Mini Marché

Admittedly, my favourite thing about this shop is the name. However, it’s really great to see a family run shop in an area over run with ‘the enemy’ as they call Spar and Centra. The owners are always friendly and ask you how you’ve been. At different parts of the day you’ll meet the wife, husband, and their sons behind the counter. One time I was having trouble with my DVD player and the husband actually offered a great deal of advice and told me to come back in to him if his suggestions didn’t work!
They’ve got everything you could imagine and I even found marshmallows there once that I couldn’t find in Dunnes or Tesco. Some of the food in there is a bit dated as Ciara pointed out. One time I bought a bag of Dorito’s ony to bring them home to find out that the bag had been opened and they were stale. Another time my flatmate went to buy milk and all sell by dates had passed the week before. So if you decided to fight against the corporate giants and support this shop, as I suggest you do, it might be best to stick to non-​perishables!

The Mini Marche is where I stop off for the paper on the way home from Aldi. It’s an independent newsagent (one of a dying breed) in the centre of Rathmines, selling everything from newspapers and magazines to cheap bottles of wine, yellowing boxes of toothpaste and jars of Bisto gravy that look like they’ve been sitting on the shelf since the early nineties.
Its choca-​block with random cupboard staples that you may have run out of and need in a hurry at 10pm, pick-​and-​mix, chocolate bars and sweets and cheap crisps of every variety.
They also sell take-​away coffee (and this is where they fall down in my opinion) — a spoon of instant nescafe in a polystyrene cup. YUK. And it aint really instant in any case, as you will have to wait for hte kettle to boil. Expect to pay € 2 for this cup of horribleness.

One of those places that tries to cater to as many needs as possible in one shop, and it does a pretty good job. From cards to groceries to sandwiches to newspapers, they fill the little place up with quite a lot of stuff for you to purchase.
Though Rathmines is littered with Spars and Centras this little family-​run business has managed to hold on in there despite the intense competition, although it probably has a little location advantage as it’s just far enough away from the swan centre for you to consider being lazy and just buying what you need here.