FEATURED BUSINESS: O’Connor’s Public House

Bobby O’Connor is a jack-of-all trades in his Brewster bar. MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY “I love the work,” Bobby O’Connor said in his thick County Cork brogue. “It’s not the money; I just get real joy from working.” “Bobby,” as he is known to the patrons of his Route 22 Pub, O’Connor’s, is always working. His hands move lightning fast behind the bar—pouring shots, grabbing a rag to clean the woodtop, moving into the ice bucket, and then just as quickly he vanishes into the kitchen to give the cook a rest—moving from the deep fryer to the sink of dishes. “My father loved working,” he said, “so it comes naturally.

Bobby’s path to successful barman is zig-zagged. He was born in America to two Irish immigrant parents who built their family to six kids and they returned to Ireland to run the Muskerry Inn, a pub and guest house in County Cork. “It’s right by the Blarney Stone,” Bobby recalled. The O’Connor boys would man the taps, clean up, and keep guests happy. But Bobby had a wanderlust. “I came back to America about fifteen years ago,” he said. “It was no problem because I was a citizen.” He tended bars until he met Tom, of Brewster’s Tom and Jerry’s, who offered him a job. “I loved tending bar, but I decided I was either going to own my own bar or get out.”

Bobby loved a location on Route 22, and opened O’Connor’s in the spring of 2007. It was so successful that he built another O’Connor’s in Mt. Kisco and a third in Brookfield. “You hear horror stories of people down 50 percent,” he admitted, “but we’ve been lucky.”

In the course of discussing the merits of different establishments, he said he prefers “smaller bars,” and that he wants them to be “neither too ritzy or too tacky,” where “both blue-collar and white-collar can feel comfortable.” He also said he invokes the Cheers slogan: “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” as a goal. “It took us over a year here in Brewster, but we’ve done it.”

Bobby is being modest. He holds an annual customer appreciation day, and busses regulars to the beach for a day of hot dogs and sun. “It’s a way of getting people to know each other,” he explained, adding, “They might see each other from across the bar. But as people spend time together, do different things, it becomes a kind of fraternity, a club.”

What kind of club is O’Connor’s? Certainly a comfortable one. During the day the bar is quiet but never empty, a place where people read or enjoy a pint while watching sports highlights. On weekends and holidays it can be packed with young people, many of whom are on a first-name basis with the bartenders, and the gregarious owner. In recent weeks the bar has sponsored its own “O’Connor’s Idol”—a karaoke contest for which the top prize is a free trip to the Muskerry Inn.

Of course O’Connor’s has the necessary items: the occasional shamrock, and both Guinness and Smithwick’s on tap. But it’s a place of small and memorable details: the bathtub sitting behind the bar, the uniquely dim lightbulbs that dangle from the ceiling over the bar, and the suits of armor that flank the tiny stage.

Bobby plans to continue expanding. “What I love, most of all, is taking a blank space and creating something nice in it. Taking a little corner and figuring how to make it a place to be,” he said with some pride. Along with his brothers, Bobby believes they can expand to twelve or fifteen bars in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut.

He also loves building a place that gathers what he calls “a nice class of people. A nice class is a group of people who just want to have fun, who talk, who get to know one another,” Bobby explained. “That’s what we’ve got at O’Connor’s; it’s what makes us great.”