Howth Harbour’s King Sitric is set to reopen tomorrow at 13:00 after a kitchen revamp.

King Sitric is a Dublin institution with Aidan and Joan McManus running it since 1971. They are known for consistently producing quality dishes for literal decades. The place has been a family affair from the start, and now their son Dec has taken the reigns in the kitchen.

Good Friday is a perfect day to reopen the doors, being the traditional day of the fish dinner. “Good Friday has always been going out here even when he couldn’t drink because everyone has to eat fish. So Howth is always busy.”

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The refurbishment has merged two different kitchens into one sleeker sustainable kitchen that Dec characterised as his dream kitchen. Speaking to Char, he said: “my dad thinks it is just way too excessive. It’s everything that I have been dreaming up for ten years.”

With a newly expanded kitchen staff of sixteen, the team is confident that they can keep doing what the business has done well since the seventies; focus on lobsters, crabs, and prawns. The refurbishment has also seen the team pivot more towards the hypers seasonal model where the regular menu is smaller, and there are more and more diverse changing daily specials. He said they are “aiming to have three fish specials every day, depending on what’s available”.

Dec said that it was a natural progression. Every time he went “to rewrite the menu, it seemed to end up smaller, but the board and specials got bigger”. What they wanted was ultimate flexibility. The team has gotten “so tight now “that they can deliver on the day in a previously untenable way. So now they buy all their fish on the day, enabling them to provide better value to the customer and give them the flexibility they were after.

What has the team even more buzzed than the flexibly daily menu is the new kitchen itself. They have a new composter, what Dec calls a “proper Digester”. It takes one hundred kilos of food waste per day and turns it into twenty-five kilos of compost overnight. They are likely the first restaurant in Dublin to install this. It’s an environmental and socially conscious inclusion that will make it one of the most sustainable restaurants in the country. The compost itself will be of excellent quality because fish shells and bones are naturally high in the kind of nutrients that soils lack after use.

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