsored mural advertising the new season of Bridgerton.

Now, the signs above the deli counter writhe with painful descriptors like ‘hot-to-trot’ and ‘light & easy’. On offer are things like scrambled egg hot pots, a ‘roll-in-a-bowl’, and even pancakes. Thankfully, the new additions seem to be routinely ignored. Customers continue to march in, lock eyes with the CFR technician of the day, and order their usual.

When my honeymoon period with the chicken fillet roll wore off, I thought I’d taken the measure of its limitations. But the local Irish deli, no matter how practised you are at its counter, will find ways to surprise you. There will always be some days where the timing is just right: the ingredients are your favoured level of crisp, the bread is warm out of the oven, the proportion of sauce is perfect for the quantity of chicken and salad, and fifty cents are randomly knocked off the end price by mistake, or by the power of God. These are the days you keep going back for.

McGuire’s became my local deli when I last moved apartments, and I’ve remained loyal to it for more than three years. With a fair distance between it and any surrounding schools, and at a little stroll from Shop Street, McGuire’s has just the right amount of customer traffic: the food tastes fresh but it’s rare you’ll have to wait in line. Just inside the shop entrance, the deli is blasted by cool air off the canal, and you can read the day’s newspaper headlines from the shelves while your roll is being buttered. The deli technicians do not hate you for existing on the opposite side of the counter; in fact, every day I watch them select the best of each roll-filling I choose.

 

 

5. Spar, Mainguard Street

When I asked a friend and former deli employee about the food at the place where she used to work, she was reluctant to speak. There were mentions of vacuum-packed bags of chicken and turkey slices. The vegetables, she said, arrived pre-sliced and pre-diced. The boiled eggs were pre-boiled and peeled, in a large bucket, kept fresh in brine. At the relaying of this particular memory my friend allowed herself an exaggerated shudder before succumbing to silence.

The flip-side to a constantly stocked deli is the sad scale of the food wastage involved in this culinary model. Another friend says that the Co. Mayo deli where he works over-orders at least a culinary bucket’s-worth of chicken fillets each week which he, a diligent vegetarian, takes home and feeds to his collection of dogs. The dogs, he insists, are healthy and happy.

Some technicians sauce your roll before they squash the fillings in, some sauce after. Some apply their own pricing systems. Some delis have written lists of their menu items; most expect you to know inherently which sauces live in which unlabelled squeezy bottles. But beyond these local variations, what is generally on offer at an Irish deli counter is a predictable experience. So while the Spar deli on Mainguard Street is nothing special, I include it here because occasionally I walk past it with an empty stomach, and I receive the experience I expect – and isn’t that all we want from our delis?

In a fit of online shopping during lockdown, I treated myself to a black boiler suit. Taking the boiler suit on its first journey out, I went to Spar for my breakfast roll (butter, ketchup, two sausages) and joined the end of a morning queue of men in strikingly similar attire, except theirs was paint-splattered and cement-caked. I remembered the anxieties of the college queues years before, when, feeling under surveillance, I strained to see under the glass ahead of time and practised my routine answers. More workmen joined the queue behind me. Kicking back down the street for home in my heavy boots I bit into my breakfast roll, sending a burst of ketchup shooting down my black pant leg.

 

To read the rest of Dublin Review 89, you may purchase the issue here.