- An Irishman who spent the last 30 years in the US, and the last 20 years as a Memphis restaurateur, he strives to bring the traditional pub and restaurant experience of his homeland, from the food and drink, down to the bar you sit at, right here in the Mid-South.

I'm Toby Sells, this is A Conversation with DJ Naylor.

Welcome to A Conversation with DJ Naylor.

Thank you for being on the show today.

- Fantastic, great to have all you guys here.

Toby, welcome to Bog & Barley.

- My first time in, I walked in, and I couldn't believe it, this place is, it's grand and it's dramatic, but it's also cozy and kind of inviting, - Yeah, it ticks a lot of boxes.

It was sort of the dream ticket project.

I call it the cathedral of alcohol, right, [Toby chuckles] with a bar like that and hundreds of bottles on display.

But I agree with you, it has a lot of coziness to it, as well, - Absolutely.

- Especially up here.

- Yeah, and of course, the road to this Bog & Barley, about to celebrate its second anniversary, its second birthday here in Memphis, starts way back, and it starts in Ireland, where you grew up there, in County Mayo.

It's on the western coast of Ireland there, in a little town, you told me how to pronounce it, I've forgotten.

- Yeah, the Americans would pronounce it Ballina.

Back home, where I'm heading tomorrow, we would say Ballina.

- Ballina.

- Ballina, yeah.

- And it's there on the western coast, so you've got the beaches, and you've got the bogs, and it's also the salmon capital of Ireland.

- Yes, back in the day, '60s, '70s, and '80s, the River Moy was just streaming with salmon, and we used to have lots and lots of salmon fishing tournaments, and yeah, it was designated the salmon capital of Ireland.

Beautiful place, three, four miles from the beach, but a small town, 10,000 people, so my heritage, and, you know, my upbringing, is there, it's a small, west of Ireland, poor town, where, you know, everybody knew your business all the time, especially when you're 1 of 12 kids, and we lived in downtown, over the fireplace, in the middle of town.

So yeah, my memories of there are fantastic, and I'm fortunate to have all my siblings still living.

Like I said, I go home tomorrow for my oldest brother's 70th birthday on Saturday.

- That's incredible, that's incredible!

- Yeah, yeah.

- One thing you would do, always...

I did some homework on you, and about what you've been doing.

In The Irish Times, they did a great story about you back in the day, and how you would actually, you'd go out to the peat, the bog, and collect peat.

- Yeah, yeah.

So we would leave early morning.

It'd usually be me and two or three brothers, namely, my younger brother, Brendan, my next oldest brother, Jerry, and my next oldest brother, Vinny, and boys would go to the bog, and you would bring with you your breakfast, your lunch, and maybe even something in the evening, [Toby laughs] and we would go, and go on and do anything from... We'd usually hire an expert to cut the bog, so we would cut the peat, but then there was a lot of work to be done on further visits, where you would have to stand the turf once it got dry enough to stand it, then you would have to turn it, and then you would have to bring it home.

The fun part was bringing it home, - Yeah?

- Because, you know, that means you were at the end of the journey, - Oh.

- And means your home would be heated for the winter.

- Yeah, so you would bring that home and you would use that to heat your home and do other things?

- Yeah, it was very commonplace for almost everyone in your neighborhood to heat their home with peat.

- Yeah, and peat also is kinda the smoky ingredient in a lot of Scotch, so, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, and it's sort of transcended the entire whiskey business.

There's peaty whiskeys to be had in the US now, Scotland, Japan, Ireland does a little peat, and a neighboring county, Sligo, has a small, little peat distillery.

So yeah, it is the ingredient of whiskey, it's what heated the home, and it's what became one of the conventions of naming this bar.

- Yeah, Bog & Barley, it really does speak to where you came from, and your interests, of course, you got the bog, and you can still go down to the bar.

I did it, I went down to the fireplace and you've got a little slice of peat there, so I went and saw it, touched it, see what that was all about, But then also the barley, which is a, you know, key ingredient in whiskey, and you really fell in love with whiskey later on and- - Yeah, it was... Well, obviously, we all had our fireball days, right?

