Brian McKenna Loosens Up: Why Beijing’s Top Fine Dining Chef Opted to Go Casual with His New Gastropub

What happens when one of Beijing’s most elite chefs loses his love for the finer things? For Brian McKenna, such a sinking, fizzling feeling could only mean one thing: it was time to scrap his lauded restaurant, Brian McKenna@The Courtyard, and move on. 

“I gotta tell you, I just don’t have that passion to cook another piece of foie gras, or to read about cooking an egg for fine dining, and how it transforms in water at a certain temperature after so many hours and blah blah blah,” the internationally renowned chef says, with a cheeky grin, of his desire to own a more casual gastropub and grill, which will have its grand opening on September 12. 

His new establishment will be housed on the grounds of the long beloved Wangfujing establishment  Molly Malone’s Irish pub, which recently closed and is now being renovated to the Ireland born, England raised chef’s specifications, so that he can reopen it as Molly Malone’s Gastropub & Grill. The new digs will be far more casual than the courtyard, with average spend per head around RMB 250-300 – a 10th of what customers would pay at The Courtyard. 

“My thinking was: why not open the kind of place that I would like to go in my time off?’” McKenna says, adding that that notion came to fruition after a recent visit from his friend and collaborator, renowned Dutch restaurateur Ron Blaauw, for whom McKenna has consulted extensively – one of the many side projects that he had been struggling to balance with his Courtyard responsibilities. When Blaauw arrived in Beijing recently, he visited the Irish chef’s fine dining digs, and had one thing to say: “He asked me, ‘What the f*ck are you doing here? Only nine tables? Fine dining?’”

Blaauw’s point was simple – running such a fancy restaurant has been passé in Europe for nearly a decade. A far hotter trend – which Blaauw has employed to great success in Amsterdam – is to blend the best elements of fine and casual dining, in order to offer guests a quality meal without a stuffy atmosphere. For McKenna, having such a close friend and trusted peer offer up such advice only further whetted his appetite for less formal fare.

“Really for quite some time, I didn’t want to be at the Courtyard,” McKenna freely admits now, adding: “If someone dropped some cutlery there, everyone would gasp. But on my off time, I’d been visiting places like Feast and Jing-A Brewing, and had a great time enjoying their straightforward, delicious food and fun atmosphere. So I thought: ‘Why not combine the two, and have that great atmosphere, but make it more mine, with my recipes, to raise the food quality level while keeping the prices low.”

For McKenna that take on refined casual dining means not only readying simpler dishes overall, but also incorporating some of his long honed Michelin level techniques. His revamped Molly Malone’s Gastropub & Grill will feature English tavern fare like homemade sausages, burgers, and steaks, coupled with craft beer. But each will be elevated by subtle fine dining flourishes, while still being straightforward to chow down on. Prime examples include a dessert burger made of chocolate and sesame; fish n’ chips battered with a gas “foamer” canister typically used for fine dining foams and creams, to give the fish a crispier coating; and a steak and kidney pie which has a piece of marrow that is removed for customers upon serving, so that they can see the succulent pieces of meat tantalizingly flake off of the bone and onto the crust. 

He thinks this combination of simplified and refined techniques will make the new gastropub a unique choice for Beijing foodies. That mix also offers McKenna a chance to return to his roots, and delve into the kind of tavern fare that he grew up on as a boy at the establishment that his parents owned, which was a pub downstairs and a boxing gym on the ground floor. In those days, McKenna would practice jabs and uppercuts upstairs, then head to the basement for some well earned grub. “The food was slop,” he admits with a laugh, but added that growing up near the gym gave him the discipline he needed to survive in London’s feisty restaurant scene later on. He fought his way up, and eventually attained fame and acclaim as the head chef at Michelin-starred Le Poussin at Parkhill. Now, McKenna is thrilled to finally combine both sides of his upbringing. 

He admits the transition to Molly Malone’s hasn’t been easy, especially for the high caliber staff members from The Courtyard that accompanied him. “They still expected much of it to be elaborate, for smoke to come off the dishes right on the table in front of the guests,” McKenna says with a laugh. “It took a while for them to get used to keeping that complicated stuff in the kitchen, and make things simple and fun for the customers.” McKenna recalls one of those colleagues trying one of his new meat pies: “She said, ‘My mom used to make food like this!’ And no one has said that about my food before,” says the chef who has spent so much of his career working in exclusivity. He adds: “It feels really great to open myself up like this, to reach more people with my food, because I grew up with food like this.”

See pictures of Saturday's soft opening of Molly Malone's Gastropub & Grill here and book a spot to go see for yourself after its official opening on September 18.
 

Photos courtesy of Brian McKenna