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Business & Tech

Matt Murphy's Pub: Familiar Dishes, Recreated

Serving up innovative twists on old favorites

There’s a certain charm, an almost disarming seduction, about a restaurant that takes food we all know and love and shows us a whole different side of it. It’s a brilliant, really: we’re lured through the door with the promise of familiar dishes, and then sit a captive audience to the ensuing parade of creativity, as our culinary favorites trade up their old baseball caps for top hats and fascinators, or exchange silk sashes for warm woolen scarves—whatever the case may be.

is a small space, with nostalgia-inducing photos lining the walls, a tribute to Ireland and to a time when you could get a quart of milk for sixpence and twenty. Here, we ate our meals with dishtowel-like napkins across our laps, beneath a wall-size portrait of somebody’s grandpa seated next to a roaring fireplace, the fiddle playing. It all feels snug, and I want to sit, order a Scotch off of the sizeable Scotch list, and unwind.

Yes, it’s cozy, but with this food comes an undertone of innovation. Take the French fries, for example—worthy specimens, thick-cut and nicely browned, but the fun part is the accoutrements. Dip into curry mustard, truffle aioli, horseradish mayonnaise, or the housemade ketchup, a puree of roasted tomatoes sweetened with molasses, and dressed up with touches of cinnamon, nutmeg, and star anise. It has a deep flavor, but it’s quite sweet, and no one would ever mistake it for Heinz.

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I loved an appetizer of mussels in a sauce of curry and coconut milk, with braised carrots and leeks and a few slices of grilled bread.  The mussels were supremely fresh, and the sauce was such an elegant balance of sweet, salty, and savory that we asked for extra bread to sop it up.

The Steak Salad might more aptly be called Steak With Salad—it’s a full-size, pan-seared steak alongside an overdressed mélange of greens, crumbled bacon, and sharp cheese.  The steak is heavy and flavorful, and the trick of serving the steak whole instead of slicing it across the salad retains more of the juices inside.

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The caveat to this mealtime modification is that when we manipulate the old favorite dishes, the tried and true, we’re bound to come across some innovations that don’t quite work. The corn coleslaw that I ate springs to mind; a slaw made sweet with kernels of corn, spicy with a hot mayonnaise, and pungent with gorgonzola cheese, served on the side of the Buttermilk Fried Chicken. The chicken was just barely overcooked, but that I could have excused―it was the slaw that threw the whole plate into disarray.

Likewise, a pressed lobster sandwich worked in theory, but the lobster’s subtle sweetness was masked by a host of stronger competing flavors: the buttery bread, bitter greens, and a fruity vinaigrette.

Don’t skip the dessert menu, where you’ll find confections like a rich hazelnut bread pudding with milk jam, or vanilla ice cream served with a chocolate sauce so luscious that you might drink the whole cup of it before a drop of it touches your ice cream―and we did. The highlight was a creamy, ambrosial vanilla custard served with cherries soaked in port and an oatmeal shortbread cookie on the side.

Matt Murphy’s is worth a visit, if just to sit at the bar and peruse the carefully crafted drink menu.  But note that it’s cash only, and it’s not cheap; plan your visit on a plump wallet and an empty stomach and you’ll come away the opposite.

Matt Murphy's Pub is open Monday through Sunday, 11am to 11pm. 14 Harvard Street, Brookline. Cash only, no credit cards accepted. MBTA: Green Line (D) to Brookline Village.

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