On any given night time, a tactile, no-frills plate of fried splendor lands on tables at Little Dumpling in Dublin’s Temple Bar neighborhood, proper across the time it lands on 1000’s of different tables all through Eire. It’s a spice bag: a group of spicy, starchy fine details on prime of chips (french fries). One thing like disco fries, it’s a staple of Chinese language takeaways throughout Eire, and the stuff of post-bar road meals legend.
Since the dish premiered at Templeogue’s Sunflower Chinese language restaurant round 2006, the spice bag has morphed and unfold in Eire, overseas, and throughout social media. As cooks combine in their very own variations, it’s change into a complete style of meals, its personal galaxy within the universe of Irish culinary tradition.
Until it arrives in an amazing pizza field (during which case it could be known as a “spice field”), the dish’s conventional packaging is a brown paper bag almost translucent with grease. This quotidian container unleashes a messy, but tantalizing mixture of fried and spicy objects. There’s at all times hen, often in strips, whether or not they’re coated, breaded, or fried. And there are at all times fries and onions. There could be different greens too, like spring onion, contemporary chiles, or grated carrot. Then come all types of accouterments, from spring rolls to hen balls. And there’s curry sauce on the facet, besides if the takeaway is among the many feverish camp that swears by satay sauce.
Then there’s the signature spice, which varies bag to bag. The Gaelic title for the finger-licking late-night hit, “mála spíosraí” (roughly “mala spice”) hints on the dish’s specific style of numbing warmth. Sichuan peppercorns are a throughline, as is nutty, earthy Chinese language 5 spice, however cooks apply flavors in varied kinds.
Chef Jules Mak goes for muddled and floor Sichuan peppercorn, salt, pepper, sugar, a little bit of chile powder, and a faucet of MSG. Yearly, his high-end Hong Kong-inspired Mak At D6 in Dublin sells a metric ton of spice baggage for one month solely.
“We blitz them out a bit extra bougie,” he says. “We do 100 an evening.”
Per nationwide outlet RTE, Hong Kong diasporic communities, identified merely as “Hongkongers,” signify a lot of Eire’s Chinese language migrants. Their use of spice in objects like spice baggage appears to be like rather a lot just like the style of salt and chile dishes that spans throughout South Asia, utilized to every part from ribs to prawns.
Mak, whose father hailed from Hong Kong and mom from the Emerald Isle, grew up seeing to-go orders for chips, curry, and rice at Furama, his dad’s stalwart Chinese language restaurant in Dublin that closed a few decade in the past. It was known as a “three in a single” then, and Furama wasn’t the one place doing it. Following Sunflower’s spice bag, Mak says, the three in a single pale, because the three objects fused into spice baggage throughout the restaurant scene.
Over the previous 20 years, all types of variations have popped up in Eire. There are Dublin chains serving spice baggage with Indian flavors, County Waterford fish and chip retailers the place the dish comes with fried fish, and fried hen burgers with spice bag-inspired fixings on the grocery store.
“It’s a little bit of a bastardized Chinese language dish,” says Irish meals critic Russell Alford, “nevertheless it’s ours.”
As Sunday Occasions meals critics, hosts of the Gastro Gays podcast, and authors of Sizzling Fats (a e-book all about fried meals), Alford and Patrick Hanlon have watched the spice bag unfold over time. They level to the early 2010s as the primary time the dish jumped to the worldwide stage. Australia and New Zealand have been early adopters.
“It’s sort of this icon of Irish delicacies, of Irish tradition,” Hanlon says. “It’s altering the notion of Irish delicacies overseas.”
Spice baggage are notably tuned to unfold on social media. The dish combines objects — fries, fried hen, spicy meals — which can be identified winners on-line. The oil-slicked bag additionally unfolds to disclose its contents like a Christmas current, making for a nice reveal in TikTok or Instagram movies. Variations made with an air fryer, which acquired worldwide star remedy in 2017, spurred the dish additional into the international consciousness.
