[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and change maker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks so much for having me here with you today. I'm wondering if you could just introduce yourself by saying your name and your pronouns.
[Barry Rafferty]: Barry Rafferty, he, him.
[Danielle Balocca]: All right, thanks Barry. So we are today sitting here inside your bar that's set to be open in a couple months. But before we get into talking about the new bar, I'm wondering if you can answer the question that we ask everybody on the podcast, which is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[Barry Rafferty]: Well, that's a great question. I spend a lot of time in the Ford Tavern, obviously. But outside of that, I love two places in particular, the Magnificent Muffin and Bagel. The guys in there do a great job. And Goldilocks, the guys in there do a great job, too.
[Danielle Balocca]: You mentioned you get the same sandwich at Magnificent Muffin.
[Barry Rafferty]: I do.
[Danielle Balocca]: What do you order there?
[Barry Rafferty]: It's club sandwich on white, bacon, sausage, salt, pepper. It's not good for me, but it's wonderful. Delicious. Thanks. Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: All right, so like I said, and like you said, we know you as the owner of the Ford, or most people would know you that way. But we're sitting right now inside a construction zone in Medford Square, in what will soon be your new bar. So I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you arrived at this point in wanting to open a bar, and kind of what your vision is here.
[Barry Rafferty]: Well, you know, I'm a Medford resident, obviously, and there was a winter, two winters ago, it was a January evening around 8.30, I was going on one of my walks. It was a snowy, cold evening and, you know, as we all do, there was a million things going through my mind, but as I was walking through Medford Square, I saw a for lease sign on this premises. And I found it intriguing, but I was not interested at that point, really, in opening another bar. I had my hands full with the Ford. It was only open about a year, I think, at that point. And then I walked about two buildings down, and I saw this old red-bricked wall, and I questioned whether the unit that we're sitting in now also has that red-brick wall, because I began to see in my mind the starting ideas of how a back bar might look against an old wall that's, I don't know, as we look at it now, it's probably a hundred years old. On top of that, when I saw the for lease sign, it was John Veneziano, who happens to be my neighbor, And I thought, yeah, no, Barry, keep walking. So by the time I got back to my house, I thought, you know, I'll call John tomorrow. I'll go walk through it and see what my opinion is. So I did call John the next morning. I think about 45 minutes later, I ended up here in 25 Salem Street. And the wall that I hoped was here was covered by, I don't know what the surface was, foolishly or what maybe I shouldn't have done it but I just kicked a little hole at the bottom of that surface and I see behind it that there was a red brick wall so I thought okay well okay that's a good start. On top of which I liked the size of it because if I was going to do an Irish bar I was going to make sure that it was small and cozy so the size certainly worked for me and there's a great basement downstairs that I could have storage and so forth in and what really closed the deal for me was there's a little space at the back of this unit that we can put a patio on. It's semi-enclosed, it's not There's no difficulties in relation to residents because there's no apartments close by. And I thought, hmm, I could put a little deck out here, a little TV perhaps, and it's a place that you'll walk out to and you'll think, hmm, I think I'll sit down here, have my pint, and stay for the afternoon. So I met the landlord, a gentleman called John Costas, and we agreed on a rent, and that was, I don't know, gosh, it could be nearly two years ago. And here we are about two months away, or circa two months away from opening what will be an Irish bar called Mrs. Murphy's. I called it Mrs. Murphy's, my mother-in-law is a Murphy, is a Mrs. Murphy obviously, and my wife is obviously Murphy, and I thought You know, as against going with Murphy's or Murphy's Bar, I wanted to kind of put a female friendly element into it and Mrs. Murphy's was born. And what that did for me also was kind of give me an idea of how I wanted it to look. And when I go back to my own childhood in Ireland, all we have is memories, Danielle. And, you know, my memory is not what it used to be, but there's certain moments in my life that I'll never forget. One of which is going to my grandmother's farm in County Mayo, where she had this old, small farmhouse on 50 acres of really poor land, stones, rocks, very hard to make a living out of, to such a degree that she had to come over to America for three or four years at a time, a nanny in a house in Manhattan to earn enough money to keep the family farm going, leave her three daughters behind. Very difficult, very hard times, but I used to go to my grandmother's house when she returned. I might spend the whole summer there by myself. I had five other siblings. So there was six of us, but none of them wanted to go to Mayo. They were all happy to stay in their house in Dublin and play with their friends and do their own thing. But I felt like my grandmother was, she was elderly at that point. And I didn't like her staying there by herself. And I used to help her paint the gates and get rid of weeds and as much as I could help her. But she had, She had this old farmhouse, as I alluded to, and in this house, it's extraordinary really, the house might have been, I don't know, 900 square feet maybe, but of the 900 square feet, 400 square feet was devoted to a room called the good room. And the good room was not to be used by anybody. It was simply to be there for when the priest called into the house, or the lawyer called into the house, or the accountant, anybody with a profession. And the good china would come out, the tea and whiskey would be produced, and then when they left, it was all removed, and the door was closed, and you didn't go back in. But when I think about that old room, I began to think about how I would like to dress this bar, and how I would like the feeling of this bar to be. So it goes back to my grandmother, it goes back to my wife's mother now, and hopefully it'll go back to my children when it's my time to go.
