Restaurant Review: Old but gold classics at O’Mahony’s of Watergrasshill, Cork

Joe McNamee finds the best kids dish he has ever encountered in O’Mahony’s of Watergrasshill

• O’Mahony’s of Watergrasshill
• Main Street, Watergrasshill, Co. Cork
• Tel. [phone]
• www.omahonysofwatergrasshill.com/
• Open Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12pm to 11.30pm (food served 6pm-9pm); Sunday, 10.30am-11pm (food served 12pm-3pm)

I worked in London in the 80s as an anonymous line cook in a barely average restaurant. After work, stinking of onions and cooking oil, we’d head to late-night dens, pretending to be bin men, public toilet attendants, serial killers, anything, so long as girls didn’t think we were chefs. Chefs then existed on the lowest rung of labour’s ladder, save a few Frenchmen: the brother's Roux, Pierre Koffman, Raymond Blanc; but they were ‘French chefs’, gilded swans gliding serenely on the surface of a stagnant pond.

No, the glamour boys of hospitality were the restaurateurs and certain restaurant managers. They greeted and graded customers, toured tables like visiting royalty, lived in social columns and hosted the brightest parties. A chef might be replaced but customers were none the wiser and, anyway, couldn’t care less, as long as the menu remained the same year-round and their favourite restaurant man (very much a “boy’s club” in those archaic times) was still in situ.

We had first heard of Marco Pierre White through the culinary grapevine, but he was soon public property. He opened his own restaurant, Harvey’s, in 1987, and won a star almost immediately. A year later, he had two. By the time Cork-born photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, shot him in grainy black and white for the book, White Heat, the era of the celebrity chef had begun, chef as bad-boy rock star, the one most deserving of top billing.

There are still plenty of great restaurateurs but nowadays, it is more often the chef whose name is front and foremost, the one with the most Instagram followers, the most column inches, the one who laps up kudos and awards. And when the chef goes, a restaurant can struggle to maintain momentum.

I do think it is right and proper that the person with the most physically demanding job in a restaurant gets recognition, especially if their cooking is praiseworthy, but not all chefs are born to be restaurateurs. On the other hand, I often think a true restaurateur could never really do anything else.

Victor Murphy is one such, born to his trade, working in Cork hospitality for over three decades, in bars before graduating to restaurants. House Cafe at the Opera House saw him and Stephen McGlynn establish a template that combined superb hospitality with excellent local produce cooked with deceptive simplicity.

It was a real shame when it closed, but it proved a boon for Watergrasshill, as Victor and his partner, Máire O’Mahony, moved back to take over the country pub run by her family in the village for over 200 years.

Máire is also a seasoned hospitality professional and a professional artist; one of her most accomplished — certainly largest — “pieces” to date is her innately stylish and contemporary reworking of O’Mahony’s interior, an aesthetic pleasure each time you enter.

She and Victor are on the floor. Máire, charming yet understated, leaves the heavy lifting to Victor, the ultimate host, in a colourful Hawaiian shirt, radiating bonhomie, effortlessly re-calibrating his welcome so it is precisely tailored to the individual needs of each new arrival, oscillating between warm, hammy humour and sincere and gentle felicitations. Despite becoming an erstwhile Celtic Tiger dormitory town, Watergrasshill is still a rural area and you sense certain more conservative customers betimes view him as a flamingo when they’ve only ever known crows, but all are loving the show.

We start with cracking cocktails from house mixologist John Coleman’s list based almost entirely on Irish ingredients, a bright, breezy negroni and a fresh, citric margarita.

Spousegirl’s three plump and perfect scallops are squeezed in together like maiden aunts on the couch at Christmas, pearlescent sweet flesh, gently burnished to a golden caramel, a demure counterpoint to muscular bisque, scallop’s coral adding heft. White wine vinegar in slow-cooked shallots is a welcome grace note.

I have very good country paté, terrine of pork belly and shoulders with sauteed chicken livers. Port adds sweetness, bay leaf’s near-minty nip adds real character, pistachios a toothsome bite. It comes with crunchy, creamy remoulade but deserves a better class of grilled sourdough than tonight’s anaemic version.

La Daughter, post-playdate, is a broken creature but perks up for fish and chips from the kids menu, superb beer-battered haddock with gorgeous, gorgeous in-house chips and roasted garlic aioli. It is the best kids dish I’ve ever encountered, full stop.

Spousegirl takes delivery of splendid cod fillet in sublime Noilly Prat sauce with sweet meaty mussels, and new potatoes, crowned with the bright umami pop of Goatsbridge trout caviar. My dish is better again: Glenbrook Farm free-range pork belly, roasted ’til thick layers of fat are rendered as glorious crispy crackling, contrasting with succulent, tender meat, served with Paddy Frankel’s Kilbrack rainbow chard and butter roasted carrot.

A natural merlot (Chapeau Melon, La Vrille et le Papillon 2018) from the very splendid Brian’s Wines is fresh, fruity, and crisp in its delivery of earthy dark berries, quite perfect with the pork and doesn’t fare badly either with La Daughter’s note-perfect chocolate brownie with excellent Yumgelato ice cream. Treacle tart does similar, a superb rendition of an old but gold standard.

Another mark of the true restaurateur is to trust the chef to look after the cooking once they’ve absorbed the ground rules and the overall ethos. Do it right and a good restaurant can survive changes of the guard: O’Mahony’s has had four chefs since first opening (granted, Covid-19 played merry hell with continuity) but the restaurant has cleaved fast to its singular culinary identity; superbly sourced, local, seasonal produce served as a small plates menu of delicious, imaginative yet unpretentious dishes.

However, O’Mahony’s may have found its most-accomplished practitioner to date: Barry Phelan has an admirable CV (Thornton’s, Chapter One, Sage Midleton, plus two years in Florence, Italy) and it shows in the authority and precision he brings to each dish, the assurance with which he juggles textures and flavours. Just months in the new job, there is a sense of much more to come — and the “restaurant man” and his partner will be out front, bringing it all together.