Irish stew

To the Manager of the Newmarket Arms,

Every Thursday night for as long as I can remember, my family’s been having dinner in your pub. A long honoured tradition that my parents started accidentally when they met on a wet August night in 1985. Mum had just arrived for a few post-lecture drinks with her uni mates. Dad had come in especially for the stew. You see Thursday night was Irish stew night, and my Dad being as Irish as they come, missed his Mammy’s cooking and found that your stew was as close as he was ever going to get to home. So he sat up at the bar and ordered the stew as he always did, and while he was waiting he noticed a woman with the curliest, the reddest hair he’d ever seen. She was like some sort of etherial Irish Princess. I have the same God-awful hair – only it makes me look like Strawberry Shortcake.

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Man in pub, 1953, John Brack (Australia 1920–1999) Private collection, Melbourne © Helen Brack (Photo credit: The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia)

Anyway, the combination of red hair and homemade stew was enough to get my parents talking, and then drinking and then dancing and then… well, let’s just leave it there, shall we?

That happened on a Thursday night. Rain, hail or shine, they went back to the Newmarket for drinks and a hot meal every Thursday for the next eighteen years. And my father had your stew every time. Even when you changed the recipe from a meaty, homemade version to a mass-produced, food-like substance, he still ate it. There were only two occasions when he didn’t. The first was the night Rory, my older brother, was born.

The second was the night my father died.

After that night, I started ordering it. And even though we no longer went every week, every month – I think there may have even been a year we didn’t go at all – every time we did have Thursday night dinner at your pub, I ordered the stew.

Until this week.

This week there was no stew on the menu. In fact, when I asked at the bar I received a snarky answer from your snarky barman, Tom, who informed me that the entire menu had changed and you wouldn’t be serving stew anymore. According to Tom, stews aren’t considered ‘contemporary’ cuisine – no one cares for them.

I know the eating habits of one customer is hardly reason enough to change the menu back, but my whole life can be counted in Thursday night dinners at the Newmarket Arms. I’m as familiar with your back corner table – the scratches in the wood, the hunter and dog painting on the wall, the brown splodge of I-don’t-know-what on the carpet – as I am at my own dining table in my pathetic little flat.

Look, I know I don’t bring in a crowd of mates on a Friday or Saturday night – I don’t really have friends like that – but I do eat the stew every Thursday. Regular as clockwork. And that’s income you can count on.

So I’m asking, no begging, that you keep the stew on the menu.

Think of that 21 year-old beauty, with hair as red as blood and as tightly curled as wood shavings, who caught the eye of a tall man with a big heart.

Think of that family who will always be one person too few.

Think of the daughter who would eat stew every night, for every meal, for rest of her life if it would bring him back.

And now tell me that no one cares for stew.

Regards,

Mara