Tom O’Connell’s restaurant is like a classic 19th-century novel. There is Grandma O’Connell, and Bill Casey and Nora Egan and Declan Ryan and William McCoy and Jane from Ardsallagh. There is Mary O’Regan, and Sean Kelly (of course), and Tom Ferguson and the Stanley family, and on and on they go, these vivid characters in this absorbing narrative.
And what do they do? They produce the great ingredients that Tom O’Connell and his team work into magic. They make the words that are woven into culinary sentences in this great restaurant. They are the alphabet of the story of one of Dublin’s great places to eat. James Joyce would have loved fleshing them out, and Flaubert, too. And both writers would have loved the ritual of O’Connell’s, a place where you can order a roast organic chicken, carved at the table, with bread sauce (Grandma O’Connell’s bread sauce, of course), or just have a Grantstown egg mayonnaise sandwich on Declan Ryan’s sourdough bread as you plot the novel that will make you famous. O’Connell’s is a part of Dublin, a part of Dublin living, a part of Dublin’s present, a part of its history.
