Oy Vey: A D.C. Restaurant Serves Up Jewish-Irish Fusion
“Others have a nationality,” the writer Brendan Behan famously noted. “The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.” We also share a love of corned beef and raucous fiddle music — think folk and klezmer. Still, an Irish-Jewish fusion restaurant seems like a stretch.
Enter the Star and Shamrock, a “modern-day neighborhood melting pot” on Washington, D.C.’s up-and-coming H Street NE, whose logo is a three-leaf clover inside a Star of David. “Sound like a contradiction?” asks its website. “Jewish and Irish cultures, celebrated (and tormented!), have more in common than you’d think! Misery loves company — Oy Vey!” The site also touts cross-cultural culinary quirks like “a Reuben with a side of latkes and a pint of Black and Tan, or a shepherd’s pie with a side of matzo balls.”
But, as the D.C. restaurant blog TwoFoodieBrothers reports, Star and Shamrock has been “savaged” in reviews. Its “Latke Madness” specialty was “a Jewish version of a KFC Double Down… the latkes played the role of the bread in the sandwich,” seethed the Internet Food Association blog. “The pastrami was clearly not smoked: pink and shimmering and rubbery, it was more like a flavor-deprived corned beef, chewy and disappointingly uniform in texture.” Oy vey is right. But the best commentary on Star and Shamrock’s experiment might come from a commenter on TwoFoodieBrothers: “Forget about the execution. The mere concept of this restaurant offers a compelling argument against mixed marriages.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
