Easy Napkin Folding

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 CLEARY  talks 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 Times  magazine 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.