- Yessir.

- We don't like to, we don't like to admit those, but we did.

But later in life, 2015, '16, '17, '18, really kind of got into Irish whiskey, Irish whiskey first, then I graduated maybe to Scotch, and then furthermore, I graduated into American whiskeys and bourbon.

And you know, I wouldn't say I'm... You're always learning, obviously, but I enjoy whiskey, I enjoy the stories.

Maybe more than anything else, I enjoy the story that goes behind the whiskey, - Yeah.

- Whatever that story might be, you know what I mean?

Like is it the Buffalo Trace story?

Is it the Midleton Ireland story?

Is it the Jameson story?

You know, it's always kind of, there's always some great stuff in the stories, and that's the part I enjoy doing with whiskey, is tasting them with our customers, and telling the story.

So if you're at the water cooler the next morning, you are, "I bet you didn't know this, huh?"

- Yeah, that's right.

- And I love that, that people leave the room or leave the tasting.

Now, obviously, we've changed that a lot in '18, '19, '20, Reny got involved.

- Right.

- He turned a whiskey tasting into a whiskey dinner, so now people really come for the food and enjoy the whiskey.

- Well, I did a Scotch tasting at Celtic Crossing.

This was pre-COVID, so back in the day, and went in, didn't know a thing about Scotch, it was just you and a PowerPoint presentation, and, you know, maybe six Scotches to taste, and the very last one was so peaty-smoky, and I got to see kind of the variety out there, but you told those stories really well.

I mean, just off the back of your hand too, you know, so deep love of whiskey, and so it really does kind of tell your story, the name of this place, Bog & Barley.

But before we get too ahead of ourselves here, so you're still a young man in Ireland, and you were able to get a visa, and you came over to, what, Boston first?

- Yeah, so I was actually playing Gaelic football in Chicago when the Sunday papers advertised people to apply, via a postcard, for a visa to the latest round of visas, which was 1993, the latest round of Morrison-related visas to the United States.

My mother says, "Hey, you want me to put you in for this?"

She filled out the postcard, gave it to my sister, Hilary, and Hilary dropped it off at the post office, and I was fortunate enough to win one, or be selected, in early '94, which, I was then doing a master's in business systems in Limerick, Ireland, and one of the stipulations with the visa was you had to set foot in America within 90 days of attaining the visa, and I got the visa somewhere in March.

It put my drop-dead date of having to be in the States of June 27th.

- Wow!

- And you know what day I flew?

June 27th.

[Toby laughs] Being typically Irish, I procrastinated to the day of, and, of course, landed in northern Maine, way up near the Canadian border, town escapes me now, and one of the things you had to get done there was you had to get your fingerprints, me and my brother had to have our fingerprints taken at the first port of arrival.

But it was also the year of the World Cup, so in order to kill two birds with the one stone, we landed in Maine, and then further flew on to Orlando.

- Oh, wow.

- Landed at Orlando, and the hope was to enjoy some of the World Cup before partaking in our version of the American Dream.

- Amazing, amazing.

- Yeah, so, yeah.

- And you ended up in Boston, right?

- Yeah, so after- - And you worked in finance IT, is that correct?

- Yeah, I did actually, yeah.

So I graduated University College Dublin with a business degree in finance, and then I went on to do a master's in, basically, IT systems, - Okay.

- in Limerick.

So my first job, which was really hard to get, 'cause I was out of college in Ireland and not having graduated school in the United States, my first job was in a copying shop.

My parent, my father, owned a printing business, and I had another skill while I was trying to get my career, sort of my university job, and my first university job was with Thompson Financial Services in downtown, right by where the Tea Party was, - Oh, wow!

- Where they dumped all the tea into the harbor - Sure.

- In dispute, right?

And that was my first job.

My next job from there, then I went into a nonprofit, called Turk, I was basically the IT expert in an Apple-based place, - Okay.

