A Rising Son
Uber publican Benny McCabe is betting big on Cork. Like, really BIG.
Benny McCabe should be miserable, joyless, hate tweeting, angrier than thou in his indignation, and non-stop giving out about the state of everything because for the best part of a year his army of pubs have been theaters of silence.
And if he were, you might give him a pass - you’d probably also steer well clear of him - because covid-19 has wrecked the man’s business of serving up drink and good times.
So before we proceed, let us pause, and say their names: Sin É, The Mutton Lane, The Oval, The Bodega, The Rising Sons Brewery, Arthur Mayne’s, El Fenix, Crane Lane, The Vicarstown Inn, BDSM, The Poor Relation. And all the ones I left out.
I must admit, I haven’t drank in half of Benny’s pubs, and in the other half I drank too much. But, regardless they’re all off limits and for now live on only in our memories, stirred by those moments of longing when we mutter in a WhatsApp group or tweet “I’d murder a pint”. What we really miss though is that polygamous marriage: company + pub + all the other elements = bliss.
But, Benny McCabe is not angry. Even better, he is gloriously absent from Cork Twitter, which might explain why he’s not always angry or annoyed (and annoying). He does, however, occasionally take a slash hook to Facebook to air his thoughts and grievances since the pandemic began.
Benny is, in fact, in rare form. The first thing he does when I arrive in the door of the Bodega on a Monday in late March, as half the country were giving out about the pace of the vaccine rollout or how it’s impossible to measure a child’s foot online or something, was to jump up, make haste to the bar and bring down a tray full of beautiful pints.
He didn’t. But a man can dream.
He did though, put in front of me a half a dozen eggs from East Cork and swore me to boil them, and add only a little of butter and salt. The New York Times has a strict policy forbidding journalists from taking gifts. Tripe + Drisheen can’t afford to pay either of its two staff, so we’ll take six eggs whenever offered.
Benny talked for close on two hours, so, as they say, much of this interview was left on the cutting room floor. But if you read no more, know this:
The path out of covid-19 “represents the biggest opportunity for this city in a thousand years.”
It was actually this point, Benny’s searing optimism for where Cork is headed, which is how this interview came about.
After I published the very first article on Tripe + Drisheen, a two-part piece on dereliction, Benny emailed me about it - some of the longest standing sites on the city’s limbo list are neighbours of The Bodega and The Rising Sons Brewery - but what caught my attention was, how in a few short lines, he expressed what I would describe as an alarming optimism and confidence in Cork.
In fact, Benny McCabe thinks Cork could “be the roadside bomb that could take down the likes of New York and London culturally.”
Benny thinks Cork could be one of the greatest small cities in the world. Or, if comparisons are your thing, he thinks Paris is the Cork of France. And Rio, that’s the Cork of Brazil.
Now, Benny laughs when he says this - he’s not some marketing gowl who has swallowed a keg full of Kool-Aid, or whatever the Cork equivalent of it is - but he’s also deadly serious when he considers the potential of Cork. And the possibility that we’ll get there.
So this is how I ended up in The Bodega, a pub that’s never quite lived up to its potential, which he picked up for a reported €8m just before the arse fell out of the Celtic Tiger in 2008. Benny is dressed in shorts and a Sin É T-Shirt, the pub where it all began and which his mother and father owned and sold, and which he bought back with a Credit Union loan.
Covid-19 has forced a reckoning on us all, individually and collectively. And Benny’s routine, just like many others, has been upended. But these changes I suspect have given Benny pause for thought and he’s had time, god knows we’ve all had plenty of that scarcity, to think on things.
The pandemic has also forced a new perspective on him. For a man who has spent his entire life regarding the world from one side or the other of a bar counter, Benny’s had the time to look elsewhere over these past 13 months. Panning out, looking out over Cork, the river, the quietened streets, the vacant sites, the people, has afforded him a new perspective.
“It’s been a fucking mind blowing experience for me observing, and the more I observe the more I read and the more I go hang on a minute.”
And what all this boils down to is that Benny McCabe likes what he sees. Like, he really likes what he sees.
Snotty Joes and bent noses
For a man who picks up pubs like you might pick up a pint, Benny never set out to own “a rake of pubs.”
“That’s not who I am, and I’m not comfortable with that,” he says.
While that sounds confusing, because he does own a rake of pubs, more than any other individual in Cork, Benny seems himself more as a custodian: he’s just looking after the four walls, the patrons and the vibe.
But also, perhaps this discomfort is rooted in his past; he didn’t like growing up in a pub and he wanted to get out the side door of the Sin É, and as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
“I grew up in a pub and hated it. I fucking hated it boy,” he says. His plan? Join the army, which on the face of it sounds diametrically opposite of what a public house represents.
