Sean Muldoon
Pub Expert
Sean is best known for The Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog in Lower Manhattan—the bar he founded in 2012 with his business partner, Jack McGarry. Combining the best of traditional Irish pub hospitality with some of the world’s best cocktails, The Dead Rabbit has won almost every major award in the industry, including “World’s Best Bar” (twice).
Before moving to New York, Sean was bar and potation manager at the Merchant Hotel in his native Belfast, when it was named World’s Best Cocktail Bar in 2010. In 2015 Sean and Jack collaborated with hospitality legend Danny Meyer in the creation of GreenRiver in Chicago, a restaurant and bar themed around the Irish presence in the history of the Second City.
In 2016 Sean and Jack opened their second venue in New York City. BlackTail is a Cuban-styled bar based around the post-Prohibition golden age of cocktails, a style they simply call “the lush life.” Sean consults throughout the world on pubs, hospitality training and standards, and drinks menu creation.
Jack McGarry
Mixed Drink Expert
Jack McGarry is The Dead Rabbit’s cofounder and operating partner. He also created its extraordinary drinks program. In July 2013, he was named International Bartender of the Year at the prestigious Tales of the Cocktail awards. He is its youngest-ever recipient, and to date only the second in America.
To realize the Dead Rabbit project, Jack tested hundreds of mixed-drink recipes from the nineteenth century onward. Each recipe was adjusted to account for contemporary palates, and regularly involved fifty to seventy versions before one was considered just right. His resulting menu was a landmark in the industry, and confirmed Jack as a global authority.
Tim Herlihy
Distillery Expert
Born and raised in County Louth, Tim began his working career at the iconic Cooley Distillery, learning the industry all the way from grain to glass.
As Tullamore D.E.W. ambassador, Tim is a frequent presenter at whiskey shows and cocktail weeks, discussing history, cocktails, and one of his favorite topics, the Irish pub. Preceding St. Patrick’s Day 2014, Tim completed a twenty-eight-day lecture tour of the best Irish pubs in all fifty U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia. The achievement is still spoken of in whispered tones, mostly
by Tim.
A natural raconteur and never at a loss for a toast, Tim has led television segments on Access Hollywood Live, Fox and Friends, and The Steve Harvey Show, among others. In 2016, he became Whisky Magazine’s Icons of Whisky award-winner for Irish Whiskey Brand Ambassador of the Year.
Elaine Hill
Photographer
As Eve Arnold (more or less) said, the instrument is not the camera but the photographer. In other words, who you are shapes what you make.
Elaine’s images say very strongly who she is: witty, insightful, meticulous, and creative. Based in Belfast, she works in areas from commercial and corporate projects to portraiture and the performing arts. But it is in the highly specialized field of food and beverage photography that Elaine has truly distinguished herself.
Over the past ten years, her images have helped reposition major spirit brands, launched cool restaurants (and some even cooler maverick chefs), gotten beneath the skin of the guarded, and found the beauty in the everyday. Yes, Elaine is friendly and approachable. But make no mistake: She’s going to get that shot.
Conor Kelly
Writer
Conor is like a tree: If you sliced through him, you’d see rings of words. But please don’t do that. (Blood is so hard to get out of a laptop.) He is from a talky Irish family where storytelling is a competitive and, occasionally, full-contact sport. Over the years, he has corralled words as a journalist, translator, copywriter, and book editor—shaping manuscripts on everything from instruction manuals and biographies to historical fiction and university textbooks. More importantly, however, he provides The Dead Rabbit’s tone of voice and gets to write the bar’s extraordinary story-menus and promotional materials. In the face of seemingly relentless peer pressure, Conor nonetheless retains an abiding love for the semicolon; like this one. What a lovely thing.