[Danielle Balocca]: Wow, that reminds me of people here, they have the formal living room where everything is covered in plastic.
[Barry Rafferty]: Yeah, it reminds me of Everybody Loves Raymond, showing that. It's true, and Seinfeld for that matter too. It's bizarre, I think the world has changed somewhat since then. We don't do that anymore. But yeah, it's kind of nice. I kind of like it. But when you have a 900 square foot house and 400 square feet is not available to you, it's kind of bizarre.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, for sure. So you're going for something to honor that aesthetic. How would you describe how you want it to be in here?
[Barry Rafferty]: So, you know, old. I would open with that. I'd love to when it's finished, I'd love for it to look like it's been here for 70 years. Now, it's easy to say that, Danielle. It's very hard to do. And I've spent, I don't know how many road trips going up to New Hampshire to, you know, salvage yards, antique reclamation, all sorts of places to try to find, you know, five or six or seven or 10 pieces that I can kind of incorporate here that go back to 50, 100, 150 years ago. So as we sit here now, as I just described before we went live, is, you know, there's two pieces, there's three, there's four pieces that I bought that came out of a mansion in Beacon Hill that was built in 1880. And it's extraordinary to think really, when I think about that, the craftsmanship that's gone into these pieces, there was no machinery like we have now. Weeks and weeks and months of time spent on these wonderful pieces that are now being reborn into something else and hopefully will be here for another hundred years. So, I wanted to kind of get a base of, okay, so if I get a certain amount of pieces that is old, that are old, I'll build around that. So, as we sit here, it's very hard for people to listen to us to try to explain it, but we're going to go back to old world benches, wainscoting, dark woods, Not unusual for an Irish bar, let's be clear about that. But warm, friendly, like when I walk into a bar and I feel like, gosh, they're nearly putting a blanket around me to make sure that I feel loved and respected and that they're glad that you're here. And that's what we're going to try to do. And then on the walls, what we'd like to do is, as against getting generic pictures and sayings and so forth, have something that means something. Unfortunately for me, I was on the phone to my mother yesterday about her old pictures of where she grew up and my grandmother and so forth. And unfortunately, she moved house about four years ago. It's all been lost. So she has a sister. So I'm hoping that that isn't going to be lost. So I'd like to kind of incorporate part of the wall space to what was important to me and when I grew up and how times are much simpler then. And they truly were much simpler. So we're not going to try to create something here that's cool. We want to be the antithesis of cool, in truth. We want it to be old and comfortable and familiar, where you don't feel I have to get dressed up. You walk in, you have a beer or two, or whatever else takes your fancy, and you leave thinking, yeah, it's kind of an extension of my living room.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, but I've heard the way that like the sort of culture around pubs in Ireland feels really different than like a bar. Yeah, I'm going to a sports bar here. And so like, you know, I think we know from the Ford, like that you're very community oriented, right, that like you guys do a lot of work in the community, people know you a lot, I think for that. So I guess what are you hoping for? You mentioned how you want people to kind of feel at home here. What are you hoping for, like an impact for the community, or how the community will interact with this?
