Vacancy Watch: The former Transylvania restaurant in the north inner-city

Just off North King Street in the north inner-city, down a laneway, is a two-storey stone building with a sign that says “Transylvania Restaurant”.

On Thursday 6 June, about 10am, the shutter was down, and graffitied. Two big bins  on wheels stood in front of it, one red and one green.

This 200-year-old building, with its eye-catching sign, has had many lives. It has been a warehouse, a cafe, a Romanian restaurant, and a grow house.

These days, it’s just sitting there vacant. But the HSE recently bought it, and a spokesperson gave some detail of plans it has to bring the building back into use.

“HSE Capital and Estates are currently appointing a design team to progress the project through the normal project stages with a planning application to follow in 2025,” they said.

From warehouse to cafe

This warehouse was built about 1810, according to the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage’s National Built Heritage Service’s website.

It’s on the council’s Record of Protected Structures.

“It retains its original form and fabric and is distinguished by utilitarian nineteenth-century construction materials,” the National Built Heritage Service says.

“Modest in scale and form, it adds significantly to the industrial heritage of this area, contextualised by the adjacent linen and yarn halls and paper-making site,” it says.

In 1996, Charlotte Assaf applied to the council for permission to change the use of the building from a factory warehouse to a cafe.

And that is how Petre Tanase found it after he moved from Romania to Ireland – to seek asylum – about two years later, he said by phone last Thursday.

“I didn’t have much money in my pocket, I knew the guy who ran the coffee shop, and he wanted me to take it over,” Tanase said.

So he went and met Assaf, the owner, in Booterstown, and pitched her his plan, he says.

An idea

“At that time, Romanians who came here, unfortunately did not have a good image,” Tanase said. “The papers were full of stories about Romanians as beggars and thieves.”

“It made me ambitious to open that place to show there could be some other kind of Romanians, than the ones who go in a shop and steal something,” he said.

When he told Assaf about his plan, she was on board with it, Tanase said. “I told Charlotte and she understood,” he said.

Charlotte Assaf not only agreed to let him take over the lease but even sent “engineers” to do some work on the building to get it ready for Tanase’s restaurant venture, he said.

“She was my angel in the first few years when I came here,” he said. “I had only £360 in my pocket.”

The Transylvania Restaurant

Tanase says when he opened the Transylvania Restaurant – named after the region in Romania – it was him and a chef.

“I’d wear a nice suit in front of the customers, show them to their table, then go back into the kitchen, take off my jacket, help the chef, wash some dishes, put the jacket back on, and deliver the food to the table, looking very elegant, very smooth,” he said.

A 1999 article about it in the Irish Times, says the offerings were “Not your everyday menu, by a long chalk. It offers home-made bread, homemade Romanian sausage, and a variety of spiced pork and beef dishes. The wine, naturally enough, is Romanian.”

After some time passed, and he got a couple of good reviews, the restaurant started to get more and more popular, Tanase says. He says he also got some publicity by getting on Joe Duffy’s RTE 1 radio show Liveline.

As Tanase remembers it, Duffy rang up to book a table and got a laugh out of the answer phone message. In it, Tanase put on his best Dracula voice, and said something like, “Ha ha ha, this is Transylvania Restaurant …”

Duffy got Tanase on the show and talked to him about it, and also played the message on the air, Tanase says.

Soon, the restaurant was buzzing, Tanase says, a live band every evening, happy customers.

Last week, Tanase said he doesn’t have any photos of it to hand. “We didn’t all have cameras in our phones back then,” he says.

But it is still remembered. In her 2022 book Stickleback, Eilín de Paor included a poem about the restaurant.

“There’s a poem in the peeling paint, the disconnected neon, but it isn’t mine to write. I’ll leave that to the owner who proudly hung the sign,” it begins.

“To the goths who came mistakenly, expecting Draculean exotica, staying for sausage tochitura.”

Watching the door

Not everyone was welcoming to Tanase and his restaurant though, he says.

A 2001 article in the Observer, titled “Arson, abuse, stone-throwing: Ireland’s welcome for refugees”, featured Tanase, among others.

He said he kept “a bag of broken cups and a jagged concrete block – all thrown at him in the restaurant”.

“Often gangs of white youths gather outside his door. ‘They scream, “Whore, Romanian refugee, go home!” But I have nowhere else to go. This is where I am making my life,’ he said,” according to the article.

“‘They want me to be ashamed that I am Romanian,’ he said. ‘But I will never feel such shame.’”

These days, Tanase is living in Castlebar, running a restaurant called Blue Serenade. He remembers the attacks on Transylvania Restaurant well, he says.

At one point, it got so bad, he had to keep the door locked, because people were throwing things in and forcing their way in to abuse him, while diners were trying to eat, Tanase says.

“They’d throw cans of Coke or stones in, or come in and push me,” he said.

So he rigged up a motion-activated smoke machine and recording, which featured him in his Dracula voice, welcoming people to the restaurant.

That gave him a minute to see via a CCTV camera whether the people at the door were friend or foe, whether he should greet them and usher them in or leave the door locked, he said.

Tanase says he ran the restaurant for “three or four years” and then transferred it to another Romanian person, who transferred it to another, “and eventually it closed”.

From grow house to addiction service

In Google Street View images, in 2009 the front of the building appears in good repair, the windows’ panes intact letting the light inside.

In 2012, Gardaí found a grow house operating out of the building where the Transylvania Restaurant had been, according to an 8 June 2024 article in the Sunday World. They found “1,490 cannabis plants valued at €1.1 million”, it says.

In 2014 Google Street View images, the windows are boarded up, the shutter graffitied. And so it has remained.

Earlier this year, records from the Registry of Deeds suggest, the HSE bought the building. An HSE spokesperson confirmed the purchase by email

“The HSE has acquired No. 7a Henrietta Place to expand the existing Social Inclusion and Addiction Service located [next door] at the Henrietta Place buildings,” she said.

It’s part of a larger plan to do up numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 Henrietta Place, to provide “Migrant Social Inclusion” services, recovery services, and a “Recovery Café and restaurant”, the spokesperson said.

“HSE Capital and Estates are currently appointing a design team to progress the project through the normal project stages with a planning application to follow in 2025,” she said.

On Tuesday 18 June, the main Transylvania Restaurant sign was gone, replaced with a cheerful purple one for Soilse, the addiction rehabilitation day service, saying “It’s an inside job”.