- Which was incredible.

Really enjoyed it, still have friends there.

And then I went from there into KPMG Consulting, in the consulting wing of KPMG, which they spun off into a separate division, a separate LLC, called BearingPoint.

- Yeah.

So doing something completely different up there, and, you know, this kind of technical degree.

Talk about how you found Memphis, and kinda the beginning of Celtic Crossing.

- So one of the things with my KPMG job is I used to travel a lot.

One of the secrets for KPMG is if they don't have you sleeping in your bed, you'll work a lot harder, so everyone works on the road, so if I wasn't in Toronto, New York, I was in Philly, I was in Dallas, I was out on the West Coast, in Washington state, San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, Texas.

So I traveled every, I worked everywhere but Boston.

But one of the things was you used to have to, as a consultant, get up to speed on some technology really quick.

You know, it could be PowerPoint one week, and, you know, some sort of reporting module next week, or Lotus Notes the next week, so it was a really, really high-anxiety job that you really had to learn things quickly.

So I traveled a lot, and a lot of the times, instead of going home from the West Coast, I'd come and visit friends in Memphis.

I had a bunch of friends here from Ireland, namely, Gareth O'Sullivan, Clint Brown, I got to know, Richie Grant was the coach at the University of Memphis soccer, Gareth was at CBU, so got integrated into the whole soccer scene here, and really liked Memphis.

I liked Memphis for a lot of reasons.

I loved Midtown, loved living in Midtown, so I spent a lot of weekends there, till push came to shove, and I'm like, "Got a little tired of Boston, I'm moving here."

And so after seven, eight years in Boston, I decided to pack up and move to Memphis.

- Wow.

Wow.

- Yeah.

- And so you got here, that was what, early 2000s-ish?

- Yeah, 2001, early that year, before 9/11.

- Yeah.

- I was still working in Philadelphia, 'cause that's where I was on that particular day, but living here, you know, moved to Memphis March, April that year, in fact, right around St. Patrick's Day, and I fell in love with Memphis on a lot of fronts, and one of the things that really I loved about here was I was getting into sort of the idea of buying some real estate in Boston, and of course, your land in Memphis, which is one-third the price of Boston, it became much more affordable.

And my little other dream was to kinda become an entrepreneur.

It started with doing some rental properties.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- And did you pass by the, I don't know if it was The Glass Onion at the time, but what whatever the real estate is there that's Celtic Crossing, now, for, what, almost 20 years, how did you get interested in that?

How did you get involved?

- Well, I believe the backbone or the spine for doing the restaurants, you know, either you have a financier, which is someone... A lot of restaurateurs have people that provide financing, and my opportunity came through owning real estate, so I started buying some real estate in '01, almost immediately when I got here, '02, '03, and then when I got to '04, we started having the conversations, a group of us, with opening an Irish pub in Midtown, and one of those conversations, where are we gonna go?

Well, I had bought the Anderton building, was under contract to buy, I was awaiting the purchase of it, but while waiting, we had become aware that The Glass Onion may be available for sale, so we started basically doing a Friday evening visit, a Sunday evening visit, and on a Sunday evening, I believe, with John Moyles, we made the decision, we were going to submit an offer to buy The Glass Onion as it stood, and convert it, with help, into an Irish pub.

- Wow.

- So that was the first venture, you know, the grand plans for that were on the back of a stamp.

[Toby laughs] I am not making that up.

- Love those stories like that.

- Yeah, yeah, so.

- What was Cooper-Young like at the time?

What was the pub scene like?

- Of course, so we had the deli, we had Tsunami, we had things that have gone and come since then.

Obviously, Mulan's there now.

There was something there before that.

We had the beauty shop.

It was a coming, but maybe less thriving area in the mid 2000s.

It was definitely coming.

I think we timed it really, really well.

I also think we were very systematic in bringing in a lot more people.

- Yeah, for sure.

- You know what I mean?

It became Club Celtic.

- Absolutely.

- Everybody remembers.

