The Menu: Remembering Cork restaurateur Dave Halpin

Our food columnist recalls formative memories at Halpin's on Cook Street - and its coffee refills

The late Dave Halpin: some man for proper coffee, says Joe MacNamee. Pic: Eddie O'Hare

The Menu was greatly saddened to learn of the recent death of restaurateur Dave Halpin, of Eco’s, in Douglas, and Webworks, on Winthrop St, for not only was Dave a hospitality innovator in his time but was also a gentleman. 

The Menu’s first memories of Dave stretch back much further than the above-mentioned venues for he recalls when Dave first came to Cork and opened his legendary Halpin’s café/restaurant, on Cook St, just off the South Mall, selling what was undoubtedly proper coffee, then something of a rarity around these parts, and, what’s more, offering refills during off-peak hours, a boon to a penniless schoolboy trying to pass himself off as a Left Bank Parisian existentialist.