The Dubliner, the Irish pub on Sutton Avenue in Maplewood, has served its last pint. An announcement on Facebook Tuesday evening noted, “The COVID-19 virus has caused The Dubliner to close for good.”
Eddie Neill, a restaurateur with a resume longer than a yard of beer, opened the original Dubliner on Washington Avenue in 2007. At the time, it was a popular downtown draw for Irish music, a proper pint of Guinness, and innumerable soccer and rugby games on the TVs day and night. The restaurant closed its doors “quietly, and without fanfare,” as reported by SLM at the time, in November 2015. The pub resurfaced in Maplewood a year ago, with Neill again at the helm.
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“We hurried it open to be ready for St. Patrick’s Day, developing and even decorating it retroactively,” he explains. “We had a rough start—and a rough finish, it ends up.”
Neill says it was “the uncertainty factor” that most influenced the decision to close, speculating that close-contact bars might be the last places to gain general acceptance. “And now we hear that the rebound could hit us again, like another wave coming in,” he says. “It’s hard to blame anyone for deciding ‘to take a permanent walk,’” his term for shutting down the restaurant.
Neill says he plans to concentrate his efforts on Café Provencal, which he co-owns with John Schreiner, as well as his interest in a Wagyu cattle operation where cows are fed strictly grass and live sprouts.
At the moment, Café Provencal remains open for curbside pick-up and delivery, where business is “two-thirds off, but viable,” reports Neill. He and Schreiner are creating space and dividers inside the restaurant, adding “psychological treatments,” as Neill calls them. He hopes that the café’s patio, which will receive additional plantings separating the tables, “can open soon and stay open. Having a well-designed outdoor space will help immeasurably,” he says of the new normal.
Neill, who’s owned and operated many local restaurants over the years—the storied Malmaison, Eddie’s Steak and Chop in Clayton, T. P. Neill’s at the Saint Louis Galleria, and Café Provencal in Kirkwood—has recently been working with a group of regional cattlemen who are adopting a new form of animal husbandry by feeding American Wagyu cattle “grass and live grains, like sprouts,” he says. The result is “a lean beef with better lipids that tastes, well, beefier…like the beef we remember when we were younger.”
Believing that a permanent market will emerge for “consistent, high-quality, beef that’s deliverable to people’s homes,” he’s working on developing consumer interest in off cuts (such as onglet/hanger steak), specifically the pavé cut (think a well-trimmed, lean rump steak). Neill says he can cut 200 nearly identical pavé steaks from each cow, producing “uniformity in an area where there was none before.”
The stay-at-home, back-to-basics mandates have caused Neill to rethink a lot of things. “My wife and I plan to spend more time at our house in Michigan this summer,” he says. “I think I’ll plant a garden.”
