Murray's Old Irish Inn, Waddington, NY

Saint Patrick’s Day. This is a “must” day for the Julie/Mom Project. By blessed god or goddess we will celebrate this occasion! I saw adverts for a few places in the Julie/Mom Project hit list and considered some local places, but we we ended up on a different mission.

 

Well, we haven’t “officially” been to Scoopuccinos yet. I called them up, given their advertised specials in the North Country for corned beef reuben sandwiches and corned beef and cabbage dinner. It was JUST dinner. Julie and I wanted lunch and we wanted “traditional”. Side note here is that “corned beef and cabbage” is NOT “traditional Irish” fair but traditional “Irish American” fair. Look it up if you don’t care to recognize, this blog is about today’s world.

 

We briefly considered Maxfield’s (still on our hit list) and just as quickly rejected McDuff’s (written up last year). Also thought about Eben’s Hearth, where we love, but have already done for “the Project”. Looking through the “North Country This Week” adverts, we saw Murray’s Old Irish Inn.

 

It turns out that Murray’s is not listed in the North Country This Week Restaurant Guide that is suppooosed to be the guiding light of this blog. Well, I suppose we are off to new country then. We googled it, pretty much stop at main place and turn right. The St Lawrence Seaway was our guiding  sureness. We hit that and turned right! Turned right again and eventually found it.

 

The immediate survey found two small rooms adjoined in the center. The furthest room housed an inactive furnace fireplace and a mostly working pool table with over half the seating capacity. I honestly didn’t ask about the fireplace, it may well be in full force during the height of the winter season! It did not look disfunctional.

 

We were there for traditional American Irish corned beef and cabbage meal. Murrays promised it was there at lunch hour start for Sunday celebration and so it was! Julie and I headed out of town for not-quite Canada.  I joked about having our passports.

 

We found it eventally after realizing we couldn’t cross the seaway/border. Thank goddess for rural, sparse areas that make finding an establishment with a tiny, inobtrusive place an excercise in satisfaction.

 

The party was apparently over the night before... great for us, bad for traditional St Patty’s Day partiers. Not “bad” I suppose. I recall times in my younger days of St Patty’s Day celebration with too much revelry. So it was great for my day with my 11 year old kid, Julie, of the PROJECT.

 

We ordered our plates of corned beef and cabbage (supposedly profits offerered to a charity though i never caught what it was), then wondered about. There was a pool table Julie insisted on playing. I told her maybe and we did later.

 

The plates were piled high with corned beef, cabbage, baby carrots and potatoes, topped with a slice of buttered raisin bread. Julie asked about seasoning as we fished out large bits of flavoring, whole black pepper kernels and a bay leaf.

 

As we tucked into this smorgasbord, I considered our surroundings and presentation of the occasion. The large mirror backing the bar was engraved with “GUINNESS” as was other decor, including a proper dart board that was clearly not in use due to the presence of a structural pillar directly in the location of the throwing area. There was some typical green paperwaste garland and such, but my daughter and I were decked out in the most elaborate schemes for anyone there with our “I <shamrock> NY” shirts and green shamrock bead necklaces.

 

Julie got a green colored Shirley Temple, I ordered Guinness Draught. I looked for a tap and saw none. Out came my perfect draught. I noticed the empty box of nitrous oxide infused cans later. Works for me... beats the sometimes dirty lines in the places that serve the Guinness from a tap.

 

I asked about the process by which Julie ate her meal. I ate mine typically for me, a few bites of each item at the same time. I like to bolster the blandness of the potato (red skinned here) with a bit of corned beef and/or cabbage. Julie claims to eat each item in total, separately, in order of least favorite to most. I asked her how she felt when she then ate too much of her least favorite items and was too full to eat her favorite, “I hate it when that happens”. Curiously she claims also to save her least favorite item for last so as to use the excuse of being full to not eat it. The raisin bread went uneaten despite her claim to like it (two bites removed). The corned beef was second last to go and consumed in entirety! Both of Julie’s strategies seemed to be in play.

 

We shot one game of pool, poor Julie missing our rare lessons at my favorite bar in Hawaii. More lessons in how the table eats the que ball than anything else. The proprietor demonstrated a light-up silly hat from the party the night before and gave it to us, by which it failed soon after! Ha! I can fix it by soldering some electronic wires but it will have to wait for the next Vernal Equinox.