The army never happened; but Benny was intent on leaving school early, and so he did. But it wasn’t because he didn’t like going to Christians, the centuries-old fee-paying all-boys secondary school.
“I had great school days. I just took the genuine view that by the time I was 17, I don’t want to be a lawyer - anyway I didn’t have the connections - I’d rather cut my wrists than be an accountant, and I didn’t have an interest in dentistry.”
Partly too, I suspect Benny didn’t want to play the points race, which, on the face of it is what the Leaving Cert adds up to. In fact, Benny thinks the Leaving Cert should be dumped. Benny’s got a few other notions, which are less radical than they would appear in headline format.
He thinks the drinking age for beer should be lowered to 16; Cork City should have an elected lord mayor and that mayor should have considerable powers; pubs should be allowed open until 5 a.m., if they want to. Most publicans wouldn’t, as he readily admits. But a few might.
Anyway, as he says “in his wisdom” he decided to leave school early and start working. And he didn’t waste anytime in starting his hustle.
He ran a few bands, discos, and clubs with a couple of his buddies. One of their ploys was to book a venue, tell them it was for a twenty-first birthday party, and then open the doors to a party of fifth-year students. Compared to the vast majority of 17-year- olds Benny was pulling down some serious cash.
“I wouldn’t do it again,” he says, “I’d go a different path and I don’t think kids can do that these days.”
“I made a few bob, got a wedge, bought a small shop, fucked that up completely, rented a pub down South Main Street and only half fucked that up.”
That pub was Snotty Joes, before my time, but Benny, who was 19 when he took it over, recalls some legendary nights that often descended into chaos.
Snotty Joes was also the last time Benny had a straight nose.
“There was a fight every day. And I mean fighting. The odd black eye, bust nose, but nobody got hurt.”
There’s points when I listened back to the interview with Benny, in which I thought, “linguistically how did he do that?” Paint a picture of a bar room wrecking brawl in which every body was injured and nobody got hurt. But, that’s half the reason you interview a barman: for the stories, and Benny’s got some.
As Benny says, it’s funny how life turns out, because if it had gone another way, he might have tried his hand where many an Irishman and woman have gone before him, and failed: New York City.
In the early 90s, together with his wife, the couple had applied for Green Cards; she got hers first, and headed stateside. Benny was to follow, to New York, when his came through, but before that happened, they got news that the couple were going to have their first child, their daughter and so his wife returned. New York never happened.
Benny’s still got grá for New York; it’s where he was in February of 2020 just as the West was waking up to the fact that the coronavirus had gone global.
Sin É, and the art of adding salt to a pub
By the age of 26, Benny was back in the Sin É, the family pub, except it was no longer in the family. Together with his wife he bought it back.
“Back then any young fella could get into business, all he needed was a bit of balls,” Benny says. And cash.
He got a loan of £10,000 from the Credit Union; his wife had “bate him in the door” warning him to put his money in Gurranabraher Credit Union every week.
It took him about four years, but by the age of 30, Benny had figured out something: running bars was what he was going to do for the rest of his life.
Of all his pubs, the Sin É is his spiritual home and “his baby”. “My heart is manifest on the wall.” It’s where, mid-week he enjoys a pint, and a flutter on the horses.
Benny says he has never gone looking for a pub to take on or take over; the owners come to him, as he is a safe pair of hands, and as most punters will know well by now, Benny loves an old pub, the older and more storied it is, the better.
“My father being a publican, on his day off he went to his buddy's pubs.” Young Benny soaked all it all up, “and I just have the memories of all these old pubs that are now ghosts.”
“You never really own a pub,” Benny says. What he means is that while it’s yours on the deeds, you are in fact ever only a guardian. “It’s a spiritual thing.”
“You’re a custodian of the four walls and the four walls are only the sum of the people that drink in them.”
From the Sin É, Benny came south of the river to The Mutton Lane and then west a little, over to The Oval. His recipe for restoration is minimalist: “Those progressions, sometimes it’s a bit like cooking fish, just add a bit salt man. Don’t ruin it, don’t fucking ruin it.”
With The Oval it was like an onion, peeling back layers until he got to where it was.
When Benny takes over a pub he does not take on board designers- he has his own crew - and his reasoning for dumping designers is that they design for designers and architects draw for architects.
“Publicans should draw for the comfort of their patrons and the general emotional vibe of the building.” Vibe is a word Benny frequently takes down off the shelf when he talks about what a pub should feel like. He does not follow the word “vibe” with “man”.
Benny recognizes his redesigns don’t always work to everyone’s liking: some people are forthright with him, going as far as to tell him: “Jesus you’re sound, but I hate your pub.”
