On a busy Friday evening, the anxiety at Mary Margaret’s Olde Irish Tavern isn’t very any longer finding a true pint of Guinness. It’s finding a contrivance to take a seat down down, whine dinner, or even get it to the restroom.
The downtown St. Pete pub is mostly filled shoulder to shoulder with stay-tune fans, soccer supporters, dinner guests, and leisurely-evening crowds.
Publican Pete Boland, who moreover co-owns The Galley and The Ship’s Protect, said the condominium has become so consistently busy that an growth next door has shifted from a longtime belief accurate into a necessity.
Mary Margaret’s, at 29 third Avenue North, will get bigger this frigid weather into the neighboring Top Slash Pizzeria condominium.
The growth marks a chubby-circle moment for Boland, whose grandmother, named Mary Margaret, operated a salon out of the Top Slash Pizzeria condominium advantage within the Nineteen Seventies.
The Irish pub for the time being occupies about 1,600 sq. feet, and the 1,400-sq.-foot addition will extra than double its seating capability with roughly 50 fresh seats, a 2nd 12-seat bar, extra patio tables, and additional restrooms.
“We’re packed to the gills,” Boland said in a conversation with St. Pete Rising. “It’s become a logistical anxiety. Where develop I keep empty kegs? Where develop I keep the beer? Where develop I keep of us?”
Construction is anticipated to originate in early October, even although the fresh Mary Margaret’s will stay starting up at some level of the work.
Boland hopes to grasp the fresh condominium ready by Christmas, or no longer no longer up to sooner than the pub’s seventh anniversary in February and the bustle surrounding St. Patrick’s Day.
Mary Margaret’s will defend its existing bar, stay Irish tune agenda, and nightly personality. As a replace, a hallway door on the good thing about the pub will lead accurate into a fresh room built around eating, inside most events, and an starting up-air bar coping with third Avenue North.
The fresh condominium will moreover give Boland the flexibility to separate completely different experiences that for the time being compete for condominium inside one miniature room.
Mary Margaret’s hosts stay Irish tune six nights a week and karaoke on the seventh, but it is going to even be complex to accommodate a noteworthy soccer match, a Notre Dame game, and stay leisure on the equivalent time.
The added room will allow the pub to narrate a game in one condominium whereas tune continues within the a whole lot of.
It’ll moreover get room for the guests Mary Margaret’s has regularly had to shrink back: households shopping for dinner, groups of 10, company events, wedding ceremony receptions and birthday celebrations.
“We’ll grasp a eating room, we’ll grasp a inside most occasion room, and it’s going to toughen the guest skills,” Boland said.
For Boland, who attended culinary school on the Art Institute of Tampa and started working in ingesting areas at 14, the additional eating condominium issues as powerful as the 2nd bar.
Mary Margaret’s has built a following for fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, and bangers and mash, but its crowded layout doesn’t continuously get it easy for guests to decide on in for a meal.
“I don’t sacrifice the everyday of meals,” he said. “We aquire true ingredients and we treat them stunning. We rob it very seriously, and now we’ll be ready to grasp extra of that eating ambiance.”
The pub’s snarl has moreover created extra advantage-of-condominium pressure too.
Boland said Mary Margaret’s goes through about 14 to fifteen kegs of Guinness a week even for the length of August, with that full rising to around 20 to 30 kegs in height season, making Mary Margaret’s one of many glorious Guinness purveyors within the whisper.
The expanded condominium will contain a 2nd fade-in cooler, allowing the crew to transfer keg storage out of essentially the most recent cooler and get extra room for the restaurant facet of the operation.
Fraze Originate Inc. is designing the growth, with Silverwood Designs coping with millwork. Boland expects the growth to add about 10 jobs.
Next door, Top Slash Pizzeria operator Shan Bakrac plans to mix the pizza belief with sister restaurant Sunless Cattle Burger Co. within the Sunless Cattle condominium, which operates on the equivalent block. The consequence will be a remodeled rapid-casual belief centered on pizza and smashburgers.
Boland said he and Bakrac started discussing the growth about two years within the past. Now, each companies are making ready for necessary changes on the equivalent block.
“I mediate we’re going to appropriate in fact blow it out of the water—we’re so fascinated about it,” Boland said. “We’ve had this imaginative and prescient for a protracted time.”
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