O'Connor's Public House — Restaurant in Rochester

The green checkered paper is a somewhat common variant of the more common red, but I think it’s just one of a couple dozen ways O’Connor’s leans into the Irish aesthetic. Since the closest I’ve been to Ireland is the Manchester airport, I can’t speak to its authenticity, or whether or not Irish cuisine is full of obviously frozen onion rings, as these are.

They look decent, as frozen rings go: thick, plump, and juicy. There’s also clear signs they were seasoned after frying with salt and pepper, a trivial step that most places ignore. Despite the thickness, they seem to be a bit overdone, with some onion rings either stuck together or cracked in twain.

A lilting cup of undefined dipping sauce completes the platter, perched in such a way that it threatens to spill at the slightest provocation.

Regular readers will know my long-standing disdain for the frozen Brew City Onion Rings which these, of course, are. They probably came off the same truck that delivered them to Rochester Mills Brewing Company just down the street, a crack in the “authentic Irish” facade. There’s little reason to dwell on the many deficiencies of frozen onion rings (bland batter, flavorless onions), but the additional seasoning manages to elevate them a little beyond the pack.

It might be the extra salinity, but the batter does taste a little sweeter than frozen onion rings usually do. The onions, however, are wet and tasteless, more water-logged and sopping than either juicy or greasy. They’re clearly overdone, but not so much so that the moisture is completely gone, though perhaps that would have been better.

The sauce is a bizarre blend of bland, the sort of mayonnaise based accompaniment that makes up roughly half of the calories in a standard American diet, and overpowering. There’s an aggressive aftertaste lurking in the orange sauce that sneaks up on you. To its credit, it is a lot spicier than I expected, but it’s a complete mismatch with the middling flavor of the onion rings.

I often call onion rings overcooked, but this should be better understand as a gradient scale rather than a binary status. The terminal stage is when the onion rings are burnt husks, bordering on inedible. Before that, there’s a point at which all moisture has evaporated from the onion, but the batter might remain edible.

These onion rings are at a stage before that, one where they cooked just long enough to turn the onions to mush and the batter to crumbly bits, but where both are still, at least vaguely, recognizable as belonging to an onion ring.

The wet onions lead to slippage galore, with several instances where the entire onion slice spews out of the rigid batter like an albino snake squirming through a hole in a dark cave. The batter, while texturally superior to the onion (if only slightly), simply has no give, an ossified, fossilized layer of earth.

Everyone knows about the roles that supply and demand play in price formation, but fewer discuss the role of other firms in the marketplace. When you have a competitor just down the street charging $7.95 for defrosting some tasteless onion rings, your price of $7.99 is in line with consumer expectations, regardless of the actual quality.

While I understand why O’Connor’s is charging that much for a basket of sub-par, poorly prepared onion rings, that doesn’t make the value, or the...

I have had an overall amazing experience attending this bar until tonight. I was out with friends at 10:00PM on a Saturday night and my party had a table near the bar. An additional party was standing near the bar and was blocking the pathway for waitresses to move forward in tending to other patrons. Inevitably, a waitress ran into one of the patrons in the standing party and spilled the drinks she was carrying on two friends in my party. As my party instructed the standing party to move out of the walking way of the waitresses, they proceeded to walk forward and scream in our faces, stating they were willing to fight, attempting to undermine those at my table. As management came to break the fight up, two of the patrons in my party were thrown out of the bar - one was thrown out for "yelling foreign obsenties" at the standing party, who initated the foreign obsenties; the other was thrown out for approaching management calming about the situation, only to be thrown out for being "a racist hoe". The defending party was able to remain in the bar; they were not asked to leave, they were not approached by management and asked about the situation, and they proceeded to pass the remaining members of my party, yelling profanities and making obsene gestures - they even received bottle service as the night proceeded. As a customer of this bar for nearly two years (and my friends customers for half a decade), I have never experienced such disrepect from any establishment. I refuse to return as a customer and have myself or my friends receive accusations of racism when such has not been caused. I will be expressing my experience with friends and family as explanation of not to come to an establishment as this. I sincerely hope that this message is seen by those management of Gus O'Connors, as I would gladly love to discuss and analyze the environment and mistreatment...

My wife works in Rochester we live 40 minutes away. Several of her customers said 0'connors had the best shepherds pie.. Sorry to say..we disagree. It arrived looking like the guinness stew with a small soggy flop of mashed potatoes drowned and buried..no crisp on the potatoes...looked nothing like the picture especially in proportion. Secondly suggested by waitress as a side was the bbq Mac cheese.. she described it as large cheesy noodles with pulled pork..so I envisioned large elbow noodles full of 🧀 cheese. What we received was non tasty spiral noodles...the bbq was tasty. So for a 28 dollar order..handed cashier 40..the young girl asks..do you want any change back...??? We always tip 25-30% for good service..but just a carryout typically that will get a round up..my wife had thought of maybe giving her a five..but cmon...really. So after our lack luster dinner..I called three times before getting. A manager...Jenny refused to comp anything even after I reiterated my wife works right by them and we would most likely return if she were to comp us..not only NO encouragement to return..said something of."no way could we expect the same quality food in carry out as in the restaurant.." Well if that's truly the case shouldn't the price be different..?. the delicious "buttery potatoes" the manager described were soggy and a small clump the size of two boiled eggs... nothing like advertised. NO CRISPING OF THE POTATOES. We will continue to visit Stony Creek Roadhouse..where the carry outs are as good if not better than in the restauant... I got a carry out pickerel that needed a net it was a monster! We won't be back...