The Dead Rabbit

Chicken fillet rolls beside the pint

The Chicken Fillet Rolls land as bar food, not ornament. Mark Moriarty , chef partner at The Dead Rabbit in Manhattan, built the snack for the hand that is already holding a pint. His route into that decision began early, with summer holidays at 15 in the kitchen of The Chart House in Dingle, County Kerry, before formal training in Culinary Arts at Dublin Institute of Technology. The through-line is Modern Irish cooking with the varnish taken off: food that knows service, appetite, and timing. Moriarty’s public line, “Cooking in a restaurant is the easy part,” sits neatly beside the role here. The kitchen has to meet a room whose first language is the bar, then make the food feel native to it. At 30 Water Street, the Chicken Fillet Rolls, a dish developed with him for this house and this kind of drinking, sit alongside his 2023 Irish Book Awards Cookbook of the Year and the wider arc of his work.

A bar built in layers

Sean Muldoon has been co-owner and opener here since 2013, after directing a bar at The Merchant Hotel in Belfast until 2013. That earlier station matters because The Dead Rabbit asks for both room sense and systems sense: the pour, the welcome, the way a guest moves from the ground-floor Taproom to the second-floor Parlor, then up again to the third-floor private room. Muldoon’s career also runs through ingredient and supply-chain work at scale, including senior leadership in research and development, quality assurance and supply chain until 2016, then the chief ingredient officer role from 2016 onward. The split is useful, not decorative. A pub that works at this address has to hold atmosphere and mechanics at once. Its drink program has made room for Irish Coffee, bottled punches such as Admiral Vernon’s Grog, the Scarlet Lady with champagne and Irish whiskey, and The Dead Rabbit Irish Whiskey. The food has to keep pace without pretending to be a tasting menu.

The room without a screen

The Taproom carries the pressure first. Guinness moves across the counter, Irish whiskey lines the back bar, and the noise gathers in the wood-paneled nooks before it climbs the stairs. The Parlor changes the tempo rather than the subject; cocktails have more space there, but the grammar remains Irish pub, not hotel lounge. Modern Irish art and furniture by Irish makers keep the room from becoming a costume of old New York, even though the name reaches back to a 19th-century Irish American street gang from Lower Manhattan. There are no televisions, which leaves the room to its own acoustics: glass, footfall, service calls, a pint settling on the bar. The kitchen’s work sits inside that sound, close enough to the drink program that a roll, a Scotch egg, or fish and chips has to read quickly and hold its place.

The discipline of a busy house

The Dead Rabbit has received present recognition, but its real test repeats at the pass and the bar. Moriarty’s contribution works because it accepts the house on its own terms: a Manhattan Irish pub where craft cocktails, whiskey, Guinness, and food share the same service rhythm. Muldoon’s part is the architecture around that rhythm, the belief that a room can be opened, shaped, and kept moving without losing its grain. End the night here on something concrete: Mark Moriarty’s Chicken Fillet Rolls, built for The Dead Rabbit and the pint beside them.