Dead Rabbit’s Sean tells all on latest venture

The Belfast man behind ‘the world’s best bar’ has told how his latest venture is his biggest to date, as a he returned home the scene of one of his early triumphs.

Sean Muldoon, who  along with fellow Ardoyne man Jack McGarry created multiple award-winning The Dead Rabbit in New York, is set to launch Hazel and Apple in Charlestown, South Carolina, later this year.

The 52-year-old told a guests as a special evening in Belfast’s Merchant Hotel that the multi-million pound project mayl be his last before eventually re-settling into retirement in the city of his birth.

“Hazel and Apple is a big undertaking, it’s completely different than Dead Rabbit,” he said. “It’s a 320 capacity bar all on one floor. It has so many different components to it.”

It was at The Merchant where Sean helped develop one of the top hotel bars in the world almost two decades ago, when in 2005 he told Billy Wolsey he would open the world’s best bar in his new five-star hotel.

Just a few years later The Merchant was named the world’s best hotel bar at the 2009 Tales of the Cocktail Festival in New Orleans, regarded by many as the most prestigious awards ceremony in the cocktail and spirits industry.

A move to New York with barman  Jack McGarry followed and with the backing of Galway native Conor Allen, a regular in The Merchant, the pair created the iconic The Dead Rabbit in New York’s financial district.

Post Covid though came an amicable parting of the ways with Sean taking on a location in Charlestown earmarked for a new Dead Rabbit, while Jack set upon his plan to rapidly expand the Dead Rabbit brand.

“I’m living my best life in Charlestown. It’s the happiest I’ve been to be honest,” Sean told the Irish News.

“It’s a beautiful place with a lot of opportunity.

Like The Dead Rabbit, Hazel and Apple is a partnership, with Jillian Vose, who Sean says was effectively ‘the face’ of their New York bar.

Although some of the same investors are involved: “It’s a completely different operation. We opened Dead Rabbit on $900,000. This is going to cost multiple millions of dollars.

“A few years ago I would have been petrified, I wouldn’t have been capable Whereas now I see this as the biggest challenge of my life and it’s something I’m really ready for and excited about.”