Restaurant Review: Cork's Beantown Café banks on its American heritage
The exterior of Beantown Cafe, Model Farm Road. Pic: Larry Cummins
- Beantown Café
- 1A Farranlea Park, Model Farm Rd, Cork, T12 NX7P
- (021) 239 9400
- Instagram: @BeantownCafeCork
- Opening Hours: Mon-Fri, 8am-4pm; Sat, 9am-3pm; Sun, 9.30am-2.30pm
Having spent a fair portion of my youth growing up in the suburban hinterland of Beantown, my dominant memory is of endless housing estates and little in the line of social amenities, and once you outgrew playing on the greens, you looked elsewhere in the city for real entertainment and stimulation.
Centuries later, in September 2018, Beantown opened in a former flower shop, a tiny space that estate agents call ‘bijou’, and once I had finished rubbing my eyes at this great rupture in the firmament of my childhood memory, I popped in for a passing coffee. It was poor and I didn’t plan on returning.
Two years later, covid rumbled into town, and while the pandemic has mostly wreaked havoc on the hospitality sector, it appeared to benefit Beantown. Initially, as the nation took to endless tramping around immediate locales, it became a very popular, socially distanced, pitstop for takeaway coffees in an area largely bereft of same.
When al fresco dining arrived, Beantown gradually expanded its exterior footprint, adding substantial covered seating and expanding their interior kitchen, and by the time restrictions ended, the place was hopping, family and friends still living in the neighbourhood all singing from the same hymn sheet of high praise.
One morning, I tried a coffee. It was a substantial improvement. Not long after, a very healing breakfast bap of bacon and sausage held equal appeal.
It was time to assemble the Grub Squad, No 1 Son and La Daughter armed with their keenest appetites, one recent Saturday morning.
Menu is breakfast/brunch/lunch, seemingly the most popular hospitality formula on Leeside, at the moment, three other more recent arrivals all cleaving to the same formula. Carbs (croissants, bagels, baps and flatbreads) are foundations on which to build your brunch, employing the usual suspects —de rigueur bacon, eggs, sausages plus options of cheese, cream cheese, hummus and peanut butter.
Beantown is a diner with more claim than most to a direct American heritage, so pancakes get a prime billing, with as many sweet toppings on offer as a cash-strapped dentist could ever dare to dream of.
Certainly there is fresh fruit — strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, bananas — but all other toppings are the class of thing you’d give up for lent if of a religious persuasion, including Nutella, maple syrup, milk, white or dark chocolate, and of course, cream.
LD, a pancake freak, has the ‘healthy’ option: bacon and maple syrup, and lots of the latter.
It is the sandwich menu that intrigues me. Rich Otto is co-proprietor with wife Annalisa Riordan, and while Riordan originally hails from just 500 yards down the road, born and bred New Yorker Otto was reared in the sandwich capital of the world.
The sole reason I don’t order the ham and cheese toastie, one of the courses on my death row meal, is that No 2 Son gets there before me. Key to the Beantown toastie’s appeal is the descriptor, ‘butter on sourdough’, for, as any right thinking soul knows, buttering the outside is crucial to a good toastie. How much butter? Too, too much which is exactly what they do in Beantown, grilled bread wearing a glistening, golden glow, melted butter adding delicious lush flavour to crunchy toast.
Ham and molten cheddar are decent if unspectacular but still perform admirably — amp up quality and variety of principal fillings and an already very good toastie could become a serious contender.
I opt for a close cousin, the pastrami melt. It is not up to the toastie’s standard but is well delivered, melting cheddar, tender, piquant pastrami, topped with rocket, tomato and mayo, but, sadly, no buttered exterior.
No 2 concludes with a solid smoothie (mango, pineapple, banana) while I nibble nice lemon and poppyseed cake. LD can barely find room for a saucer-sized chocolate chip cookie, stowing the remainder for takeaway, and we finish with coffees, enormously improved since that first disappointment, eminently quaffable.
Beantown’s food offering isn’t at all ‘cheffy’, more like very good home cooking, and that is sincerely meant as a compliment, but where it excels is ambience. A young, friendly staff are most probably part-timers, no grizzly, jaded old culinary pros here, and it brings a lovely, vibrant energy to the enterprise, despite occasional small slips in service. But it is more than that.
Near the front door is a ‘manifesto’ on a large blackboard which details the origins of Beantown, recalling when Otto, a former teacher, and Riordan opened their first café, Gratitude Café, in Brooklyn, in New York, where the core ethos was on community values and putting people over profit, inspired by intellectual and writer Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, not your standard hospitality ‘inspiration’.
Beantown repeats the model, and judging by the endless flow of utterly contented human traffic of all shapes, sizes and ages, they appear to have done exactly as planned, confirming the best ingredient of all in Beantown is the life-affirming people — on both sides of the counter.
- Food: 7.5
- Service: 8
- Value: 9
- Atmosphere: 10 (Brotherly and sisterly love is very much in the air!)
