In memory and in praise of Carr’s of Paris
For 26 years, 1989 to 2015, there was an Irish restaurant and pub here called Carr’s, owned and managed by Conall Carr from Kilcar and Donal McMahon writes on behalf of all those who dropped in over those years and came away with heartfuls of lovely memories
The eyes of the world were turned towards Paris during this summer’s Olympic Games.
We will always remember certain scenes, like the landing of the balloon on the circular lake of the Tuileries Garden followed by the spectacular lighting of the flame, or the breath-taking view stretching from the Garden to the Place de la Concorde and continuing on up the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe.
Conall Carr on the last night, in July 2015
Turning the corner at No. 5, we reach our destination ‒ 1 Rue du Mont Thabor. For 26 years, 1989 to 2015, there was an Irish restaurant and pub here called Carr’s, owned and managed by Conall Carr from Kilcar. On behalf of all those who dropped in over those years and came away with heartfuls of lovely memories, I wish to record this fine achievement here and salute it.
Now Mont Thabor wasn’t the beginning for Carr’s. For four years, not far away in the same Paris district (18 Rue Thérèse, Paris 01), there had been a Carr’s restaurant, with its own historic landmark garden nearby too, that of the 17th century Palais Royal.
The company was registered on September 9, 1985, and soon the newspapers, both Irish and French, were spreading the word. Lorna Siggins dropped in one Saturday to report on “the second Irish restaurant in Paris” (The Irish Times, 10 April 1986) and gave us the owner’s background: “Armed with both a Cathal Brugha Street diploma in hotel management and a B.Comm. from UCD, his experience includes working in five countries, plus 17 years working with Bord Fáilte in various posts.”
Conall Carr and Gerry Mulholland
Early in 1987, a year that saw Stephen Roche’s name all over the French papers in July, Conall Carr made it into the columns of Le Monde (24 January 1987) for coming second in a competition for Paris’s best restaurant for “cuisine étrangère” (ethnic cuisine).
“This entertaining Irish restaurant received many votes ‒ and deservedly so. Certainly in the evening there can be quite a din, especially if the ‘quiet men’ of the green isle have consumed a fair bit of their native beer. It’s then that the pianist gets going and the singers belt it out. But at midday, when it’s quiet, you will savour Galway Bay oysters, herring with Guinness, pâté of smoked mackerel . . .” and so on to the meats, “pain irlandais” (Irish bread), drinks etc. “Award for Kilcar Man’s Restaurant in Paris” ran the fanfare headline to a short report in the Donegal Democrat on March 27.
“One of those things that just jell”, i.e. being in the right place at the right time. Let us look back at the road Conall took - and the one that opened up for him - from remote Kilcar to the very heart of Paris.
Born in 1940, he grew up in a house on Lower Main Street that was a pub as well as general grocery and hardware shop, with petrol pump outside. “Siopa agus Tabhairne” said the sign on the front wall, written in old-Irish letters. Given how deep-rooted traditional music is in Kilcar, the pub was also a regular venue for local musicians. Lorna Siggins’s article carries a photo of Conall at the piano in Rue Thérèse, a piano that very likely moved with him and the one we see in Mont Thabor.
Since his older brother Proinnsias was to inherit the shop, Conall had to look further afield. Having an aunt in Rathfarnham was probably a factor in his attending Terenure College nearby as a boarder and thereby acquiring a life-long interest in rugby that made him, years later, the ideal man to welcome both players and fans who flocked to Mont Thabor during the rugby season.
Indeed, things must have gone so well for Conall that he soon began to look round for a bigger premises. Again, he happily found it, in December 1989, this time close to Place de la Concorde and Place Vendôme, even nearer to the heart of the city than before.
The new Carr’s had a restaurant wing on Rue d’Alger (No. 5) and a pub-restaurant wing on Rue du Mont Thabor (No. 1), and even a spacious basement area, The Cellar Bar, for private parties.
Conall was the majority shareholder of the company (51%), with Seamus Doherty (from Kilcar, a civil engineer based in Beaconsfield, UK, died 2017, buried Kilcar) (18%), Paul Boylan (6%), Timothy Carr (5%) and 8 other minority shareholders (including chef Legay) contributing the rest of the company’s capital. The decoration outside (green awning over dark brown and green panelling) and inside (photos on walls, bookshelves, upholstered bench seating etc.) created a sense of a warm and relaxed Irish welcome.
The neighbouring building was (and still is) a four-star hotel, the Duminy Vendôme, while opposite, then and today, stood the five-star Renaissance Paris Vendôme Hotel, both exuding an air of luxurious calm, a calm quite likely shaken a bit at night ‒ as Le Monde reported happening in Rue Thérèse ‒ whenever loud singing was to be heard coming from Carr’s. (Who’s to say, however, that some of these neighbours didn’t drop in occasionally?!)
As well as setting up a new pub-restaurant, Conall also made changes in his personal life. He married Manuella from Cap Verde in the church of St Roch (not far from Mont Thabor) in 1991 and they had a son, Kevin. Manuella was also a valuable work colleague of Conall’s, given her previous experience as secretary in a travel company. When she died in 2013, aged 56, she must have been sorely missed in every way.
