Bantry: Easy to endorse
The portions and range of side dishes at Willie Pa’s Bar & Restaurant were on a scale not often seen today. Picture: Des Barry.
AS all the recent folderol around marking the 50th anniversary of JFK’s visit to Ireland showed, our links with America run very deep and can be characterised in many ways, the great majority beneficial.
Nevertheless, that we became so very animated about something as transient, as choreographed and backslapping as a presidential visit must point to something unattractive, fawning and needy in our make up too. But then, to paraphrase a mantra of our time, that is who we are.
One of the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who lived and prospered in America but dedicated his life to the culture of the country and place of his birth — Tralibane, a hop, step and a jump from Willie Pa’s — was Francis O’Neill who was born in 1848, just after the Famine ravaged this country’s poorest people.
Though his career, a very successful one, in the Chicago police is all but forgotten, his work as a collector of Irish music, culminating in the publication of O’Neill’s Music of Ireland 110 years ago is his great legacy.
Its significance endures and it was, in its day, a part of the great, step-by-step growth in national pride, confidence and eventual political assertion that culminated in events which, for better or worse, still shape this country.
One of the better things, though the 1916 leaders may not have died specifically for this, is the opportunity to enjoy places like Willie Pa’s, an unprepossessing restaurant without road frontage but rather tucked away behind the facade of a bar. Though the address says Bantry it is a bit more than a few hops, steps and jumps from the town, a short car journey really.
An unfussy, uncomplicated place the welcome was warm and genuine, an engaging smile and a door held open, simple things but all too often just memories in the mythical land of a thousand welcomes. The dining room had that universal and infallible stamp of approval too — every table seemed as if it was taken by locals, one group celebrating a summer homecoming with family members who, more than a century later, had followed their long-dead neighbour Francis O’Neill to America.
The food was excellent, more hearty and real than showbiz stellar. It was the glue in an evening of pleasure, not the prima donna presence. It might be a good guess too to suspect that someone in the kitchen had trained in Skibbereen’s West Cork Hotel which had an almost international reputation for generosity. The portions and range of side dishes were on a scale not often seen today. Indeed one or two went back to the kitchen untouched because even a professional trencher can only eat so much.
DW opened with a salad of goats’ cheese and Jackie McCarthy’s increasingly prominent black pudding. The salad was so fresh that it stood in contrast to many of those weary, wilting bowls of compost-in-waiting offered elsewhere. It was all sharpened up by a neat and helpful dressing.
My starter was the best dish of the evening and indeed the best bowl of chowder I’ve had in a long time. This dish has so many variants that it has suffered in lots of ways, but here it was top class.
For her main course DW had a dish not often seen now, stuffed pork steak with a cider gravy. It was generous, well-cooked and entirely satisfactory.
I had a fillet steak, often the epitome of over-priced blandness, but Willie Pa’s was lovely, succulent and with, as the wine aficionados say, a long and deep after taste. Like the chowder it showed how dishes we may have come to take for granted should really be.
Desserts — a very well presented chocolate tart and apple crumble — kept their end of the bargain and were, if this phrase can be applied to food, entirely earnest.
Willie Pa’s was enjoyable and easy to recommend. It’s hard to imagine that Francis O’Neill might ever have imagined a place like it so close to his place of birth, but those who come to visit his memorial monument now have a place to celebrate his legacy in a style he would surely have approved of.