[Barry Rafferty]: That's a great question, Daniel, and I'll explain why, in my view, why. There's a misconception, A, that Irish people I can't say drink too much because, gosh, who defines what that is? But Irish people use a bar or pub, which this is going to be, they use it as a means to communicate with their friends, to meet new people. They don't just come in for a beer or gin and tonic or whatever it may be. They come in to interact before they go home or before they go to bed and it's a community space. And if I can achieve anything, that would be my hope. That it's somewhere, I'll meet you in Mrs. Murphy's. We'll have a few beers, we'll have a chat, we'll have a bit of a laugh, and then we'll go home. That's what I would hope it to be. Like Medford, I live less than, I don't know, half a mile from here, and the Ford is, I don't know, a further mile down the road. I'm at an age now, Danielle, where the idea of walking a mile and a half down to a bar is not really appealing to me. But it certainly would appeal to me, given where I live now, to be able to walk, I don't know, eight minute walk down here, meet some people, and go home. But the amount of housing that surrounds where we are now, I would also hope they can leave their cars behind, they can walk, meet their friends and walk home from there. I'm in Medford, gosh, 11 years now. I married a lady from Medford called Erin Murphy. And quite frankly, it changed my life. I'll say that all for the good. I'll say that too. And when we moved back from Ireland, because Erin had lived with me for two years or so in Dublin, and we had no intention, to be honest, of coming back to America. And neither did Erin. It just happened. By chance, I won't go into how or why, but the reality is it was a very unusual occurrence. And to such a degree that I was given an opportunity to come work for a large company in Boston, an opportunity that I wasn't looking for, and they pursued me. And I just thought one day, yeah, you know what, let's go. So that's how I ended up in Medford. There's a few funny little stories about Medford from my point of view. I remember my wife's family used to live kind of very close to Haynes Square. And I remember I went for a walk one evening and I sat on a bench at a bus stop. And I was watching the world go by, trying to figure out where am I? What am I living in? Because it was all new. And it's very different than what I was used to. And I couldn't figure it out. I'd say to Erin, let's go to a bar for a drink, and she'd bring me to what I would have called a restaurant. And I'd say, well, this is not a bar. I want to go to a bar. She'd say, well, this is a bar. I'd say, no, it's a restaurant. And there's no delineation here. There certainly wasn't. Not at Redford, yeah. Yeah. So we went to a few places, and my dream began there. okay, well, if I'm going to do something by myself, I'm going to do it in Medford. And here I am with the second place coming. I hope it's my last, to be honest. I'm old and grey and bald and I'm tired. But, you know, when I look at the projects that I've done over my life, this might be the nearest and dearest to my heart. I want a little piece of Ireland here. And I get emotional even thinking about that.
[Danielle Balocca]: And I think people are excited for it too.
[Barry Rafferty]: Yeah, I know the Chevalier certainly are. I know, you know, from when I go through the square and I think about, you know, people from other cities parking their cars, trying to get somewhere to eat or have a drink in Medford Square before they go to the Chevalier. Everyone's so busy, but there's not enough places. I think that's fair to say. And this might play a little part in helping with that. I certainly hope it will, and I'm pretty sure it will, actually. Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: And I remember, I mean, I remember coming, I was like teaching a podcast class at the library that went till eight, and I was like, I just want to get a drink after the class. I had to go to the Ford. There's nothing open here. I mean, it was great to go to the Ford, but I had to drive across town.
[Barry Rafferty]: No, no, I get it. I completely get it. Yeah. I mean, people think sometimes, you know, competition is good. That's my view. So I don't believe the Ford will be Competition or Mrs. Murphy's will be competition for the board. I think it'll bring in new opportunities a new business and This city needs more competition. Yeah, and if competition comes for us here for mrs. Murphy's great bring it on Yeah, let's go.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, we were we went to uh, I was worried about I Medford Brewing since the beer hall opened.
[Barry Rafferty]: Yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: And we went to trivia there.
[Barry Rafferty]: You're right.
[Danielle Balocca]: It was crowded. We couldn't even sit down. So I think, you know, we're primed for wanting more.
[Barry Rafferty]: It's helped Medford. There's no question in my mind about that. Yeah, it has. So yeah, it's good.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome. And so when do you, like, do you have an estimate on when you'll be opening?