Common Ground: A very short true story about a Cork couple as told by Benny McCabe
“There’s a couple up in the Sin É, fucking great craic anyway, they got divorced. Written into their divorce settlement is a tongue-in-cheek piece that he would get the Sin É and she would get The Oval, but they would view The Mutton Lane as common ground. Now if you knew their personalities you would say ‘that’s perfect’ it suits this former couple.”
Probably the pub which has been altered the most is the one where we are sitting now - The Bodega.
“It’s still not right he admits,” adding that “it’s been one of the more challenging ones.”
Benny shifted the bar counter from the back wall to the left as you go in the door, and there’s a very important reason for this, and one which he thinks partly explains why The Bodega long underperformed: the length of time it took to get from the entrance of The Bodega to the bar counter, especially if you were already a few drinks in.
“I used to come in here and I’m after three pints and by the time I made it to bar they were all looking at me, fucking hell, am I stumbling, Jesus Christ, and then at the bar you mumbled and…”
Which is one of the reasons he upped and moved the substantial counter to the Patrick’s Street side of the premises, so now the welcome starts at the door. Or it will as soon as we’re all allowed back into pubs.
Hope and anger
OK, so I lied. Benny is a small bit angry. Actually, it’s more like frustration. Partly, it’s the same frustration we’re all feeling borne of this pandemic, but also it stems from how the hospitality industry is suffering through the crisis, and by what Benny sees as a confederation of experts and political leaders making a hash of handling certain aspects of the pandemic, cheered on by a coterie of journalists.
Ireland is an outlier in terms of how long and how far we have pushed our lockdowns. With still no date for when pubs and restaurants can reopen in some format, some of Benny’s grievances are retrospective, as with the infamous €9 meal, the amount the Government decided was needed to be allowed a visit to the pub.
That, he thinks, was a kick in the teeth to the man and woman, the regulars who just wanted more than anything a bit of company, even if that company just meant them being happy out in their silence, in their place at the bar.
“You’re saying the socially awkward man or the single parent or the old guy who lives on his own and has to book in advance and pay €9 for a meal.”
“You could be slowly dying of cancer, for example, go for two pints a week and you’re going to have eat chips and a fucking toasted sandwich.”
“It’s insensitive, it’s wrong, it’s bourgeoisie, it’s Marie Antoinette writ large, it’s all that.”
Benny’s anger over the €9 meal could be read as both backward and forward looking; the pubs will open one day soon again, but we don’t know what arbitrary amount you will have to spend on food to justify having your pint. Maybe that won’t transpire, maybe it will, and maybe the journalism “echo chamber” will declare it necessary and important.
Between the end of July last year, and when pubs and restaurants were closed again at the end of October, Benny’s Heritage Pubs group served 130,000 customers in the city. Three staff members tested positive; two of them were close contacts with nurses who worked at Cork University Hospital. They also had three notifications from the HSE informing them that someone who had been to one if his pubs had tested positive.
This is part of what forms Benny’s case for arguing that pubs are a controlled environment, and he’s not alone in making that argument; it’s the same case the Vintners' Federation of Ireland have been pushing too.
At the same time, Benny recognizes the need for controls; he was one of the first publicans in Cork to close his pubs ahead of the first lockdown because he thought the powers that be needed a push. “But fuck me they got the push and ran with it, d’you know what I mean?”
That said, the data from his pubs, was, as he recognises, before new and highly transmissible strains of covid-19 were detected at the end of last year.
While he doesn’t have the data to back it up - to be honest none of us do - he thinks the shutdown has “turned 7,000 pubs into 150,000 shebeens from Christmas Eve.”
“And you wonder what went wrong?”
On the list of people unlikely to be ever be invited to a lock-in at a Benny McCabe pub are behavioural scientists, most journalists, weak politicians, and generally anyone who claims they are an expert, but never got their hands dirty.
He thinks pubs are and have been unfairly targeted by “a significant portion of journalists who were always anti-pub prior to covid. Many of them have struggled with alcohol.”
But Benny says it’s very unfair to equate alcohol abuse with the public house: you can buy alcohol anywhere, and, as he notes a lot of alcoholism is hidden.
So, this is Benny’s message, going forward:
"The politicians need to back off the pubs, the journalists need to refocus, and the behavioral scientists and all these experts need to fuck off out of it, or else come and work with me for a month, and then make up your mind.”
Checking in with regulars
With all his customers locked out, Benny and his staff have divided the city into quadrants and on the weekends they’ll go out and knock on doors and check in on regulars.
“We are their community, we’re are an emotional welfare network for many people who fall through the cracks and so when you close the pubs and insist on €9 meals there's a popular misconception that you’ve got the fat publican that plays golf and is in the VFI and drives a Mercedes and all the rest.”
We come from a more punk rock background and we were taught to look after our customers, like our mother and father did, that’s the real vocation.”