Favourable reviews began to pour in over the twenty-six-year life-span (or reign, may we say?) of Carr’s Mont Thabor, both in newspapers and, later, in the new digital media – Carr’s website and Facebook page making it easier to reach audiences, so vital in the modern commercial world. A short sample: “Carr’s restaurant will play host to the Irish team late tonight” (Kathryn Hone, The Irish Times, Saturday, 15 January 1994). “Carr’s restaurant is one of the main places where Irish people gather in the French capital to enjoy Irish music, poetry and theatre” (Lara Marlowe, The Irish Times, 20 May 1998). “Carr’s is the most stylish and elegant of the many Irish bars in Paris – about 40 in all (Anita Whooley, Irish Examiner, 22 December 1998). “It is amazing to have such a bargain place of such good quality in such a posh area of Paris!” (Facebook comment).
The Facebook page of Carr’s Pub maintained from late 2013 to closing night on Saturday, July 18, 2015 has taken on real value now as a precious photo album for the final years of the great venture Carr’s was. The series of announcements during the soccer or the rugby seasons of matches being televised at Carr’s fade away but the photos of customers gathered there, enjoying each other’s company as well as a jar maybe, take on a kind of glow.
Don’t all photos of gatherings, viewed in retrospect, conjure up finally the poignancy and the mystery of the past? And videos of people singing or playing an instrument even more so. In the absence, unfortunately, of one of Conall himself playing the piano, we have that of a very good friend of his, the kind-hearted and multi-talented Galway man, Gerry Mulholland (died 10 May 2023, in his 70s), who played the piano on the last night and on many a night over the years.
The closed sign went up on the door at the end of a fine summer’s day in July 2015. The 116 photos on Facebook follow the day’s progress, from the neon sign CARR’S reflected one last time in the glass of the entrance door of the Renaissance Hotel opposite (the concierge at the front kindly smiling for the photographer) to the shots of patrons drinking up and bidding adieu outside on the pavement in the early hours.
As for the reasons for the closure, the official documents don’t seem to indicate any kind of financial pressure. It may well be as simple as a 75-year-old man finally calling it a day: after thirty years (1985‒2015) of happy and fulfilling work, ably supported by eight members of staff, the fairly unrelenting nature of the business must, in the end, have made Conall see some writing on the wall.
Now I can well imagine the reader wondering at this stage, “This is all very interesting but what about the writer’s own story of Carr’s?” Ah, how I regret never having been there, even once! No rugby international ever brought me to Paris and to a pub-restaurant afterwards, I’m afraid. A few enjoyable meals in the short-lived Teach Barní, Kilcar, with Mary McHugh of Towney (whom I, a Dub, married in 1995) and her family, alerted me to a certain Kilcar man who, I gathered, owned a pub-restaurant in Paris but, alas, I was not quick enough off the mark to see it in operation. All I could do in the end was research and write up what I consider a fascinating story. I met Conall in Harbour Lights nursing home, Killybegs, in August 2017, to get his approval for an article.
Guy Legay, Conall’s tutor in the Bristol long ago, remembers Conall to this day. With only a year between them (Guy born in 1939) and both from a rural background (mountainous Auvergne for Guy), they got on very well on a professional and a personal level.
Guy’s top-class hotels or restaurants with Michelin stars (Bristol, Ledoyen, Ritz (1980-2000)) were all quite near Conall’s places, which made it easier for them to keep in touch. In an email he recalled old times: “Conall was eager to learn all about the fine points of French cuisine and I was very happy that I could teach him some of these. In time we became friends and often went out together. Sometimes on a day off we’d have lunch in a local bistro where we’d amuse ourselves by star-rating the fare!
"It’s thanks to him that I came to know some of his Irish friends. His restaurant was very successful and had a loyal clientele, including myself. We’re both now in our 80s. Souvent j’ai une pensée pour lui, en pensant aux bons moments passés dans ce bel établissement, le Bristol. When I think of the good times we had in that fine place, the Bristol, I often think of him too.”
I’m sure that all those who enjoyed good times in Carr’s will also remember him and his team like this. Our efforts and our achievements, whether in the form of medals at Olympic games or in our everyday quiet life of service to others, must, we hope and pray, act in the end as our contribution to what we might call a mysterious human-divine process at work in history, one leading ‒ as the French writer Teilhard de Chardin S.J. believed ‒ to some kind of culminating, all-encompassing “jelling” into One. Mount Olympus is linked with the gods in Greek mythology.
Mount Tabor (Mont Thabor in French), though the street name comes from a battle Napoleon won in 1799, has, as we know, Biblical associations, especially as the scene of the Transfiguration. Wonderful then, isn’t it, that a Kilcar man should, out of all the hundreds of streets in Paris, have made his home (and welcomed us to it) on Mount Tabor all-blessed and all-blessing!
Donal McMahon lives with his wife, Mary McHugh of Kilcar, in Saggart, Co Dublin. He taught English and French at Maynooth Seminary from 1974 to 2013. He wishes to thank Conall’s relatives, in particular John Brennan and Eunan Murray, for their very valuable help in writing this tribute.