The dish additionally capitalizes on a rising tide of Irish cultural exports. Arguably Eire’s most well-known culinary providing, Guinness, can be having a second; “splitting the G” (downing a Guinness till the froth lands in the midst of the letter G on the glass) has fueled a growth within the Dublin-made beer. Actors like Paul Mescal, Saoirse Ronan, and Cillian Murphy have cemented themselves in younger American minds the way in which John Harm and Richard Harris did for his or her Gen X dad and mom, rap group Kneecap is taking the world by storm with frenzied gigs, and international deal with the continued siege of Gaza has introduced Eire’s personal historical past of colonial wrestle into focus.
Quite a lot of these elements come collectively at Bar Snack in New York’s East Village (acknowledged because the eighty fifth greatest bar in North America), the place Kneecap performs on the audio system on a regular basis, a devoted faucet whips up foamy pints of Guinness, and the spice baggage circulate like stout via cobbled streets.
When co-owners Iain Griffiths and Oliver Cleary have been ideating the menu for the bar, which opened in November 2024 earlier than the kitchen got here on-line in April 2025, they noticed the smash burger pattern waning. Griffiths, who lived for a few years in Scotland and England, and Cleary, who’s Irish, thought spice baggage might be the following hit factor.
Their rendition arrives within the attribute paper bag: buttermilk-fried hen tendies, peppers, onions, and fries with spices and a curry sauce. Additionally they put the Spice Ladies brand on T-shirts to hype the bag’s debut.
“That felt like one of the vital U.S. issues we might do,” Griffiths says. However the spice bag was ok to earn followers amongst their Irish clientele as effectively. “[They] would lookup and provides us the nod, like, that is good.”
At New York’s spicy fried hen specialist Pecking Home, chef-owner Eric Huang approached the dish from one other facet. He grew up in a Chinese language restaurant, so the flavors of the spice bag have been nothing new to him. After studying of the dish whereas cooking with cooks from the UK and clocking the model by New Zealand’s Andy Hearnden, Huang rolled out his personal iteration, titled Hen Salt Fries, on Saint Patrick’s Day 2025.
The dish goes heavy on an in-house seasoning salt, together with cumin, coriander, Sichuan peppercorns, and some extra seasonings. It arrives with a curry sauce meant to evoke basic Japanese model Golden Curry, offering a candy, sentimental edge to the feisty medley.
Throughout the globe, the price of the dish has rather a lot to do with its cultural supremacy. Little Dumpling serves a beneficiant spice bag for simply 13 euros, Pecking Home’s goes for simply $9, and Bar Snack serves the Georges St Particular, a cheerful hour-ish combo of a spice bag and a Guinness pint for $22. As a U.S. recession looms and the EU fights to keep away from sliding again into an financial downturn of its personal, these acquainted, reasonably priced objects — particularly variations given a facelift to make them really feel like a deal with — draw diners out when James Beard begins to appear to be a financial institution robber.
However cooks additionally acknowledge that upscaling the dish an excessive amount of would rob it of its 1 a.m., easy cool. Although some worldwide spice baggage have diverged considerably from the unique dish, together with “wholesome” recipes made with tofu or extra greens, most iterations keep on with the unkempt pleasure of a greasy, low cost mess of fried stuff. Regardless of the spice bag’s on-line virality, Hanlon and Alford insist it shouldn’t be a vacation spot, phone-eats-first dish.
Huang acknowledges that, for Pecking Home not less than, the spice bag’s viral second is already over. However he retains serving it for the Irish expats and anybody who fell in love with the dish whereas visiting Eire, the oldsters who inform Huang the dish takes them proper again.
“They pour the candy chile sauce over, the recent curry sauce, too,” Huang says, “and it’s this steaming, greasy bag they’re consuming. And once they put their palms within the bag, it’s a very, actually superior consuming expertise.”
A couple of extra spice baggage to attempt around the globe:
Xi’an Road Meals (Dublin)
Bites by Kwanghi (Dublin)
The Three Stags Pub (Redlands, CA)
Casements (San Francisco)
The Kitchen Bronx (New York Metropolis)
Irish Channel (Washington D.C.)
Kingfisher and Rye (Tacoma, WA)
