Restaurant Review: Ballydehob burger joint elicits a Yay! from our critic

"It is a tiny room but packs a mighty visual punch: in a part of the world where interior design often inclines towards ‘authentic’ and ‘rustic’, Yay! Burger is brash, bright and brilliant"

Sat, 05 Nov, 2022 - 13:57

Joe McNamee

Yay! Burger
Staball Hill, Ballydehob, Co Cork P81 VW20
Tel. 353 28 48 222
www.facebook.com/yayburger
Opening Hours: Mon, 5-8pm; Thurs/Fri, 5-9pm, Sat/Sun, 11am-2pm & 5-9pm

I first encountered Yay! Burger during the third lockdown, as a pop-up takeaway operating out of Hackett’s pub, in Schull, in West Cork.

Presuming you were one of those lucky enough to be spared the personal tragedy of losing a loved one to The Covid, or to suffer excessively from a bout of same, and also managed to avoid the economic ruination that was visited upon many, then it is entirely possible you shared the national experience of lockdowns, which seemed to cleave closely to an identifiable pattern.

The first was a dizzying cocktail: fear of the unknown virus allied to the novelty of stepping off the hamster wheel of life, which just so happened to coincide with a prolonged period of clement weather as the nation ‘stepped outside’ and relearned that, actually, Ireland is a very gorgeous part of the world.

It afforded time and headspace for personal reflection and many of us came to appreciate what we had all along but had failed to see, distracted by the remorseless daily grind in headless pursuit of some illusory better future. There were even moments that were genuinely life-enhancing. The third lockdown, however, was just plain shit.

It was winter. We were sick to death of banana bread. We were bored, stressed, moody, irritable, angry, and upset — often all at the same time. We missed family, friends. We missed the company of strangers in crowded places. We missed the familiar mundanity of our old ‘normal’ lives, and we took comfort wherever we could find it. I don’t think I was alone in taking special comfort in food through all three lockdowns and during the third, Yay! Burger became a favourite family treat.

In a West Cork devoid of people, as if it had passed through a nuclear winter, fetching up at appointed collection time to Hackett’s, softly lit with glowing red bulbs on an otherwise darkened Main St, was an almost surreal experience, a brief encounter with other humans before then hightailing it back home with the goodies.

I’ll give no hostages to fortune as we head into another winter with You Know What still lurking, but those first few months of 2021 really seem to have occurred in another lifetime, and as I fetch up in Levis’s pub in Ballydehob for a pre-prandial pint with three fine comrades, it is very much like the ‘old days’, as if The Covid never happened.

By the time we mooch 20 yards up the hill and into the gloriously vibrant space that is now Yay! Burger’s permanent bricks-and-mortar home, receiving an equally vibrant welcome from Gemma Greaney, co-proprietor along with her partner, chef Chris McDonald, I’m beginning to think The Covid was all a dream.

It is a tiny room but packs a mighty visual punch: in a part of the world where interior design often inclines towards ‘authentic’ and ‘rustic’, Yay! Burger is brash, bright and brilliant, Greaney rocking a colour scheme of black and white stripes with lurid splashes of sunshine yellow and it near shimmers in the glow of neon signs scattered throughout. I even grab a photo of the wonderfully irreverent little WC, painted coal black with zebra stripes toilet seat and a comic portrait of Noel Gallagher on a throne with a live cheetah. This is precisely the place to go to if you’ve mislaid your smile.

We haven’t mislaid our appetites and order for Ireland. Braised and Infused is excellent West Cork beef Featherblade slow cooked for hours and served shredded in the house brioche with Dubliner cheese, peppercorn sauce mayo, English mustard, pickles, rocket. The Frenchman in our party can’t stop raving about the magnificent ‘sauce’, though McDonald prosaically insists on calling it ‘gravy’. Whatever you call it, this rich, lush reduction of braised meat juices with beer and wine is a potent partner for sweet, shredded beef.

Queen of the Vines has a humongous and wonderful Parmanormal Activity (they do like a punning name in Yay! Burger), of panko fried chicken fillet, with garlic and Parmesan butter, mozzarella, marinara sauce, basil aioli and rocket.

The dips and sauces are all cracking: aioli, chimichurri, chilli jam; the latter especially good as an extra sauce with Honey I Buttered The Chicken, divine Japanese style buttermilk fried chicken with honey butter and wasabi mayo.

Cobs of fresh local corn are grilled over charcoal, sweet, smokey, buttery and quite divine. Rustic fried potatoes come with smoked rosemary salt and what we can’t finish, we make sure to bring home for breakfast in the morning when they are just as good.

Though the trip home to the table back in the lockdown era took less than ten minutes, any transportation of wrapped takeaway food invariably diminishes a dish, the enclosed package steaming the bun in the dish’s own heat, for starters, so I’m keeping it dead simple with a straight up burger from the daily specials, American Boy. A 6oz patty of superb West Cork beef, from Twomey’s, in Bantry, dry-aged and mixed with top fat and smoked bone marrow, grilled over charcoal and ashwood, is superbly succulent, smokey and deeply delicious, served with smoked bacon, American cheese, grated onion, crispy onion, BBQ ketchup, burger sauce, pickles and iceberg. It is, hands down, the best burger I’ve had in years.

Our weekend away was planned around a return pilgrimage to Dede at the Customs House, in Baltimore, which proves, incredibly, even better than on my last and very splendid visit during the summer, yet our night in Yay! Burger turns out to be almost as equally memorable for similar reasons of convivial companionship in a wonderful venue, all the while relishing especially exquisite food. All hail to the Yay!

The Verdict