THERE’S something magical about the tale of two barmen from Belfast who head to the Big Apple, take on the best of that city’s saloons and beat them hands down.
Fairy tales do happen in New York but in the case of the duo behind The Dead Rabbit, voted the world’s best cocktail bar for the past two years, the road to success has been paved with their blood, sweat and tears.
Ardoyne men Sean Muldoon and Jack McGarry share an obsession with taking a relatively simple task of making a drink for a paying customer and elevating it into an art form.
“Everybody who works in The Dead Rabbit is a bit mad and obsessive,” says McGarry, a rather intense but friendly 28-year-old who perhaps surprisingly, given his occupation, stopped drinking a year ago. “In fact, it helps to be mad working for us as it’s the only way to fit in.”
When we meet, McGarry and Muldoon – his senior by 17 years – are back in their home city to take CNN Travel around their favourite bars for a report aptly due to go live on the US news giant's website on St Patrick's Day. Approached by CNN to do an item on their own bar, located at the southern tip of Manhatten island, the pair instead proposed an in-person tour of the bars/pubs in Belfast that shaped their philosophy for opening The Dead Rabbit as a way of paying back to their home city.
As it happens, we are sitting in the Merchant Hotel in Belfast's Skipper Street where the two worked together for a while, perfecting their drinks alchemy before they took the plunge to ‘make it big’ in NYC.
Muldoon was the experienced bar manager, a married man who put the Merchant on the international bar map, winning World’s Best Bar in 2010. McGarry, his academically gifted number two, siphoned off every bit of knowledge and expertise he could get from the older man, and more.
Both went against the families’ wishes and advice to pursue their American dream six years ago; particularly McGarry, who was destined for university until his year off working with Muldoon turned into a cocktail-making odyssey. The two first encountered each other on the streets of north Belfast but neither could have predicted where their relationship would have taken them – McGarry was a toddler on the back of his father’s bike and Muldoon a teenager playing the Belfast street game kerbie, who stopped to let the dad and son go by.
“We properly met when Sean ran the Connoisseurs’ Club at the Merchant when he brought [legendary New York cocktail pioneer] Sasha Petraske over said,” said McGarry, a former pupil of St Mary’s Grammar School, who started working in bars at 15.
“That was the year that I was taking a year out, ahead of university. It really showed me that there was a career to be made out of this industry. I was working in other bars and had to wait for a job there.”
On the other hand, Muldoon couldn’t wait to leave St Gabriel’s secondary school and flitted between construction jobs, being unemployed and working on a music before he finally settled into bar tending in his 20s.
“I always wanted to get away from Belfast, to see the world and have an adventure. Where I was living, the reality of it was that any of us could be killed any single day and I wanted away from that,” he says. “It wasn’t a good environment to grow up in. I’m proud to be from Belfast and Ardoyne but it was really tough for a kid as I couldn’t get a job.
“I wanted to make a CD as I really believed I could achieve the impossible. It was pie-in-the sky stuff, but it was what I wanted to do. I always believed I would make it big but I didn’t know how.”
As a business and creative partnership, the pair blend smoothly together – Muldoon, the creative one who knows what he wants in a bar – from mood, tone and atmosphere – and McGarry, the man who makes it happen, from the drinks selection upwards.
They hit it off when, during McGarry's job interview at the Merchant, his then prospective employer Muldoon and he had a meeting of minds over, of all things, ice. Muldoon was particular, to put it mildly, about the consistency of the ice in drinks and judged potential staff on their ability to create it. McGarry was "crystal clear" about what was required of him he says, only half-jokingly.
Their potential was spotted by Galway investor Conor Allen who encouraged them to look to New York, where he was willing to put up the money for a bar.
Muldoon and his wife Ann went over first, working in a variety of bars before finding the Dead Rabbit premises in Manhattan’s Water Street. While the cash was provided, everything else was down to Muldoon and McGarry – and it wasn't easy. Muldoon admits to struggling until McGarry came over 10 months later.
“I genuinely think if Jack hadn’t come out when he did, it might never have happened
“Things had taken a down turn for me, I wasn’t earning any money – it was a terrible experience at that time,” says Muldoon.
McGarry chips in: “We sweated; we bled over getting that bar going. Sean ended up in hospital. He suffered a panic attack, initially believing he was having a heart attack. I also got sick and was in hospital. While Conor invested a lot of money, we invested our lives.”
They both took up running as they had no money for public transport and lived off an $8 chicken burrito meal once a day.
But when The Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog finally opened in 2013, it became a hit virtually overnight.
“We both knew that once we opened the bar we were going to destroy every other bar,” says Muldoon.
Now the men each own a 10 per cent stake in The Dead Rabbit – named after a New York gang of Irish immigrants, best known from the film Gangs of New York, which featured Liam Neeson.
They have opened two other bars in the city and are now proper New Yorkers, with hard-won Green cards, and are very much intent on forging ahead with their bar scene domination.
McGarry says: “The only way that this partnership will break down is if Sean retires or I’ve had enough of the industry as we are extremely intense and push each other very hard. Sometimes we can get upset with one another but that Ardoyne, Irish connection will never be broken.”
Adds Muldoon: “For everything that he does that annoys me, someone else would annoy me a hundred times more. The fact that we both went through what we went through to get that place open – nothing will ever come between us.”
DEAD RABBIT DUO'S TOP BARS
Merchant Hotel, Belfast – “Still one of the best bars in the world”
Duke of York, Belfast – “We drank there after work”
Crown and Shamrock, Newtownabbey – “We had a great session there last night”
The Spaniard – “Great bar, great staff”
The Garrick – “Always worth a call in”
Madden’s – “A real local favourite”
Kelly’s Cellars – “Great bar”
