First look inside Cork Opera House's new café: 'Have your lunch and listen to a great artist'
Half Moon Place. Picture: Cork Opera House
One café in Cork has a place in my heart as the perfect people-watching location: Cork Opera House. Nothing beats sitting inside the panoramic window/front wall of the arts venue with a coffee and watching the world go by from a surprisingly well-concealed spot.
So, when I heard the café had reopened with a new look and menu, I jumped at the opportunity to meet Eibhlín Gleeson, CEO of Cork Opera House, for a coffee and a chat about the new look food spot.
For such a modern, open building, the new Half Moon Place café just inside the main doors of the Opera House screams comfort and cosiness. The walls are painted a navy blue which contrasts beautifully with the calm pink velvet chairs and cushions around simple white tables. Eibhlín tells me their main aim was to create the comfort of a living room for all of Cork and “to make the place feel like home”.
“I want this space to be where people come and relax and have conversations and have cups of coffee and talk about projects and talk about interesting things that we're going to do as a community,” she says. “It’s really important to me that the artistic community and the creative community in Cork feel like the space is for them.”
She adds that it is also for the patrons who have been visiting the venue for generations and she hopes it will “deepen the relationship that people have with the opera house during the daytime.”
The comfortable chairs and plush soft furnishings were provided to the café by sponsors EZ Living, which Eibhlín describes as “an absolute game changer”.
“We're a nonprofit organisation, it's a lot for us to invest in the building and it's really important that community partners get on board with our vision. EZ Living really came on board and they made us easy for us to open.”
Eibhlín adds the staff at Cork Opera House have been enthusiastic about the new café opening and she said they have made the whole thing possible.
“We would never be able to do this or anything we do in here without the passion of the people involved.”
Half Moon Place is another step towards welcoming people back into Cork Opera House post-covid.
“We want to encourage them to come into the building as much as possible. This building is about people and it only works when there’s people in it. We learned that during covid when there was nobody in it, the building felt really sad. That's why we were really interested in getting our cafe up and running. It's for everybody, it's a really relaxed space.”
And, of course, you’d never know who you might see enjoying lunch at the table beside you.
“There's every chance you will see somebody coming down here for coffee who's performing on stage that night. That's very, very likely.
Half Moon Place offers “a very simple and delicious, easy menu,” Eibhlín says, with ingredients sourced locally and cooked by in-house chef, Eve. As well as lunch and light bites, it will also provide a breakfast menu and Eibhlín recommends “the most delicious, satisfying black pudding, sausage roll.”
Pouring herself a fresh cup, she mentions both the teapot and her cup are both from the nearby Mother Jones Market on York Hill.
“It's an amazing thing to be able to reuse because why wouldn't we when it's so pretty and so usable? It’s suited to us because they have a story, they've been on somebody else's table, they've been in somebody else's home.”
Eibhlín envisions creative conversations brewing over coffee, disabled patrons and parents with buggies gaining a new accessible coffee spot, and, of course, enjoying a live performance. A series of lunchtime concerts titled ‘Summer at Half Moon Place’ will take place in the café, starting tomorrow with vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Conor Clancy (Toucan), who will perform a free gig from 1pm.
The series will see new and established artists in the space, which Eibhlín says is “an opportunity for people to play the Opera House without the big scary auditorium. Come in and have your lunch and listen to a great artist. That's an amazing thing to do on a summer's day.”
- Half Moon Place will serve a variety of breakfast and lunch dishes from 10am to 3pm, Monday to Friday.
