What is Davy Byrne's in Ulysses?
Davy Byrne's is the pub on Duke Street where Bloom eats a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and drinks a glass of burgundy in Episode 8. He calls it a “moral pub”. It is still open, and is crowded with readers every Bloomsday.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Episode 8, Lestrygonians. Bloom, escaping the noisy Burton restaurant for somewhere quieter.
He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat.
What it means in plain English
Bloom has walked out of the Burton, disgusted by the sight and smell of men wolfing their food. In Davy Byrne's he eats neatly and thinks about Molly and Howth.
“Moral” means respectable: the owner does not chat, stands a drink now and then.
Literary context
In Homer the Lestrygonians are cannibal giants. Bloom flees the meat-eaters for a cheese sandwich.
References
- Ulysses, Episode 8, “Lestrygonians”
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
Continue in the Reading Room
Questions readers ask
What does Bloom eat?
A gorgonzola sandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy.
Related terms
Howth Head
Howth Head is the headland north of Dublin Bay where Bloom proposed to Molly sixteen years before the novel, lying among the rhododendrons. Both of them remember it on 16 June 1904, and Molly's memory of it closes the book.
Bloomsday
The annual celebration of Ulysses held every 16 June, the day on which the whole novel takes place.
Leopold Bloom
The central character: a kind, curious advertising canvasser whose wanderings give the novel its shape. Joyce's modern Odysseus.