Captain Fantastic

INTERVIEW: When Captain Americas unleashed its super-cool take on fast food on Dublin in the 1970s, iceberg lettuce was a rarity and mayo meant salad cream, and it soon became a melting pot in a city finding its feet. Former waitress CATHERINE CLEARYtalks to some of the people who have served their time on its floor, trying to master the five-plate hold

TAKE A TIME machine to Dublin in the autumn of 1971. It’s a barren culinary landscape, without a sesame seed or an iceberg lettuce. Cars drive and park on Grafton Street. Two young men, longtime school friends, meet. One of them wants to start a restaurant. The other is trying to make his way in the theatre and film business. The budding actor once cooked chips in a golf club. The budding businessman has never cooked anything. “I’d like to be a wine waiter in your restaurant,” Johnny McCormack (the grandson of legendary tenor Count John McCormack) says. “It’s not going to be that kind of restaurant,” Mark Kavanagh tells him. “But I do need a manager.”

A few months later, just before Christmas 1971, Captain Americas opened its doors on the first floor of a building on Grafton Street, and Dublin was introduced to deep-dish apple pie, those sesame-sprinkled buns (with specially imported sesame seeds) and ice cream with chocolate sauce. In the new restaurant, a 4oz burger with fries and a garnish was a princely 38p. “Several people told us we’d never get 38p for a bun burger,” McCormack remembers. Elsewhere in the city Wimpy was serving flaccid disks of beef in a bun for 15p.

After Captain Americas, Kavanagh would go on to develop the Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC). He says he started the restaurant because he needed a job and he got four others to come in with him on the joint venture. They couldn’t afford ground-floor rents in Grafton Street so they went upstairs.

Where did Kavanagh get the idea for it? "A photo and article in the Sunday Timesmagazine of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor sitting in the back of a car eating burgers from Great American Disaster." The Great American Disaster was a small chain of chic neighbourhood burger joints in 1970s London with wooden tables, bare brick walls, blasting rock music and news reports of disasters framed on the walls.

Captain Americas made its own history. It was where unknown singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh strummed guitar in the corner “for a fiver and a glass of wine”. Acts such as Horslips and Donovan launched their albums there. It was where the man who would become the country’s most notorious murderer, Malcolm Macarthur, occasionally came to sit alone with his strange hair to eat his burger quietly.

It built a hall of fame of former staff who share fond nostalgia-tinted memories of friendships, relationships, broken hearts, riotous behaviour, the freedom and the energy of being twentysomething in Ireland, and heading out to spend your tips in the Pink Elephant.

The place took a while to get off the ground. “We opened in December 1971,” McCormack remembers. “It was a crazy time to open and we were besieged at first. It was major chaos, we had no systems. Then there was a lull. I remember playing chess with one of the waiters it was so quiet. But by the middle of 1972, it was hopping again.”

Kavanagh “knew exactly what he wanted but he didn’t know exactly where to get it”, McCormack explains. They approached a baker in Stillorgan, a member of the Italian Fusco family, to bake their buns.

“This was a time when there wasn’t an iceberg lettuce to be found.” In 1974 a young woman called Sylvia joined as a cashier and she and McCormack were married in 1976. “I enjoyed it enormously. It made my career my life. We still can’t go into a restaurant without having a good look at what’s going wrong.”

The campaigner and writer Ruth Riddick, who successfully sued the Irish government in 1992 over the right to information, waited tables in Captain Americas in those early years, starting in 1973. She once got an advance on her wages to pay her rent but she blew the money on a carnelian ring in the silver shop on the ground floor on the way out and can’t remember how she managed to pay the landlord. “But to this day I’m still wearing that ring. It’s beaten on to my finger.”

She remembers a Dublin full of youthful energy – a very "alive" time. When her first article was published in Hiberniamagazine, Kavanagh congratulated her in front of a full restaurant.

