The Norman Conquistador

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Larry Feeny and Carmella Feeny (née Hernández y Drumshanbo) preside jointly — if not always harmoniously — over Ballymagaleen’s most improbable culinary establishment.
Their union is itself a miracle of cultural diplomacy: she, the daughter of a Mexican civil engineer with a taste for chili and Marian apparitions; he, a well-meaning man from Mullingar who once believed “tapas” was an ecclesiastical council.

They met at the Drumshanbo Fair, where Carmella, blindfolded and armed with a stick, attempted to strike a piñata and instead felled Michael Feeny. He awoke concussed but lovestruck, declaring that he’d seen the Virgin Mary with a spatula. They married within a month, and he’s been mildly concussed ever since — prone to mystically channelling figures from Irish history, from Strongbow to Wolfe Tone, depending on the whiskey.

Their son Saborloco (“Madflavour” by loose translation) was the inevitable outcome of that fusion: a culinary visionary with a spiritual attachment to both poitín and tequila, often in the same glass.

The Norman Conquistador is less a gastropub than a gastronomic hallucination.
The décor is an audacious blend of neo-Gothic stonework and Aztec exuberance — Celtic crosses beside sugar skulls, saintly votives flickering beside bottles of mezcal. Every table is candlelit, every wall argues theology in colour.

The clientele ranges from art students and visiting scholars to the nicer class of underage drinkers — the sort who can quote Yeats while vomiting gracefully into the flowerbeds.

A booking is a badge of honour; a seat at the bar is considered minor beatification.
Yet for Giles, a table is always available. Saborloco insists:

“When Lord Magaleen enters, the house itself rearranges its molecules.”
 

Saborloco’s cocktail list is an ongoing act of cultural integration and chemical warfare:

• The Transubstantiation — poitín, mezcal, and passionfruit, set aflame and blessed.
   
• El Potato Blanco — an improbable fusion of Irish tuber vodka and jalapeño syrup.
   
• The Saint Patrick’s Hangover — poitín, crème de menthe, and regret, garnished with lime and absolution.
   
• The Treaty of Tequila — served in two separate glasses which must be drunk simultaneously to preserve the peace.
   

All are strong enough to exorcise bilingual spirits or summon them anew.

Carmella Feeny reigns in the kitchen, her domain perfumed with chili, coriander, and turf smoke.
Her pibil boxty has converted skeptics, her enchiladas con colcannon achieved EU cultural heritage status, and her pintxo de black pudding y salsa verde has been described by the Connacht Tribune as “proof of a loving God.”

In Ballymagaleen, she is revered as the Madonna of the Molcajete, though Giles simply calls her “the only woman who could outcook Death.”

The Norman Conquistador stands at the crossroads of history and hangover.
It is where Wolfe Tone meets Frida Kahlo, where poitín finds its spiritual twin in mezcal, and where every glass tells the story of an Empire mislaid and remixed.

Each night ends the same way: a full room, a faint smell of chili and absolution, and Saborloco murmuring at the bar,

“History, Señor Giles, is just what happens between drinks.”