Mrs. Murphy's and Sons - Expensive?

Has anyone been to Mrs. Murphy's and Sons this Fall? I was wondering how expensive it is. A dining group is going there and charging $45 for salad and entree (Grilled Pork Chop, Sheperd pie, etc) including tax and tip. What do you think?

Simple restaurant math tells me that the menu price of the salad and entree together would have to be in the neighborhood of $35, which seems a bit steep to me.

Best,
Michael

any reports on the food at Mrs. Murphy's and Sons? i saw a somewhat lukewarm mention of it elsewhere, in another thread. has anyone else dined here? any thoughts?

A group of six of us went to Mrs. Murphy's and Sons a couple of weeks ago. We sampled various parts of the menu: appetizers, salads, soup and a few entrees. The soup was reported to be good (a chowder -- crab maybe?) The house salad looked to be fine. I had the mussels and found them to be very tasty. I also had the polenta with mushroom ragu appetizer. Not much flavor in the ragu and I found the dish to be overwhelmed by the blue cheese that was on it. (Blue cheese that was not in the written description BTW.) Two folks had the shepherd's pie and enjoyed it, but were not overwhelmed. The steak was quite good, and at almost $30, it should be.

Nice beer selection and they had some very good wines by the glass.

Overall impression was good, but a little too pricey to be a neighborhood place. The place seats up to 200 on two floors. (The front, upstairs room looks to be the coziest.) The bar, imported in pieces from Ireland, is stunning, if not a bit overbearing. Appetizers and salads were decently priced, entrees ranged from $12 (if memory serves me correctly) to almost $30 for the steak. They also had 4-5 pizzas available in the $10-range. I can't comment on desserts because no one tried them.

I would go back, but can't afford to be a regular. I have enjoyed food from this chef (Rick Hall) before -- he used to be at the Blue Stem on Irving just east of the Lincoln/Damen intersection.

-The GP

Address, anyone?

Mrs Murphy & Son's
(773) 868-6300
3905 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60613

Went to Mrs. Murphy's last night for a family dinner. We started with the potato pancakes with bacon and tarragon sour cream. Good, but almost too thin. More like potato chips. Three of us ordered the whiskey glazed salmon with roasted root vegetables. The salmon was excellent, and the vegetables were equally tasty. Another had the new york strip with scalloped potatoes and french green beans. Overall, the portions were plentiful and everyone was happy. It's rare my family is in agreement. We were all impressed. I'd recommend Mrs. Murphy's as a great place for family gatherings or even a date. Def. anyone will find something they like.

Despite going to Ireland a decade ago and having a number of very good meals, I admit that I still wonder if the term "Irish Bistro" is a positive for sales. If English cooking was until recently a flavorless joke, Irish cuisine was the same joke with even fewer luxuries. Until the late 80s the sum total of fine restaurants in the country must have been a dozen or fewer located in upscale hotels like this or this (both of which we went to, incidentally; the latter had been visited by my wife's grandfather 40 years earlier). And the newer restaurants we encountered in Ireland-- the kind opened by young people who'd gone off to school in England or America, had their eyes opened to world cuisine, and come back home to open the first good restaurant in their town-- were mostly aiming to be continental restaurants, maybe making an effort to reflect the local products (seafood and dairy, mainly) but also to show the same sophistication as comparable restaurants anywhere in the world, and often in the same ways, so that there was relatively little that was distinctively Irish about the meals we had.

Breakfast, usually fixed at our B&B by the proprietress, was a resoundingly Irish meal, real oatmeal and bacon and sausages (including black pudding) and Kellogg's Corn Flakes. It was generally quite wonderful, though it was a relief the time one of our hostesses announced "I figure you're probably sick of oatmeal and sausages, so I made French toast." But dinner could as easily have been in Vermont or Carmel, the cute little place in the cute little tourist town with the nice young couple running it, anywhere in the world.

All of which is by way of saying that Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro seems more Irish than any dinner restaurant I ate at in Ireland, if the definition is a cuisine which does contemporary things with the kinds of ingredients you'd plausibly expect to find locally in Ireland (as opposed to Italy or Israel).

The location is a former funeral parlor, whose Disney-gothic touches are ideal for conjuring up the feel of one of those Edwardian hotel restaurants mentioned above. There's a large antique bar complete with fireplace (Ireland being a land obsessed with methods of indoor heating-- it's one of the first questions they ask a visitor, what form of heat you have at home), and then a slightly too-narrow but attractive dining room; there are also apparently much larger rooms upstairs replete with stained glass, and I suspect party business in this town of aggressive Irish-American and Notre Dame self-identification is a big part of the business plan, though it would be a shame if Mrs. Murphy & Sons only drew a conservative, sports bar clientele, the food is quite a bit better than that.

They started by bringing a basket of breads including a slightly sweet brown bread, a sourdough and little dill rolls (unnecessarily, and slightly oddly, precut in half). I skipped the obligatory Guinness-and-cheese soup (one of the few touches of excessive blarney on the menu) and instead started with a nicely balanced crab and corn chowder, featuring visibly real chunks of crab and potato. The bread was put to good use finishing this off.