“You’re not actually attacking the pubs, you’re attacked the weaker sections of the community who need the pub to belong. You’re taking that away from people.”
“You’re having fuck all”: another true short story as told by Benny McCabe
One day a while back in The Mutton Lane, Benny was enjoying a quiet pint reading. One of the old timers, a regular, who Benny makes sure his staff call on every weekend since the pubs have been shut - “sure he’s only laughing at us” - was coming down the wooden stairs from the jacks when he stumbled at the end, put his hand out and in doing so knocked against the table where two bucks, in their late 20s, were drinking, spilling what they had left in their pints. And it wasn’t much then.
Benny had his eye on the scene unfolding.
“I’m very sorry lads,” says the old timer. “What are ye having?”
Now the correct answer, Benny says, is: “Yerra you’re grand, you’re grand.”
“The next minute I heard in the most despicable south suburban Cork accents:
“I’ll have a vodka Red Bull, so will my friend.”
“Two strapping young boys taking advantage of a small man stumbling.”
Benny tapped one of them on the shoulder, told him he was having “fuck all” and ordered him out.
“Who the fuck are you?” one of them asked.
They learned, the hard way.
The future of Cork and Benny McCabe
Benny is a changed man. “Basically covid has totally reinvigorated me,” he says.
“I’ve come out of this with an enhanced sense of place with a view of where this city is going,” he says.
“Now don’t get me wrong? Was I not fucking depressed last week in the rain, did I go home and throw the covers over the head for an hour or two? I feckin did. And anyone who tells you they didn’t is a liar.”
But those moments are fleeting and they are not putting a damper on where he thinks the city is headed.
He thinks the “youth are heroes”. Although the ones who are fetishizing working out and drinking to the extreme could do with toning that down - and likewise he thinks the elderly are brilliant.
He thinks that the pandemic is bringing about a resurgence in “political awareness” and that Cork City Council is being populated by “progressive people”. He also thinks the conditions are right for innovation and entrepreneurship - as he says, the conditions are there if you want to go off and join the tech sector or start a chicken coop and lay the best eggs in East Cork.
“Now that doesn’t solve the rent crisis and the accommodation crisis, but I always said to my kids ‘if you don’t see small business everywhere, there’s something wrong with that particular democracy’”.
“I see an overwhelming energy coming down the tracks.We’re at this point where we can take down giants.”
Benny firmly believes that Cork can be one of the greatest small cities around. There are others too preaching this gospel, but there’s considerable room to go. Still though, who would have put money on the city council to permanently pedestrianize 17 streets 18 months ago?
He thinks the city could easily accommodate another half a dozen mircobreweries - and that the brewers and pubs could be swapping in and out taps.
He thinks that “there will be places open until 5 a.m. Where will they be? I don’t know. Down the docks? Down Oliver Plunkett Street, where it’s not residential.”
“I really would like to do the 5 a.m. with no music. Or Tom Waits in the background. A bit of fucking Leonard Cohen, a bit of Dylan and whatever you’re having yourself.”
Benny will take on more pubs. The pandemic has likely speeded up the closure of quite a few pubs around the city, and in Benny’s care, they’re in safe hands.
But Benny, the messiah of Hope, thinks Cork is at a turning point.
“You don’t have to be in New York. I genuinely believe we are now entering a phase in Cork city… we now have the cultural diversity and the tech to be the roadside bomb that could take down the likes of New York and London culturally.”
“We don’t have to travel to the big cities, now the big cities are goina start traveling to us and on that basis Cork has it in fucking spades.”
As for Benny, at 49, closing in on half a century, still young but with one eye on his legacy - where to next? Well, one thing’s for sure, when the pubs come back he’ll still be putting in his shifts behind the counter.
“You have to,” he says, “otherwise, well, you’re not a bar man.”
“My situation is accidental and now I am looking at ways to make sure that the legacy of that, effectively, it’s broken up in to giving other people hope.”
“Somewhere out there probably passing in a buggy is a fuckin genius: the next John Spillane, the next Kevin Barry, the next Conal Creedon, Eileen Healy, they’re all out there.”
Roadside bombs, the lot of them. Especially Benny McCabe.
A very short Q+A with Benny McCabe:
Eggs: Hard-boiled or runny? Hard-boiled
Pudding: black or white? White
A book, or two, you'd recommend? Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday
One of the best gigs you were ever at? The Golden Horde and Sultans in Henry’s.
One of the best non-Cork city pubs you were ever in? Hackett’s Bar and Newman’s Corner House, both on Main Street in Schull, and Grogan’s in Dublin.
A piece of advice you held on to? It always takes twice as long and costs twice as much if you are an optimist so get your sums right - an old farmer told me once.
The greatest horse that ever ran? Arkle