The Pubs of Cork: I used to pour 1,000 pints a day...now a pub is all about food

Visitors to Crosshaven can’t miss The Oar Bar. Shaped like the prow of a ship, the pub is immediately distinctive upon entering the village.

The premises has stood here for over 100 years, albeit in many different iterations.

“It’s gone through various names over the years,” landlord James Slevin tells me. “The Moon Duster, The Divers - the Ancient Mariner was probably one of the very first ones.

“The building itself used to be divided in two. One part was a grocery shop, and the other was the bar. This was up until about the 1970s.”

It was established as The Oar Bar in 2013 by yachtsman JP English before being sold a decade later to Cork GP Dr Nick Flynn. It was at this point that James came on board to manage the bar and its upstairs restaurant.

I meet James at the pub on the hottest day of the year. In the glittering sunshine, views from The Oar of boats moored at Hugh Coveney Pier are even more stunning than usual. It was these spectacular views that attracted James to the village in the first place, as he recalls.

“When I came down, the minute I hit the corner coming into the village, I said to myself: ‘No matter what happens, I’m going to live in Crosshaven’.”

A self-proclaimed “proud Dubliner”, James came to Cork via mainland Europe, where he ran pubs in Austria, Germany and Switzerland for over 20 years.

“I started as a young apprentice barman at 14 years of age,” he recounts of his very early career in Dublin back in the 1980s.

The long hours of the pub business were becoming a turn-off for the younger generation in those days, so “like everyone in the trade back then”, adds James, “I packed it in and moved onto something different.”

In James’s case, that ‘something different’ was university and a career in IT, running his own computer business until he sold it in 1999. It was a subsequent trip to Austria that brought him back to pubs.

“I had family over there,” explains James, “so I went to see them and I ended up taking over the lease of a Scottish bar in Vienna. I said, ‘what am I doing here? I know nothing about running bars!’ But it came back naturally, especially with the business skills I got from computing.”

James returned to Ireland just a few years ago - “my family were grown up at that point and yeah, it was time to come back” - with the intention of working part-time. This has not gone to plan!

“I met Nick here in the bar,” says James of then-owner Dr Flynn. “We had a conversation. I said, ‘look, let me just do one or two days a week. I’ll help you with the back end of the business. Stock management, etc’. Before I knew it, I became General Manager.”

And at the start of this year, when Dr Flynn decided to depart the business, James - who had quickly fallen in love with both the pub and his new home of Crosshaven - was the natural candidate to take over the reins.

“The thing about this place,” James says of Crosshaven, “is that it’s not just a community. It’s like a big family. Everybody knows everybody.”

It’s this loyal local population that has helped The Oar to stay afloat in a turbulent time for the pub trade.

“You know, The Oar has its established regulars”, adds James, “like with any other bar in the village. But what I love about Crosshaven is that all of the local people support every single bar. And that’s very important to us, particularly during the winter months when we rely on local trade a lot.”

The Oar takes pride in its varied programme of events for locals and visitors alike, with speciality nights like karaoke and table quizzes popular fixtures on the calendar, as well as more regular features.

James elaborates: “We’ve got our sports bar downstairs and we’ve got the main bar. We’ve got live music every weekend. And we’ve got this amazing restaurant.”

The upstairs restaurant has become renowned in Crosshaven not just for its fantastic views, but its high-quality food. James had to make a difficult decision about this offering when he acquired the business, explaining: “When I took over, there were a lot of heavy costs associated with the restaurant.”

Focusing on the bar to begin with, the restaurant closed for a number of months when James became landlord. “We needed new furniture, we needed a whole rethink of how it was and how I wanted it to be now.”

The restaurant reopened in mid-June to great anticipation. “We had a very, very busy opening weekend”, says James. “The village needs it. I think this part of Cork needs it. A lot of people come down here for the views but they come back for the food.”

He believes a good food offering is essential in today’s pub trade. He’s seen a huge shift in customer expectations over the years. “These younger guys, they’re not the same clientele we had ten years ago when it was disposable income and, I suppose, the taboo of alcohol wasn’t a thing. As publicans and business owners, we have to adapt to that.

“When I started as a young 14-year-old, my job was literally pouring probably a thousand Guinness a day and that’s all I did. And then, I suppose, over the years, we adapted into the roll and a bowl of soup, but now it’s become the case that you have to have food to survive.”

Keeping up with an evolving customer base can be a challenge, but it’s not the main one facing pubs. “It’s literally the costs”, says James. The price of alcohol, food, energy, staff (The Oar has 21 employees, five full-time) - it all adds up for publicans and adds pressure to an already busy job. “My job is not just ‘open bar at 12pm, close at 12am’,” notes James. “There’s a lot that goes on in the background. Sometimes you can put in 14, 15, maybe 16-hour days and not see the benefit of doing that”.

Despite these challenges, James is in it for the long haul. “I do my job because I love the business and I love the people and I love to see people with a smile on their face and say, ‘yeah, I put that there’. That’s what it’s all about”.

James is now settled in his new home of Crosshaven and happy at the helm of The Oar. He believes that the pub, and pubs like it, play a vital role in village life.

“A good pub isn’t just somewhere to have a drink. It’s where communities meet, friendships are formed, and visitors get their first real taste of Crosshaven. Our job at the Oar is very simple. We look after locals, welcome the visitors, and showcase everything that’s great about Crosshaven”.

See www.theoarbar.ie