“It was a real melting pot of students, really engaged with the ideas of the time and what we had in common was our dynamism.” There was nothing easy about the work. Double shifts were common. “It was a zeitgeist place at the time and I’m not sure we knew that particularly. We were just having a good time, getting paid and getting well-paid. There was no sense we were being exploited, and a general sense of all being well with the world.”

Riddick believes the atmosphere was created by McCormack, as a manager from an arts background. “It wasn’t strictly a capitalist environment.” Did it teach her any life skills? “Yes, the sort of real-world experience that I would recommend for any Transition Year student. Get a job where deadlines matter. If a meal wasn’t on the table in an acceptable time then forget it, it’s so over. You learned rhythm, delivery, team-building, communication skills and direct responsibility for your work.”

She was in the restaurant when her mother phoned to tell her that her father had died. It was a few weeks before her 21st birthday, and she can still picture the restaurant and how it looked when she stood there hearing the news down the phoneline. The other legacy was two of the closest friendships of her life. “When you’re that age you don’t think you’re making any kind of history. You’re just putting one foot in front of the other.”

RTÉ broadcaster Marian Richardson also remembers a “very hip, very cool place to work with lots of laughs and a great work ethic. Everyone was on their way somewhere. The kitchen was stacked with economists.”

Although few people wanted to work long-term in the food business, the training was thorough. Hours of napkin folding and clearing plates were the lot of the newbie until they learned the ropes.

“You had to be able to balance five hot dinners on your left arm while sashaying up and down a crowded bar.” It’s Richardson’s party trick at dinner parties to the hilarity of friends and family who say “She’s Captain Americas-trained.” She joined in 1973 or 1974. “We never went home after work, we went out.” They worked to the sounds of Carole King, James Taylor and Fleetwood Mac, “so you didn’t feel like you were working”.

As things got busier the music got faster and louder. And the food was revolutionary in its day. “It was a time when mayonnaise was probably salad cream and no one had eaten green peppers.”

As a former waitress, Richardson always tips in restaurants. “I admire a good waiter or waitress. We spend a lot of time in France and there it’s a real art form. I certainly felt I learned an awful lot that has stood to me.”

Captain Americas had its celebrity regulars, including Pat Kenny and Bob Geldof and, of course, Chris de Burgh. “Ulick O’Connor was always coming in with very tall girlfriends,” says Richardson. The idea of service that made people feel relaxed, making families welcome by giving crayons to children, and the fact that the staff themselves were usually enjoying the work, gave the place a unique atmosphere, she says.

Cut to the 1980s when another generation of waiting staff discovered Captain Americas. In 1987 or thereabouts, Dermot McEvoy, now the music associate with The Late Late Show, got a job through a friend and became the meet-and-greet guy on the door. "I was trying to break into the music business as a manager and promoter. The job gave me the flexibility I needed. And it was great craic, with a fantastic social life. I'd make £12 on a shift and then go and spend £20 in the Pink Elephant." Although he could make more money from a night's music promotion, he often chose to work a restaurant shift for the fun of it. Like many former employees he's still friends with many of the people he worked with back then.

A crew of like-minded people was formed. “Everybody got someone else.” Band members and actors could request shifts around their other jobs. “You had no responsibility whatsoever. You could come in a bit late or hungover. It was all a very positive time, being footloose and fancy-free.”

Kate Bowe, who runs the PR company of the same name, worked there 20 years ago after a year in Australia. She was on a break from primary teaching so was slightly older than some of the other staff.

“I worked there for two or three years and I really loved working there. There was quite a young group of people from very creative backgrounds, the music business, acting, fledgling careers or students. I was one of the older ones there.” She enjoyed the interaction with customers. “On the floor you always had fun.” And she felt the management cared about the staff. “There wasn’t a huge turnover of staff. At the start I was a bit daunted because you’d see some of them walking up with five plates on one arm and I could just manage one plate. It gave me great respect for the craft.”

On breaks they’d go to the Coffee Inn around the corner. “There was great energy. You were unfettered and free. You did work hard and then you walked out the door and left it there.”

