Kansas City’s new Irish restaurant has a comfy lounge: ‘This feels like your new home’

During a recent weekday lunch, chefs Shaun Brady and Graham Farris were at the helm of their new East Brookside restaurant, handing servers plates of Scottish eggs, gently sliding pans of Irish crème brulée in the oven to slow cook, and every now and then stirring a big pot of braised beef on the burner.

Brady pledged to open his new restaurant by St. Patrick’s Day “whether it killed him or not.” It meant 20 hour days — and friends, family and employees pitching in — but Brady & Fox Restaurant & Lounge made the date.

Now new customers — and many from Brady’s former Brady’s Public House — are streaming into the spot at 751 E. 63rd St., at the southwest corner of 63rd and Rockhill Road.

It is described as a casual, family-friendly Irish-American restaurant and lounge. The menu includes slow braised pot roast with mashed potatoes, bangers and mash, crab-stuffed salmon, a 12-ounce rib-eye, Irish whiskey cured salmon BLT, crab cake sandwiches, burgers with Guinness bacon jam, and boxtys (potato pancakes with herbed sour cream).

It also has traditional shepherd’s pie with ground lamb, vegetarian pot pie, chicken pie and Irish lamb pie.

But Farris said fish and chips has been the most popular order, as well as all the desserts — such as whiskey peach cheesecake, Irish coffee chocolate chip bread pudding and the Five Farms crème brulée.

While growing up in County Tipperary, Brady started making meals to help out his single mother of four. He improved his skills by watching his grandmother and hanging out in the commercial kitchens of family friends who were chefs, being “nosy.”

His friends wanted to be fire fighters, police officers, but he wanted to be a professional chef.

“My mammy was very, very against me being a chef. It took her quite a few years to come around,” he said. “We weren’t put up on the pedestals like we are now. Chefs had a history of drug and alcohol problems. It was just a different time.“

He moved to Dublin as a teenager, working in restaurants from the ground up and was one of the youngest to graduate from the Dublin Institute of Technology as executive chef. He then “bounced around at restaurants throughout Europe” and hung out in kitchens in Asia.

“While traveling, if I found a restaurant I really liked, I would go back to the restaurant the next day and knock on the door, ‘Do you need help?’” he said. “I would offer to work for free and watch what was going on in the kitchen.”

Brady met his wife, Kate, while she was traveling in Ireland. She grew up in Wichita, and they lived in Chicago before relocating to Kansas City in 2013. He was executive chef at the Ambassador Hotel downtown and then corporate chef.

When Farris was just starting culinary school at Johnson County Community College in 2013, he became Brady’s chef apprentice at the Ambassador. When Brady left to become chef and a partner in his namesake Brady’s Public House, at 5424 Troost Ave., Farris joined him.

But it closed with many other area restaurants during the pandemic.

Still, Brady said it “took about 10 minutes” before they started planning their own restaurant. Fox is Farris’ middle name and his mother’s maiden name.

They took over the former Brookside Poultry spot on Feb. 1, then softly opened on St. Patrick’s Day.

“When I looked at the sales at the end of the day I walked out of here like a Cheshire cat,” Brady said.

They plan to make the kitchen bar a chef’s table later in April. Customers will pay $40 to $45 for the tasting menu — chef’s choice.

They also wanted to give the decor a personal touch.

So there’s a large print of a stone house in Nenagh by Gordon Wetmore called “Man on a Cart.” It’s the house Brady grew up in and where his mother still lives. His sister, Sandra O’Brien, sent artwork of the town’s landmarks, now framed and lining the walls.

It has a “whiskey lounge” with sofas and cozy chairs where customers can “sit back, relax and have a drink, try our whiskeys, come in and have a conversation,” Brady said.

A cubbyhole case is stocked with knickknacks from their homes — a mug with the words “Irish Whiskey Makes me Frisky,“ Irish books and more.

“We’ve had so many people come that went to Brady’s and said this feels so homey,” Brady said. “This feels like your new home.”

Brookside Poultry formerly operated in the spot but closed in late January.

Its owner and chef, Charles d’Ablaing, is now culinary director at J. Rieger & Co. in the East Bottoms and is revamping the menu with a “piece of Brookside Poultry” in each of the venues — perhaps fried green tomatoes in The Hey! Hey! Club, fried chicken out of the food truck in the Electric Park Garden, and chicken salad sandwiches in The Monogram Lounge. Electric Park will reopen on April 13.

He also plans some Brookside Poultry pop-ups, at Brady & Fox and other venues, but said it was a relief not to be an owner, especially struggling through the pandemic.

“We were on a huge comeback but it was always stressful,” d’Ablaing said. “It so much about the home life and you have to have that balance.”

This story was originally published March 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM.