Hint: It starts with 250 kegs of Guinness.
In Boston, Massachusetts, where Irish ancestry runs deep, St. Patrick’s Day coincides with a legal state holiday, and the city takes its local festivities seriously. For Aidan McGee, the chef and owner of Irish pubs McGonagle’s and the Dubliner — a popular downtown Boston spot that sells the most Guinness in Massachusetts — preparing for the holiday means coordinating deliveries of hundreds of pounds of fish, meat, and potatoes, along with trailers stacked with kegs upon kegs of Guinness.
“It’s like all hands on deck,” says McGee.
The prep starts more than a month in advance. McGee fields office catering requests of up to 100 people for Friday lunches around St. Patrick’s Day, when workers want to celebrate with Irish stews, shepherd’s pie, and spice bags. The pubs don’t usually sell corned beef and cabbage, but the chef adds it to the menu for the entire month of March. He also plans to host Irish government officials who visit Boston during the holiday and plots celebratory events for the week.
This year, McGee is hosting upscale Irish cocktail bar 1616 for a one-night pop-up. Last year, pop star Ed Sheeran showed up for a pint and a set at the Dubliner. “Unless Taylor Swift’s available this year, I don’t think we’ll top that,” says McGee with a laugh.
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The most challenging test comes the week of St. Patrick’s Day, when McGee coordinates with his suppliers to supply both the Dubliner and McGonagle’s with food and drink for nearly a week straight.
To keep the kitchens flush in fish and chips, McGee’s fish vendor coordinates with another supplier in Iceland that skins and fillets hundreds of pounds of fresh haddock, puts it on ice, and then flies it into Boston’s Logan Airport in bulk orders of 200 pounds per day. McGee estimates that the restaurants will go through 900 pounds of haddock over the course of the week, including 600 pounds over St. Patrick’s Day weekend. “[The supplier] actually employed another person because of the volume that we’re doing,” McGee says.
The rest of the menu, which is abbreviated for the month of March to make sure the kitchen can handle the volume of orders, includes similarly striking amounts of ingredients. McGee estimates that over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, between the two restaurants, the kitchens will go through 800 pounds of potatoes for chips and mashed potatoes, 400 pounds of diced beef for Irish stew, and 300 pounds of lamb mince for shepherd’s pie.
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At the bar, McGee has two bartenders dedicated solely to pulling pints of Guinness throughout the weekend. He rented two trailers that he’ll park at the Dubliner in order to store 250 kegs of Guinness, which he expects to run through over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, before reordering for the rest of the week.
“The Guinness will even get better with the volume,” McGee says. “That flow and that change — the kegs are not sitting there; they’re fresh, and they’re flying out.”
Reservations sold out at both restaurants by mid-February. Unless there’s another major snowstorm that whips its way through Boston this year, McGee expects that sales over St. Patrick’s Day will mark both restaurants’ busiest days of the year.
Despite the logistical stress that the holiday brings, McGee looks forward to prepping for and executing the holiday each year at the restaurants. “It’s a very unique thing for a nationality to have a very positive impact globally on one day out of the year,” McGee says. “It’s very unique.”
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