Paul Mescal on Heinz ketchup, family dinners and his favourite Dublin dish
Paul Mescal is the latest guest on the UK-based Off Menu podcast
Despite his immense success and even an Oscar nomination, Paul Mescal is still a Normal Person after all, including Kerrygold butter, brown bread, and his mammy’s soup among his top food choices of all-time.
The Irish actor and star is the latest guest on the UK-based Off Menu podcast with Ed Gamble and James Acaster. During his time on the podcast, the Maynooth native gave the hosts a quick lesson on all things Irish cuisine and tradition.
The podcast sees guests select their favourite starter, main course, side dish, dessert and drink. While admittedly he has only recently started eating “fancier food”, Mescal has some interesting choices within his dream meal fantasy.
Growing up playing Gaelic football and rugby, food was all about getting energy, he says. Explaining Irish sports to the English hosts, he says: “Gaelic football — you can pick the ball up in your hands. There's a lot less jumping around and pretending to be hurt.”
As for hurling? “We run around and hit each other with sticks. It's like Quidditch kind of,” he says.
The actor also revealed that while he has been able to quit smoking in the past, he has gone back to it when something "bad happens".
“I've been able to give up smoking for periods of time. But I'm always looking for the excuse to start again. I'm always like, God, I hope something f*cking bad happens so I can start smoking. So, I'm smoking again — read into that what you will."
He also admits he has “a fear of tomatoes” or rather a specific ketchup after a childminder once presented him with a snack of an easy single cheese slice with Heinz ketchup.
"It has taken me a second to go back to Easy Singles and ketchup. The cheap ketchup, I still can't do," he tells the hosts.
In discussing his dream starter, the 26-year-old reveals that his mother Dearbhla goes a bit “bananas” at Christmas time. Last Christmas, the fridge was filled with cheese as mammy Mescal attempted her own take on a charcuterie board, though she couldn't quite get the pronunciation right.
“[She] fills the fridge up with stuff that nobody in the family really needs and is constantly sending my dad for more things that none of us eat and there's no space in the fridge,” he says. “But there is one thing that she makes — this broccoli, potato, onion soup… I would eat buckets of it."
And to go along with that soup? It would have to be O’Donnell's brown bread and of course, Kerrygold butter.
“I probably wouldn't even use a spoon. I would just be spooning it off with the bread,” he says of his butter choice.
For his main, it’s a spaghetti carbonara that he once had in Italy but for the side dish, however, he’s heading to Dublin.
“It's chicken wings and it's from a specific place called Elephant and Castle, in Dublin but it's Elephant and Castle circa the 2010s. The chicken wings are not the same anymore,” he says.
“I was like 18 or 19. [It was] my first couple of trips into Dublin, going out for a meal, chicken wings and chips and it was just lathered in this beautiful buffalo sauce. No blue cheese dip, no celery — they were there, but I don't go for that.”
He made a personal appeal to Elephant and Castle to return to their old methods of preparing chicken wings and joked that if it happened, he may even name his firstborn after the restaurant. Elephant and Castle Mescal has quite the ring to it.
And if you ever want to buy Paul Mescal a drink, a whiskey sour or an old fashioned is his tipple of choice but for this dream meal, he selects a cocktail called the Sergeant Pepper from NoMad Hotel in Convent Garden, London.
A self-confessed “sweet tooth”, dessert is his own “concoction” of two of his favourites.
"I flew across to America recently and British Airways do this chocolate fondant lava cake. I don't want that, but those kinds of cakes that are barely standing up when you touch them and it all breaks apart and the chocolate oozes out. That's the center of the dish. And then I want a skillet of half-baked cookie dough.”
The star concludes by saying the hosts would be more than welcome to join the Mescal clan for Christmas dinner sometime — but they may need to get another fridge.
“My mom would lose her mind if more people came. We’d have to get another fridge.”
