Great restaurateurs do one thing better than average restaurateurs: they edit.
Look at the cheeseboard in The Oarsman, for instance. Sourced from the hallowed Sheridan’s Cheesemongers, it offers: 14 week-old Cashel Blue; Cooleeney camembert (they are actually cousins, so this is healthy nepotism!); Durrus, perhaps the greatest raw milk semi-soft cheese; smoked Knockanore from Waterford; Lavistown from Kilkenny; St Tola, an organic goat’s milk cheese from rainy Inagh in County Clare. That’s as perfect a cheeseboard as one could imagine – a blue, a smoked, a softy, a raw milk, a goats and a territorial, and it shows what the Maher brothers do: they edit. They select, they choose, they source, they know. All you have to do, then, is to enjoy. See how easy – and how swingeingly difficult! – it is to run a great restaurant? Aside from the cheeses, everything in The Oarsman speaks of the same minted care – Thornhill duck; Wick- low lamb; Hereford beef; Tom Beirne’s pork – and the brothers serve it all with a winning energy. Only fab.