She still views a restaurant experience through the eyes of a former waitress. “You do refine your sense of managing people and your expectation, the importance of service and good service. People realise it is important to give good service. It’s the difference that leads to repeat business. Because I’ve done it, my expectations are for good service.”

Actor Charlene Gleeson started working there eight years ago when she got a job through a friend. “It was like your social calendar was booked out because you were going to hang out with your mates. The music would be playing and you felt like you were out.” She loved chatting to the customers – “I wouldn’t be able to leave a table in the middle of a sentence” – and regularly did a double shift on a Saturday. “Eight or nine of us would have breakfast together before the shift started. I don’t know if that happens any more. We’d have a morning briefing, things like the numbers expected that day.”

A 90-minute wait for a table was not unusual on a busy Saturday night and customers would wait at the bar. “You’d have to brush past crowds of people, plates in the air.”

Her best tip was €90 left by a Christmas party group once. It was shared with the bar, kitchen, managers and fellow waitresses. Like others, she made great friends on the job. “We’d be back having chicken wings together in the tiny little canteen talking about auditions.”

When she was acting in an Abbey production of Playboy of the Western World, she would do a shift in Captain Americas before going on stage. When the RTÉ drama Trouble in Paradiseaired, the staff put it on the screens in the restaurant during her shift. "Nobody recognised me. I had blonde hair in it and loads of fake tan. So I'd pretend it was my sister."

The dignity of work and the camaraderie made up for the struggle of earning a living through acting. "Success to me is being happy and paying my bills is being happy." When her recent RTÉ series Sarah and Stevescreened, Captain Americas in Tallaght hosted a family, friends and crew party for her. "It was remembered that I had worked with them. It was lovely."

Fellow actor Neilí Conroy has worked for Captain Americas on and off for 11 years, “and would happily work there again now”. She started in 1997 when her daughter was four months old. “I had a ball.” The job was perfect because she could request shifts around acting jobs. “There was an Abba band on a Friday and the floor would be covered in drinks with cocktails flowing.”

If she was recognised on a shift sometimes people would sympathise over the lot of an out-of-work actor. It wasn’t as easy to blend into the wait staff in Dublin as it might have been in London or elsewhere.

“Captain Americas was a saviour in a lot of ways. It was a social life as well as a job. We’d go on to Bruxelles or Rí Rá or stay on in the bar in Captain Americas.”

The flexible working hours were key. "It's the only place I've ever worked where you could choose your shifts. You put a note in every week for the shifts that you wanted." And the tips helped top up the minimum-wage rate, although they dwindled in later years. Now touring in Australia with a production of Little Gem, she says she would happily go back to work in Captain Americas when things get quiet.

McCormack was one of the few who made the restaurant business his life. After 15 years in Captain Americas and Solomon Grundy’s on Suffolk Street, he went on to manage an enormous Mexican restaurant in London, “which nearly killed me. We used to sell £10,000 worth of margaritas a week.”

Then he came home to run Judge Roy Beans. He and Sylvia opened QV2 Restaurant on Andrew Street in 1991. In 2002 they sold up and moved to Cork where they now run South Coast Coffee.

“The great thing about the restaurant business is that it’s a kind of theatre. You get a chance to perform but you also get a chance to observe. And because you’re not drinking and the customers are, you get to see the gradual deterioration of people after a few drinks. Eating out is supposed to be an enjoyable experience and if you don’t transmit that to your staff then it doesn’t work. I used to insult customers at QV2. It was all part of the entertainment. And every night there’s a different mood in a restaurant which makes things interesting.”

Kavanagh sold Captain Americas to developer Paddy McKillen in the early 1990s. And it has expanded from its Grafton Street base to Cork’s South Main Street, Tallaght and Blanchardstown. “He wanted to buy it because it was where he had met his wife. I sold it because I was too busy developing and building the IFSC. I would love to still own it.”