I mean, it was a different business than what Bog & Barley is.

It was known as Club Celtic.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- And we were proud of it man.

We would be quiet on a Friday, we'd have a bit of lunch and a small bit of dinner, and we'd all get our, dust off ourselves at nine o'clock at night 'cause here comes the crowd.

- And it did too, and I've seen Celtic Crossing in all of its different, you know, uniforms, dressed up.

I would go in there for a quiet beer at like 4:00 on a Friday, and then, yeah, that night it was just, it was incredible in there.

- Yeah.

- And it's really become a staple, and I think an icon, of Midtown, and certainly, Cooper-Young, where I've lived the entire time I've been in Memphis, so I'm well-acquainted with what y'all do up there.

The thing that brings me back, you know, I always love a good pub, it's always a good-feeling energy in there, the food is, it's elevated, I don't know.

Talk about how you kind of came up - With your menu, and- - Yeah, yes.

- So the world's obviously changing, things change, right, so when we opened Celtic, we were a college bar, we were literally a college go-to Friday, Saturday, even Thursday.

Thursday we had, I remember, Rusty Lemmon playing live on the patio.

- Yeah.

- Thursday night, packed, you know what I mean?

Friday night, DJ John Moyles, Saturday night, DJ Gareth O'Sullivan, and, of course, Irish DJs, but it was really a meeting place, a hookup place, a party place.

In around 2010, 2011, we noticed things changing, and it's continued to change, all the way up to 2020 and onwards, where people are changing their habits, right, so there's less late-night partying, and people are more into dining experiences, trying new things, so I consider Celtic to have transitioned from being a college nightclub bar, Club Celtic, into a refined neighborhood Irish pub that has a great love for soccer.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- You know, and we've watched it transition.

It's grown, it's evolved.

We did a renovation in 2009 that resulted in proper women's rooms.

Prior to that, it was curtains.

Sorry about that, Memphis, we didn't have the money.

And then again, in 2014, we put the beautiful patio together, where we put that lovely cover on the patio permanently, and we upgraded the kitchen.

We went no smoking.

- Yep, it was a big deal.

- So it's been just an evolution - Yeah.

- To now, where, you know, the food continues to get better.

Reny's been with us now for the better part of four years, landed in Memphis in 2022, started the conversation with him in '21, So Reny's been here a while.

He's really taken it upon himself to spend a lot of time there, and he's changed the St. Patrick's Day into what is now basically a beer garden street party, Reny's idea, and we continue to try to make it better.

- Yeah, and your St. Patty's Day is a staple of that day.

I think you own the day, but that's just me talking.

Flash forward to this place.

This didn't happen overnight, and you can tell, it's just, it's gorgeous in here, the menu looks amazing.

Talk about how even the idea of Bog & Barley got started.

- Yeah, so Jamie, my then wife, Jamie, and myself, wanted to do something big.

We weren't sure where that was, okay, so we engaged a real estate agent that was affiliated with Boyle, Jonathan Aur, whose father, and uncle, and, very connected to the family, but we went looking for a second location in east Memphis, and this was one of the first places we looked at.

And I had always had a love for pubs in Ireland and pubs in the US that have very high ceilings.

- Yeah.

- And you don't come across it often now.

There's only a, there's not that many.

There's one in Chicago, there's a beautiful one in Dublin, called Cafe en Seine, and I kept coming back to here.

Even though we looked at other spots in east Memphis, lots of other spots, we'd always start and finish our journey on a Friday morning out of this parking lot.

- Okay.

- So, whenever we got back to our cars after doing our morning drive, in 2021, I would always still walk in here, buy something, bottle of wine, bottle of whiskey.

So when it all came down to it, like when we were looking at the list, I couldn't get away from here.

The idea of turning this into a cathedral, grandiose, with elegance, Irish pub.

And, you know, I think, I think we exceeded all expectations.

- I believe so.

I mean, down to, you know, kind of the curated collection of things that you've gotten, you know, the paintings on the walls, you've got, you know, fiddles and pennywhistles, and great maps, and just an amazing collection.