McDuff's on St Pat's Day!

McDuff's Tavern, 59 Market St. in historic downtown Potsdam, NY, was a regular haunt of mine back in the ol college days of the mid to late 80's. It was originally Morgan's when I first came to town my freshman year, but changed hands by the time I had joined my sorority a couple of years later. Though it had closed its doors for a short while sometime over the past 20+ years since I moved back to town, it is still a standby for the local college scene. There are several good taps of craft beer and the pub-style menu is diverse. They do good renditions of the upstate New York regional specialty chicken wings... here served with homemade bleu cheese dressing that is so chunky its hard to call it dressing.

So it was that I was wondering how I was going to find a good "family time" situation to bring Julie here for our Project, McDuff's being listed in the North Country This Week's Restaurant Guide. I have stopped in a few times since moving back to town, but never occasions to bring a 10 year old along. I even came down St Patty's Day 2011... by myself... to get my corned beef and cabbage fix. This year I was prepared to do the same, but then I thought to invite a dear friend (sorority sister) of mine that lives a couple hours drive away. My friend Charlotte is well loved by Julie and it all fell into place that we could all go and it would be a great post for the Project!

Now in my day at college here, all the bars would open at 8 am on St Patrick's Day, whatever day of the week it was. The hard core ones would do 25 cent or even 10 cent "progressions". The first hour, draft beer was 25 cents, the next hour, 50 cents, the next hour, 75 cents, etc. I have a good story of one St Patrick's Day, 10 cent progressions, 8 am bar opening, 100 cups of green beer in the middle of a table full of friends, and a political science class midterm at noon the same day... But that wasn't at McDuff's and this is a family blog!

McDuff's did open at 8 am this day. However, I had no desire to indulge in whatever beer specials they may have had going, though the breakfast specials looked tempting. Irish French Toast gets a dip in Irish Cream, 3 egg omelets with filling options including sausage, asparagus and smoked salmon are served with potato loxey, and the corned beef hash topped with two eggs is homemade. But I was only concerned with going in the afternoon for lunch. I had my own Guinness at home for breakfast. I have to say my mother is full blood Irish and my father is French decent, so the "Irish French Toast" name struck a chord with me, because that is pretty much what I am! ... the toast part being up for interpretation.

We ordered drinks first. I got a pint of Guinness on tap, Julie got a Shirley Temple that came out green and Charlotte got a glass of water that came out clear (thank goodness). There were three lunch/dinner specials and we each got one of them. Julie got the Bangers & Mash, mashed potatoes and white link sausage topped with onion gravy. Charlotte got the Corned Beef Reuben sandwich with potato chips, a tempting option for me. But I had to go with the full on traditional corned beef and cabbage. Julie has never had corned beef, or doesn't remember it, so I traded some with her for some of her bangers. Then the two of us scrounged remains of the Reuben... some bits of corned beef that had blackened on the grill... mmmmm.

While we were eating I tried to explain some of the basics of recent Irish history and culture to Julie. It turned out that the limited information on corned beef and cabbage I told her was kind of wrong, so its a good thing she really doesn't listen to me. I was just pulling up what I had heard or inferred from my Irish-American grandparents because this is very much an Irish-American tradition and not from the homeland. I was more familiar with potatoes and their relation to the homeland and subsistence and the Irish potato famine, but it was a disjointed history I shared. Better to just talk about my grandparents and the fun we used to have on St. Patrick's Day with all of our green stuff.

Julie saw the pool table in McDuff's and wanted to play, as I had occassionally played with her on the tables of my old favorite bar in Hawaii, which was also the last place I enjoyed St Patrick's Day corned beef and cabbage and Guinness in 2010 before McDuff's in 2011 and this year. I decided against it. We had come for our feast, sat in our protected booth and were done with our mission. The college crowd wasn't very much as of yet, but it was having some rowdy outbursts, spurred in part by some March Madness basketball on the TV. I finished my beer and we used the potty before we headed out on a stroll down Elm Street to my and Charlotte's old sorority house. We reminisced along the way while the college student, spring-break stragglers, decked out in green, partied in small groups in front of houses, enjoying the beautiful sunny day.