For an entree I had slices of duck breast, served to an ideal pink medium-rare in a cardamom-clove sauce, with a tasty potato-prune galette and (the one dish that was a bit off) too heavily salted wilted swiss chard. Sweetish rather than savory, a little Olde English Christmas-y even, it all seemed plausible enough as where Irish cuisine could have gone in the decade since I was there. I didn't especially need dessert, and took most of it home, but an apple crisp with (very lightly) whiskey-flavored ice cream was pleasant enough. The primary dessert choice at other tables seemed to be bread pudding, which I needed at that point about as much as I needed a Malnati's deep dish with sausage or a Taco Town pizza crepe chili bag. (As it happens, they serve pizzas, too. Well, it is a bar as well.)

I didn't pay much attention to the wine list, but the beer list was quite good-- certainly larger than any beer list I saw in Ireland, which when I visited at least was still dominated by the big breweries (maybe the Campaign for Real Ale has reached there by now) and your choices were almost always limited to Guinness, Murphy's and one foreign lager which escapes me at the moment (it wasn't Heineken, but it was something about as common). (Of course, being "limited" to freshly tapped, not-excessively-chilled Guinness hardly counts as hardship.) I ordered a stout made by a brewery called O'Hara's which was very much like Guinness but with a slight extra hint of spice, and enjoyed it.

All in all, a nice place, better than it has to be, worth trying even by those allergic to Irish blarney in America, and contrary to the unfortunate headline with which this thread is saddled:

Mrs. Murphy & Sons - Reasonable

We went last night. Eh. Service was good, our waitress made sure to keep our water glasses full.

Our friend and I had pork chop, my husband had duck breast. They had a nice selection of wines by the glass, but unfortunately they do not keep them well. I had a glass of red wine from a winery we know (we buy their wine, we've been to the winery, etc). It was not kept well, I think, as it was very warm and tasted significantly different than it has in the past - and not in a good way. I sent it back and they asked if I wanted a replacement, and I said no (I didn't check if they billed us for it, I will check and report back later).

Both the duck and pork chop were overcooked. The sides, what it came with, the flavors, all were good, but the fact that they bothered to ask how to do the duck and then overcooked it anyway was sad. They didn't ask about the pork chop, but it definitely was way overcooked. It might have been OK when they took it out of the pan, but it was so very hot it could have kept cooking itself.

I'm not sure we'll be back. At those prices it really wasn't a good value.

leek wrote:They had a nice selection of wines by the glass, but unfortunately they do not keep them well. I had a glass of red wine from a winery we know (we buy their wine, we've been to the winery, etc). It was not kept well, I think, as it was very warm and tasted significantly different than it has in the past - and not in a good way. I sent it back and they asked if I wanted a replacement, and I said no (I didn't check if they billed us for it, I will check and report back later).

They did not, in fact, charge us for the wine I sent back.

We had our company Christmas dinner at the bistro friday night. The service was excellent and it was beautifully decorated for Christmas. Sadly, the food was just ok as far as I'm concerned. The martinis were flowing and everyone raved about them. I tried an English porter that was pure heaven.
We ordered one each of all of the appetizers including a luscious cheese plate with Cashel blue, a wonderful cheddar and a soft, sweet cheese with apricots.......YUM. $8, including fruit and nuts.
The prince edward island mussels in apple cider w/bacon and cream were very sweet and not very flavorful ($6.50). We also tried a duck sausage that was VERY tasty and some sort of carmelized onion tart that was savory and good but very small.

The Guiness and Onion soup was as yummy as I remembered.......very filling and tasty $5.50.

I ordered grilled lamb ribs glazed w/Irish Whiskey bbq sauce, kale, and whipped sweet potatoes. The kale was undercooked but very tasty for lunch the next day. The ribs were very good.......but a tad salty and I'm a salt lover. ($18.50)
I saw a cod special entree that looked very tasty...someone else tried the shrimp w/bacon and was elated. Another happily scarfed down the pan roasted duck and someone raved about the Shepherd's pie ($18.50) My friend had the grilled NY strip w/twice baked potatoes w/bacon. I tasted the steak and it was tender and tasty but nothing to write home about. ($28.50)
He also ordered the Bailey's cheesecake. I eyeballed it enviously but was too full to try it. All in all......good but I'm sure glad I was not footing the bill!

I had the shepherd's pie the other night. It is very tasty but a really poor value for the dollar.

A couple of items to add to the menu:

Corned beef and cabbage: Corned beef sliced thick with a mustardy-vinegary flavor that reminded me more of Vienna than of Dublin, a feeling reinforced by the red cabbage and broasted potatoes accompanying it (rather than the expected boiled versions). Good and filling, tho.

Bangers and mash: The bangers tasted to me more like a good version of Ćevapčići in a casing (Zagreb, anyone?) than the sausages I've become accustomed to at the Gage, but the mash, with its nicely carmelized onions, brought me back to the Ould Sod.

Other entrees were priced similarly or higher, but at $16 and $14 respectively, and accompanied by $4 pints (Monday nights), these two were both pretty good bangs for the buck.