You would think this place has been here for a long time.

It's been two years.

And what got me, of course, I read all the stories before I got in here, that all of this was made in Ireland.

- Yeah.

- Talk about that, and why that was important.

So if we dial back to Celtic in the year 2004, and we're deciding to buy The Glass Onion from the three partners, I went to a wedding in February '05, and I bumped into a guy, his name was John King, his sister was getting married to a buddy of mine, and so at that wedding, late into the evening, I said, "You wouldn't take a visit to Memphis?"

I heard you're a great carpenter," blah, blah, blah.

Well, his nickname, is Badger, so Badger did, with his buddy Paul, a lot of the work at Celtic, and like I said, the plans on the back of a stamp.

Fast forward to 2021, after we'd selected this as a location, I went looking to Badger for help, who lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, who has just got partnered up with a couple of guys to create this massive 20,000-square-foot pub, food, rooftop deal that he has that's quite amazing.

Anyway, he didn't have the time.

His answer was, "Don't have the time, "don't have the resources, the place is too big.

"I'm not your solution, but here, call this guy, Ciaran Redmond."

- Okay.

- "He's done a few jobs "in New York, and he does great work.

I think you and him might hit it off."

When I called Ciaran, he was in Mexico on vacation, and I'm not kidding, he rerouted his flight plan back, told his wife and kids, "See you back in Dublin.

I'm gonna spend Saturday night in Memphis."

That was Saturday, 2022, on Cooper-Young Fest night.

- Wow!

- He landed in Memphis, and I took him here the next morning, and his face was quite shocking.

He goes, "You're gonna do what?"

- Yeah.

- I said, "We're gonna turn this into an Irish pub."

He goes, "Holy smoke, this place is is pretty big!"

And Ciaran, Graham O'Donnell, the designer in Dublin, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Ciaran, out of Carlow, Ireland, all the drawings were done in Dun Laoghaire.

The guy who did the drawings never set foot in the place.

- Wow.

- Everything was done electronically, robotically, and it was all built in sections in Ireland.

That bar existed in the warehouse in Ireland, was shipped over, and as I explained downstairs to you, they had this arrogance about them that everything was gonna fit so well.

I'm like, they were really, really cocky sure that it would all fit.

Now, we had a lot of skeptics in Memphis 'cause we were interviewing general contractors to oversee the project, and a couple of those interviews ended up in laughter, where people were like, "You really think you're gonna bring a bar "that's built in Ireland, ship it across the Atlantic, and put it in here?"

And I'm like, "That's the plan."

[Toby laughs] So, you know, I think we defied all odds.

- Yeah.

- But it was a great team-- - But as you said, I mean, they brought it in, and the way that the stage meets up with the rest of the chairs in there, it just fit perfectly.

- Yes, yes.

- Wow, incredible!

- Yeah, really amazing, that.

But it was a great team.

- Yeah.

- It's a team effort from Jason, to Ciaran, to Graham, to Billy, the EPM, all the team.

I mean, we had a big party before we opened to celebrate a team working well together.

- That's incredible - So, you know, it was a great project.

We were very lucky, because I feel like we got a lot of chemistry, having the Irish guys doing a lot of the building, then a lot of the Memphis guys wanted to work with the overseas guys, so.

- Yeah, cool.

- It was that novelty.

- Fun.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Very briefly, we'll talk about, maybe, the food here.

You were showing me a menu that's incredible.

It's elevated food, for sure.

It goes way beyond Irish pub food.

- Yes, yes, yes.

We've had a lot of pub owners in from other cities.

Rory Dolan was here, Dolan's Pubs in New York, was visiting Nashville, then he heard about this place.

He's friends with Ciaran Redmond.

He, arrived in one night.

"Hey, I just drove over from Nashville, I wanna see it."

It is not your typical Irish pub.

It's a much more elevated experience.

That comes from Reny.

