Only a Touch of the Irish Magic

I love Irish food. It gets to me not just through its tasty flavor but also due to my heritage (along the family tree, I’m half Irish, give or take). I feel a connection to the country, and especially the cuisine, in large part because food is just how I communicate to the world. There’s a reason why so many food articles get written on this site, and that’s because I love food. Good food with an Irish twist is something I’ll show up for every time, so when I find an Irish pub (or, really, an Irish-inspired pub) such as with Ned Devine’s Irish Gastro Pub and Restaurant, I have high hopes it’ll provide all I want.

But there’s the trick: a good restaurant has to come from the soul. You can’t just have a nice location and a good looking place; you have to provide food that feels as warm and inviting as the restaurant itself. Ned Devine’s certainly has the look, feeling like an Irish pub that somehow sprung up in the heart of a shopping center in Northern Virginia. But when it comes to their actual food, it feels like a bit of that Irish spirit is missing. The heart isn’t there, and it leaves the food feeling somehow less inspired than it could be.

For my visit to Ned Devine’s I sampled the Guiness Beef Stew. We were between games at the time and I didn’t have a big opening on the schedule to sit down and do appetizers and other accoutrements, so this was a trip in and out, take out and go, and the beef stew stuck out to me. The restaurant has a large and diverse menu with a lot of expected American bar foods (burgers and handhelds and the like) but they also have a small, more traditional Irish menu, and this was where the Guiness Beef Stew sat, alongside Lamb Stew, Bangers and Mash, and Fish and Chips.

For the record, my friend got the Fish and Chips, and said it was decent. I did try a bit of his food and thought the fish was bland. I ended up getting the Guiness Beef Stew because something warm and hearty sounded nice, and the waiter recommended the beef over the lamb because the lamb was more like a soup while the beef was thicker and more substantial. My rule is that when I can’t decide I ask the wait staff since, generally speaking, they should know the food better than anyone else. Beef stew in hand, we went back to the hotel to sample the wares.

Sadly, I was left disappointed by the meal. The Guinness Beef Stew is listed as "sirloin beef and root vegetables simmered in Guinness stock with mashed potatoes and toasted bread.” What ended up being in the container was a thick brown sauce over chunks of fall-apart meat, maybe one piece of onion, and a sad little scoop of potatoes in the middle that couldn’t hope to keep up with the full amount of stew that filled the container. Credit where it’s due, the plate certainly had a lot of stew. I just wish it had more of everything that was promised.

I liked the potatoes, what little amount of them there was. They were rich and creamy and not overly seasoned. They acted as a fine compliment to the stew, and I enjoyed taking a pull from the mound, dragging it through the sauce, and then eating the bite. The bread was also a fine compliment to the stew, and my early bites of the meal involved soaking the bread in the sauce and then eating it straight. These sides matched the meal perfectly and I would have enjoyed having more of both to go with the food and balance it out.

The problem really comes down to the stew itself. It was very salty and not very interesting. It really was just brown sauce on beef chunks, and while tasty in small doses, the meal needed more than that. Despite promising “root vegetables”, which you assume means onions, carrots, and potato chunks, there weren’t any to be found in the stew besides that one aforementioned slide of onion I eventually dug out from the sauce. I ordered the meal to get a nice balance of flavors and textures, the starch of potato chunks, the sweetness of carrots, the bite of onion, all playing with the sauce and meat, and none of that was there. It was meat and sauce, and way too much of it on its own.

The saltiness was a major issue. Whoever made the stew had a heavy hand with the salt, bouillon, or whatever else they poured into it. It made the sauce (which I can hardly call broth since it was so thick) overpowering. In small doses it tasted really good, but once the potatoes and bread were gone (and they went by quick) it was that sauce, and lots of it, and I found I just couldn’t finish it. I was worried it would cause my heart to seize up, waiting for a glass of water and all the salt sucked the moisture from my body. It was too much.

The beef was fine enough. Tender and flaking, it fell apart really well. I don’t really know that sirloin is the best meat for this, though. You want something fattier and more flavorful, something that has the richness and body to stand up to the sauce. I’ve made plenty of stews at home, and a chuck roast or other fattier cut is generally better for this kind of meal than a sirloin. I’m sure they use sirloin because it makes it sound more posh, something of a bullet point for the menu, but it really does a disservice to the meal. The sirloin had decent texture but was generally lost among the stew. It just didn’t sing like it needed to.

Sitting in Ned Devine’s for a bit I liked the look of the place. It felt like it really wanted to be an Irish Pub. I got the same vibe from the food: it felt like it wanted to be warm, Irish food. I know the restaurant says it’s a proper Irish pub, founded by an Irish immigrant, and they take pride in the name of the place because they took it from a beloved Irish film (Waking Ned Devine, which is a good movie). But nothing about the place actually feels like a proper Irish pub. It’s more like it wants to be one, desires it, has been engineering to look and feel like one, but doesn’t actually ever nail it properly.

The stew (and what little I sampled of the fish and chips) left me thinking that Ned Devine’s is what happens when a corporate body decides to make a homegrown pub. It has the ideas, it has the menu, but it doesn’t have the soul. Ned Devine’s Irish Gastro Pub and Restaurant is Irish food without the heart, repackaged and corporatized to make it feel real when it really isn’t. I want to like the place, but that spark of soul, the hominess you really need, is missing. It’s hard to get that if the people running it just don’t feel it, and you can tell from the vibe and the food the heart just isn’t there.