Chicken Feet & Clam Chowdah

I have many happy memories of the hearty traditional English breakfasts I enjoyed back in the U.K. These oversized platters feature a bounty of delights: savory bacon, minerally-rich black pudding, “bangers” (sausages to us Yanks; and why is it that both the words “sausage” and “banger” sound naughty?), baked beans, zesty tomatoes, eggs (which I let John have as I’m not an egg person), and some variation on bread, whether fried or toasted. I’ve been missing those breakfasts, and especially the black pudding, since leaving England So I was psyched to hear that Kildare’s Pub in Chapel Hill offered a similar Irish Breakfast featuring both black and white pudding.

Well, I should have known something was amiss when the waitress didn’t know what an Irish breakfast was (they had a new menu, she claimed). Turns out the kitchen didn’t know either. The dish the menu described included eggs, bacon, bangers, toast, beans, tomatoes, and the aforementioned puddings. The dish I got consisted of eggs, toast, two quarter-sized rounds of black pudding and two of white, and . . . a grilled hot dog. I suppose a hot dog technically can be considered a “sausage,” in the same way that the fermented juice that collects at the bottom of that container of raspberries you left out overnight can be considered “wine,” but really, it was a substitution worthy of Sandra Lee. Now, I know Kildare’s is a small chain of U.S.-based Irish-themed pubs, so I wasn’t expecting an amazing experience, but I hoped for at least a mediocre approximation of what was on the menu. Instead, out of eight items I was supposed to get, three were missing, two were skimpy, and one was counterfeit. 

When John asked the waitress—a very nice young woman--about the missing pieces, she brought back a tomato that had apparently been placed whole under the broiler. Would it have been that much trouble to slice it and sprinkle some token salt or herbs on it? She also offered to bring me macaroni and cheese as a replacement for the beans, but it never arrived.

John’s meal was also disappointing. He ordered corned beef and cabbage and got warmed up cold cuts of corned beef, the kind that usually appears on a Reuben sandwich but not as an entrée by itself. The "parsley cream sauce" that accompanied it? Tartar sauce with some parsley mixed in. 

The friends who were dining with us had a vegetarian boxty (a potato pancake, rolled up like a crepe), which they described as satisfactory, and a burger, which they thought was pretty good. It looks as though Kildare’s can do decent bar food, but when it comes to their Irish offerings—the very thing that’s supposed to set them apart from every other Chapel Hill watering hole—they’re embarrassingly bad. To be on the safe side, treat this “pub” as a bar with cutesy décor.