[Barry Rafferty]: Yes, this is a question I'm asked on a regular basis. I've been asked it consistently for a year in the Ford. And in truth, you know, I thought this would be open I think last April. Yeah, I think it was going to be April. And I'm keen to get it open But I'm also keen, insofar as I can, to get it right. And then I had to tie in with a general contractor, who was also the contractor who built out the Ford. I loved them, great people, great craftsmen, honest people. So I was prepared to wait for them to be ready. So that took a few months. On top of which, the design and planning, there's far more goes into this than people understand. And even though, as we sit here, it's only, a footprint of 1510 square feet, I think. You think, well, that's, I mean, how difficult can that be? But I promise you, it is very difficult. And then the whole permitting process and so forth is a skill set that I still haven't acquired. So it's taken some time. But to answer your question, I'm going to say by mid-January I'd be very confident it would be open.
[Danielle Balocca]: Is there an element of the pub or any part of it that you're most excited for people to see?
[Barry Rafferty]: Well, there's several. There's an area, I think we spoke offline about this too, there's an area, as you walk in the door on the left, there was a thing called a snug in Ireland, and it was a private enclosed space where, we're going back, gosh, 80 to 100 years, where the ladies who liked to have a little beverage didn't want the world seeing them having their little beverage, so the bars created an area called a snug where it was women only. And even though the world has changed, there is an area we are doing a little snug. Will it be women only? Well, you'll have to come in to find out yourselves. But I like the concept of it. And that's the area I think, yeah, I'm the most excited about. I'm excited too.
[Danielle Balocca]: Is there anything else you want people to know about?
[Barry Rafferty]: Well, we haven't discussed Armenia because in truth, I don't know what the menu is now. We're, what, eight, nine, ten weeks away from opening it. I don't know how brave I want to be. I know I want it to be great food. That's easier said than done. The menu, in as far as I can make it authentic Irish, has to be married with the fact that we are in Medford in the USA. So it'll be an Americanized version of an Irish menu. It will not be big in as far as we can. It'll be quality. It'll be reasonably priced because I believe that's what it should be. And in the world we live in, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do as well. We all know when we go to our supermarkets, My goodness when you walk out with your taking your hand you think how did that just cost $100 for what? The same applies to a business There's a science behind every bar restaurant where you know if you serve something for $10 you cannot it cannot cost you a certain above a certain amount for you to plate that And unless you're really good at what you do, the only alternative is putting up your prices. And that's not something I wanted to do. So myself and the chef, we have a good handle on that, but it's becoming very difficult. Yeah, it is. But it goes back to your business model as well, how much, you know, I won't go into the business details, but if you keep everything reasonable, you've got a better chance, let's be clear about that. But as I said, yeah, it's not easy. So outside of that, we'll work on the menu over the next four or five or six weeks. The kitchen equipment arrives, I believe the flooring is going down next week. And once the floor arrives, we can get all of our kitchen equipment in and we can start playing around with what foods and figure it out from there. But that's the hard part, actually. The menu is the hard part. Because it's not just about the menu, it's about how do you produce it on a consistent level on a daily basis for 50 or 100 or 150 people. And then what staff goes with that. But we're working on the staff now, too. You know, I said to you offline as well that my wife doesn't really enjoy going out with me for dinner or for beers because, you know, the business that I'm in, I've got something to say every time and it gets a bit boring for her. But, you know, the mood is created by the staff that work with you. I think we're very lucky in the Ford that we have great staff and we're looking for great staff now too. So for any of you who are listening to this, if you want to, If you want to have a conversation, just talk to Danielle, I'm sure she'll give you my number.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, and you did mention County Mayo, and I know a huge Gaelic football fan, so I wanted to ask, will people be able to watch Gaelic football here?
[Barry Rafferty]: Yeah, it's a great question too, and Premier League, that's another obsession in Ireland. Gaelic football of course, yes. Yes, Guild Football and Hurling will consistently be on. And then, you know, I was in City Hall yesterday asking, am I allowed to open at 7.30am for Premier League games and so forth, and they assure me that I am, so we'll do that too. But we'll evolve into that, so we'll get ourselves right first, try to figure out what we're doing, and then once we've got that figured out, we'll go further. Amazing, great.
[Danielle Balocca]: Well, we're really looking forward to it.
[Barry Rafferty]: Well, thank you. It's been fun Danielle, thank you and well done for you. Well done to you. You're doing a great job. Thank you.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Irenys. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Never Bites!