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Type: Irish
Hours: Mon.-Tues. 11a.m.-9p.m., Wed.-Sat. 11a.m.-10p.m., Sun. 7:30-a.,.-10p.m.
Good Choices: Bangers (appetizer or entree), jumbo stuffed mushroom, Caesar salad, Irish stew, fish and chips, shepherd's pie, baked haddock, all breakfast items.
Credit Cards: All credis cards except Diner's Club.
Access: Ground floor entrance; bar and lounge on lower level; restrooms on first floor but no wheelchair access.
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O'MALLEE'S
140 High Street, Newburyport
(978) 499-7999
Restaurant reviewed 12/24/98 by Bob MacDonald
As Yogi Berra said, it was like deja vu all over again. First a new restaurant replaced an old one but kept part of the old name. Then it served a dish just like our favorite at another restaurant that had closed last year.
The old restaurant was the Mall (rhymes with pal). Now, combined with the last name of the new owner, Clive Lee, it's O'Mallee's. The wood paneling and comfortable booths remain, lending a feeling of warmth and intimacy. While the menu has gone from Yankee to Irish, the dishes have more in common than either side would probably admit. Irish art and knicknacks adorn the walls; the restroom signs are in Irishcq, so be careful. Irish music is piped in softly until the dinner hour when the lights are dimmed and the likes of Louis Armstrong take over. Frankly, Louis makes for a better digestivecq than jigs and reels.
Dinner starts with a basket of two kinds of Irish soda bread, a brown and cakey one and a white one with raisins. Both have an unusually fine texture for soda bread, and both are hard to resist.
Potato jackets ($5.75) were true skins (not wedges), hollowed out and crisp, with chewy cheddar cheese, chopped scallions, and bits of Irish bacon.
Bangers ($5.50) were roasted until the casings were crisp and crunchy, while the mildly spicy stuffing had a contrasting smooth texture. Yummy. They were served with both a hot and grainy mustard and a honey mustard. The sausages are also available in entree form as the pub classic bangers and mash for $9.95.
O'Mallee's has found yet another use for the portabello portobello mushroom, making it the mother of all stuffed mushrooms ($4.95). The meaty portabello portobello was filled with an herb-sausage-and-bread stuffing that resisted sogginess to remain light and fluffy, all sitting atop a bed of mesclun. For some reason, the little chunks of sausage had all tumbled outside, as if ejected.
Caesar salad ($5.25) featured fresh croutons and crisp romaine, well coated by a creamy dressing that had a serious bite of lemon and mustard.
Ballymaloecq Irish stew ($8.95) was tender chunks of lamb with potatoes and root vegetables in a gravylike broth. Another British Isles staple was shepherd's pie ($9.95), a robust mixture of meat, vegetables, and gravy topped with fluffy mashed potatoes. The minced beef formed shaggy little meatballs that were more satisfyingly chewy than ground beef.
Burdockscq fish and chips were a reincarnation of what we used to get at the sadly now defunct Royal Windsor in North Hampton, N.H. Cod deep-fried in a light, puffy batter was equal to what you might find in London or Dublin and was served with a huge pile of curly fries. Tartar sauce made with dill pickles went so well with the fish that we wondered why nobody we knew had thought of using dills before.
A baked haddock special ($11.95) consisted of huge flakes of tender fish with crisp crumbs on top cooked in butter and white wine, creating a sherrylike sweetness. There was no garlic, as the waiter had stated, but we were advised later that this dish varies.
Mashed red potatoes contained scallions and the potato skins. Who says mashed has to mean creamy? There's so much flavor in the skins. Zucchini and summer squash were sauteed to al dente.
Caffrey's Irish Ale on draft, a new beverage to these shores, goes well with any meal. Dispensed by a nitrogen draft system, such as that used for Guinness, it has a creamy texture and a palate-cleansing bitter finish. Caffrey's is due in draftcq cans in the spring.
For dessert, there's a unique Irish soda bread pudding with whiskey sauce ($4.25). The whiskey cooks to a toffee-tasting cream that softens the bread and adds to its cakiness. Also outstanding was Midnight Craving ($4.25), an intensely chocolatety cake, dense, moist, and marbled with layers of chocolate, all in a sea of chocolate sauce and drizzled whipped cream.
Assuming that the difference between breakfast and brunch is a bloody Mary, you'll have to wait until noon for Sunday brunch because that's when the bar opens. Regular breakfast (the same selections) starts at 7:30 and is a serious affair: Combos and seemingly unlimited side orders cover a whole menu page -- various styles of eggs, pancakes, waffles, french toast...
We enjoyed eggs Benedict with perfectly creamy hollandaise ($5.75), and hash and poached egg ($4.50). The hash, also available as a side order for $3.95, was the most corned-beef-intense we've found. Our only quibble was with the bubble & squeak, a British Isles dish of potatoes and cabbage fried in bacon fat, ($1.50), which our bubble & squeak specialist found lacking in bacon-fat flavor.
The Full Monty breakfast here is called the Grand O'Mallee: two eggs any style, two bangers, two slices of Irish bacon, two black pudding slices and two white pudding slices (all four well-crisped), home fries, and toast. The black pudding was an Irish blood sausage with a distinctly allspice aftertaste; the white was a peppery Irish grain sausage -- Irish pepperoni. It was grand, indeed.
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