I didn’t think I’d spend Valentine’s Night, aged 44, in a city-centre pub having a quiz night. It’s ‘the music round’ as I order. Snippets of songs blare out more audaciously than a concert sound system. I’m getting older. Music is getting older, louder.

I can explain why I’m here, 12 years into our relationship, seven years into our marriage. Our monthly date night brought us to the Bord Gáis Theatre. After the show (Doctor Strangelove: excellent), the question was where next. Despite all the apartments and companies at Charlotte Quay and the encircling Silicon Docks, there are few pubs. Where have all the locals gone?

Some might go to The Storeyteller, about five minutes’ walk from the theatre. I’m pleased to go back there and see how it’s doing, two years to the week it opened. I visited it on its first Friday, the two-storey pub full of people and promise and interior shine. How is it doing? Has it found an enduring mix of offering and patrons?

Clearly, the Valentine’s Night quiz offering hasn’t evacuated the crowd. Some participants are middle-aged. Some are young lovers. There are groups of friends of varying ages. It all feels undefinable.

There’s little space downstairs so we adjourn to the upstairs bar: unmanned, only one other table used. It seems strange having it open without anyone staff behind the small bar. The art on the picture-filled walls suggests a place pitched at the young. After our first drink, when the quiz is ended, we’re asked if we could move downstairs. The post-quiz music is too loud. The four of us can’t converse together; we retreat into bi-laterals.

Throughout the pub, small white pieces of paper, the size of bar mats, are plastered to the wall. Each one tells a story. Clever. They’re all concise, some romantic, some interesting, some juvenile. It doesn’t matter. Everyone has a story. The romantic in me is tempted to approach the bar and ask for one of the little sheets stacked in a pile. ‘Steve and Alice forever’, I’d write. The moment passes.

We leave with the music still booming for the Friday night revellers. I still can’t put my finger on who constitutes this pub’s loyal patrons. They’re different to the young professionals who work nearby, who crowd the place after work, usually on Wednesdays through Fridays. It’s not the crowd who populate the place before a game at the Aviva. Locals? A mix of residentia and technia? It’s a city-centre pub in the part of town where the two worlds meet. Maybe that’s why it’s not so easily defined. Or maybe this pub is still writing its own story.

Two pints of lager, two gins and two Fevertree tonics: €35.40