Cafes in Monaghan
Monaghan has more places to get a coffee than a town of under eight thousand people strictly needs. Part of that is the N2, which brings in people who are only stopping. Part of it is that a cafe is one of the few small businesses a town this size can still fill a ground floor with. The upshot is a run of them within about ten minutes of each other on foot.
The bakery counters
Grahams of Monaghan on Dublin Street is the busiest lunch spot in town and the one to try first. It is a bakery and food shop with a cafe attached rather than a cafe that also sells buns, and the pastry counter at the front is why people put up with the queue. Around the middle of the day you will be standing in it.
Dinkin’s on Church Square works on the same principle. It is a home bakery first, part of a small family run group with branches across Monaghan and Cavan, and it does bread, cakes, sandwiches and hot food to sit in or take away. If you want to sit down without waiting, it is the better bet of the two.
Around the squares
Barley and Bean is on the first floor of Fleming’s department store on Church Square, which is not where most people would think to look for lunch. It is a bigger room than any of the street level places, the soup and quiches are made on site, and there is a lift if stairs are a problem.
Coffee Break with Barbara is also on Church Square, beside the courthouse, and is at the opposite end of the scale. It is small, it does coffee and something to go with it, and it does that well.
The Cottontail Cafe on the Diamond is a tea room with an art studio at the back running classes. Screaming Bean, also on the Diamond, is the plain coffee stop of the group. Coffee Angel on Market Road is the one chain here, a Dublin specialty roaster that took a unit in the town, and the coffee is noticeably better than what Monaghan had before it arrived.
Nearly all of these open in the morning and are shut by late afternoon. Monaghan does not have an evening cafe. After about five your choices are a pub or a restaurant, which is what eating out in Monaghan covers.
The farmers market
The farmers market sets up in Church Square in front of the courthouse on a Friday, and in decent weather it is the best weekday lunch in the town. Produce, bread, preserves and a couple of food trucks. It is small, and it is genuinely local rather than a craft market pretending to be one. If you are making a trip of it, check first, because a street market is the sort of thing that moves for a bank holiday or a parade.
What is not here
There is no roastery. There is nowhere treating coffee as a project, and nowhere open late. If you want a long afternoon with a laptop and a socket, Barley and Bean has the most room of the cafes, and the library at the Peace Campus has more again, which is beside the county museum on things to do in Monaghan.
This list will date
Small town coffee places turn over, and Monaghan is no exception. A room that suits a cafe suits the next cafe too, so the sign changes and the fit out mostly stays. Any guide to this written more than a year ago will have at least one name wrong, and this one will get there eventually.
Everything above was trading when the page was written, and most of it has a website or an active social page you can look at before you set out. If you find one has shut, it has shut, and there is a fair chance something else has opened two doors down.
Details on this page last checked . If something here is out of date, it probably is our fault rather than yours.