Ultimately, Reny is ex Chez Philippe, worked and, you know, worked his trade through French cuisine, European cuisine, several visits to Ireland with me, loves Ireland, loves Irish hospitality, loves Irish food, and wants to put the best foot forward when it comes to it.

- Yeah.

- So all the menu is our Irish ideas, but executed or elevated in a very elegant, almost like white-cloth approach, but we don't wanna talk like that.

It is not your typical Irish pub.

- Right, give us a couple of dishes that people talk about, that you like.

- Yeah, I really love the cabbage steak.

- Okay.

- So we're at an Irish pub in Galway, and Reny takes the menus, and hands them back to the waiter, and says, "Tell the kitchen," his name was McAvoy, "Tell Chef McAvoy, feed us.

Michelin star winner.

- Wow!

- And so we started getting plates, and that night, Reny goes, walked out of that place, said "We're gonna a take on this.

We're gonna do a Southern take on an Irish cabbage steak."

It's basically a big, big piece of cabbage that's marinated, pasted, and then cooked like a steak.

- Wow.

- And that's a great example.

Oysters, Reny and I have a great love for oysters.

We can't get Irish oysters here right now.

Reny found a provider out of Canada who do the Irish seed oysters, - Okay.

- So they're using the same seed as Ireland, in Canada, - Okay.

- And they call them the Irish points.

- Fine.

- And our bangers and mash, - Yeah.

- Another great dish, but Reny has a 20-, 25-year relationship at Newman Farms, so instead of doing the bangers that we import from Ireland, from Celtic, Reny is like, "Would you be okay "if I entertained teaching these farmers how to make Irish sausage?"

- Cool.

- "I'll go and show them how to do it."

Which, I'm not making that up.

Reny went and taught the Newmans how to make the skin on Irish sausage.

- Amazing.

- And is working to do the same with our black and white puddings and bacons as well.

So, we'll source all that from Newman.

- And just with a few minutes left, we could talk about that menu all the time, and I can't wait to eat out here, it's gonna be incredible.

Maeve's is the next thing coming down the road, that's in Collierville.

Talk about that a little bit.

- Yeah, I'll keep it short.

We were heading towards a new build-out, similar to this, in Lakeland, when we changed course, - Okay.

- And we were very fortunate to have had changed course.

The old Highlander Pub in the old Historic Collierville Square became available, and we had a mutual friend, the owners and I had a mutual friend, and honestly, we shook hands on it.

Almost before we agreed any sort of numbers or price, there was an understanding and friendship between the Mullens and us to take what they have done with The Highlander, and we're hoping to add, obviously, an Irish touch, an Irish feel.

The Maeve's name came out of long conversations, but ultimately, I'll keep it short, my two oldest girls, Kyla and Teagan, who I spend a lot more time with now, they're tough.

They're tough, they're ferocious, they're strong-willed, they're opinionated, they're very, very smart, they're very brilliant, and they both, they just, they inspire me, and Maeve is them.

Maeve, the combination of Kyla and Teagan is Maeve.

Maeve is a queen of Connacht, mythical Irish figure back in Cu Chulainn times, and she was a very ferocious leader, and she was battle-hardened, battle-tested.

One little story is Maeve got into a love tiff with her sister over a lover, and she killed her sister, all right, so when I told Kyla the story, I said, "Kyla, Maeve killed her sister over, "they were both after the same guy and she killed her sister."

Kyla says to me, "Dad, you don't have to worry about me."

I say, "Kyla, I'm not worried about you, I'm worried about Teagan."

- Worried about Teagan.

- Yeah, [laughs] well, that's amazing, and I'm sure you're gonna bring the same excellence to Maeve's that you've got here at Bog & Barley, that you've been serving in Cooper-Young for ever.

I'll just say, DJ, we're glad you're here, glad you decided to come and make Memphis your home.

And DJ, thank you so much for being on the show today, Really appreciate that.

We appreciate all of y'all.

Thank you so much for watching A Conversation With... [lively Irish folk music] [acoustic guitar chords]